The Engagement@Manchester Creative Practice session brought together colleagues, students and community partners to explore how creative methods can enhance public engagement practice, featuring three projects that offered different perspectives.

Dr Suzanne Johnson and Dr Binish Khatoon shared their project Tree of Life: How Exploring Diversity Can Create Unity. Using a narrative therapy approach, the project created supportive spaces for women from Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian heritage communities to talk, share experiences, get to know one another, and explore access to breast cancer screening. They collaborated with an animator and videographer to celebrate participants’ journeys and contributions, culminating in an installation showcased in the South Asia Gallery at Manchester Museum in May 2025.

Dr Jenna Ashton presented two projects. In Memory of Chroma combined chemistry experiments with storytelling, inspired by Derek Jarman’s Chroma: A Book of Colour and Hidden in the Soil and Scrub which took the form of a storybook for adults. The storybook explored urban ecology and housing development. Together, these projects highlighted how creative approaches can be experimental, invite curiosity and opportunities for reflection.

Stephanie Gillibrand shared the Manchester Memories project, which brought local community members, creatives and researchers together to reflect on their experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. Stephanie shared the learning and reflections from being involved in the project and using creative methods. The project demonstrated how creative methods used in the project fostered connections, reflection, shared understanding and collaboration, and to communicate these experiences with others.

Across the session, storytelling, visual media, hands-on experimentation and shared creative experiences were shown to offer meaningful ways to communicate ideas, have shared conversations and support collaboration in engagement practice.

Creative Practice Top Tips

Watch the video to explore practical advice and examples of creative practice in engagement.

Do you have a project to share? Please contact Dee-Ann and Kathryn: engagement@mancheter.ac.uk