Creative Online Workshop Practitioners

LET’S TALK ABOUT COUGH

Looking for Creative Collaborators…

We are seeking creative practitioners to collaborate on the development and delivery of online workshops giving participants the opportunity to share stories and experiences of chronic cough.

The Project

Let’s Talk About Cough is a public engagement project that aims to rise the profile of chronic cough by sharing diverse stories, knowledge and perspectives in creative ways.

Chronic cough is a condition that has a debilitating impact on people’s lives. Everybody at some point in their life will suffer from a terrible cough, usually combined with a cold or flu-like symptoms. For most people, when the cold goes away, so does the cough, but for some people the cough remains with no sign of going away.

Our vision for this public engagement programme is to raise the profile of cough as a condition to be taken seriously by researchers, patients, healthcare professionals and the public. We intend to generate multidirectional engagement, bringing together these four groups in creative ways to share stories, knowledge and perspectives about:

The experience of cough
The biology of cough
The treatment of cough

Let’s Talk About Cough is a Wellcome (research enrichment) funded project led by the University of Manchester and Imperial College London.

The Brief

We would like to collaborate with creative practitioners on the development and delivery of an online/remote programme of creative and inspiring content, workshops and activities to stimulate the sharing of stories and exchange of perspectives in relation to chronic cough. The programme of creative workshops should offer participants the opportunity to learn new creative skills and inspire them to creatively share their experiences of chronic cough and tell their own stories.

The programme will experiment with different (live and on-demand) online and remote engagement formats. These may include:

storytelling masterclasses
quick creative activities to generate story content
activities that involve sending packs of materials out to participants
using the postal service within the creative process
live interactive sessions involving the sharing and exchange of stories between participants

We are open to all creative methodologies, but we are particularly interested in:

comedy
film
animation
creative writing
poetry
podcasting/sound design

The formats and creative approaches used should be accessible for diverse participants to engage with at home, using inexpensive or readily available technology such as mobile phones. Barriers to participation will be identified and addressed during the programme development process. Many of the participants will be over 50.

We would like to work with creative practitioners with experience in one or more of the following areas:

Creative online engagement
Participatory engagement
Creative storytelling workshops
Arts and health

We are interested in the possibility of working with collaborators who have experienced chronic cough themselves and we would like to collaborate with creative practitioners who reflect the diverse communities that we wish to engage.

Budget

Creative practitioner fees will be paid at the rate of £250 per day. The time commitment may vary for different practitioners but is likely to be in the range of two to ten days.

Please note that we anticipate that most of this work will be completed remotely, from home. Any possible face-to-face meetings will be held in either Manchester or London.

Expected Timeline

The overall project runs until January 2024. The online/remote creative workshops will happen between January and April 2022.

Application

Please submit an expression of interest (maximum one side of A4) detailing your relevant experience and your interest in the project.

Applications should be submitted by Monday 18th October. Please direct any enquiries to Ellen Dowell – ellen.dowell@gmail.com