What did the project involve?

“Bristol Carescapes” was a project about care futures in Bristol. Encompassing experiential, explorative and collaborative approaches to exploring and envisaging care futures, the project drew together local creators and people with lived experience of different forms of care (e.g. carers, people with disabilities/chronic illness, frail older adults) to imagine how they would like to experience care in the near and distant future – what it looks like, how it feels (materiality), how it makes them feel (affectively).

The Covid-19 pandemic and related lockdown measures have more palpably than ever revealed the crisis in care in the UK. A deprivation of liberty shapes the lives of looked-after and care experienced individuals of all ages. This project will created a platform of collaborative exploration that sort to foster empowerment and candidacy to co-creatively envisage better, more person-centred futures for care. To live well in the 21st Century, we must learn from the mistakes of the past and present. Care is essential not only for humanity’s survival, but it shapes our values and relations with each other, other species, and the world we inhabit. Through facilitating co-creating research processes, the researchers looked to inspire and evoke potential care futures emplaced within the spaces and everyday lives of Bristolians present and future.

The researchers used the Ideas Exchange funding to identify and refine methodologies of co-creating with collaborative partners from community organisations, people receiving care, and care providers to imagine co-produced futures of care.

Matthew and Morgan involved individuals and organisations from pre-existing partnerships as well as fostering new, emergent partnerships with local community and provider organisations.

Who are the team and what do they bring?

• Matthew Lariviere (Social policy, University of Bristol) researches into care and ageing futures. This Ideas Exchange builds on Matthew’s previously curated exhibition, Sheffield Carescapes: Potential Futures for a Caring Society, created in collaboration with local creators/artists in South Yorkshire.
• Morgan Tipping (Independent Artist) has carried out practice-led research into experiences of marginalisation within the care system.

What were the results?

During a three-month research period, the researchers held several meetings and engagement sessions with collaborative individuals and organisations seeking to develop a larger co-created research project with critical making at the heart of it. Some of these meetings where in conversation, where as for others the team employed a creative approach to engaging and capturing interest in the work. This ideas exchange focused on the researchers engaging diverse range of care experienced young adults and (older) adults. To work in a truly co-creative way with collaborators who have a diverse range of communication, mobility and access requirements dedicated time was needed so that the researchers could work with understanding and harmony with the collaborators.