Day 2-Tuesday 17th June 2025

Tuesday 17th June 2025

FACiliTating Physical Activity for people with long-term health conditions: understanding barriers and enablers for a fit society (FACT-PA) and how (educational) technology might help

Bart Rienties; Alison Buckler; Ben Oakley; Emma Harris; Fereshte Goshtasbpour; Jitka Vseteckova; Julia Sargent; Keetie Roelen; Zhraa Alhaboby; Liset Pengel; Randall Stafford; Genevieve Healy; Ashley Gunter; Sanja Musić Milanović

Abstract: 15 million people in the UK have a long-term health condition and are considerably less likely to undertake physical activity (PA). Living a sedentary lifestyle increases the risks of all-cause mortality and exacerbates long-term health conditions, particularly cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity. PA may counteract these risks as well as reduce anxiety, depression, psychological distress, cognitive decline and enhance quality of life.

Health services are under increasing pressure to care for individuals with long-term health conditions, leading to high associated economic costs, which councils and local authorities struggle to meet. In parallel, the levels of available support and opportunities for affordable PA vary across the UK. With the current cost-of-living crisis, being physically active is increasingly an individual “decision” strongly influenced by economic, medical, psychological, and social factors. This particularly disadvantages people with long-term health conditions and limited resources. The UK government and National Health Service have announced programmes focused on preventative health care, including specific initiatives for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity.

The development of sustainable, accessible solutions to enable working-age people with long-term health conditions to be physically active requires an interdisciplinary, complexity-aware research approach. However, most research to date is incredibly siloed, and has not resulted in proven solutions for the complexities around PA, which need an interdisciplinary approach across key disciplines (e.g., medical and public health, psychology, economics, social sciences and humanities). Furthermore, most research lacks patient and public involvement and engagement. Therefore, this symposium at CALRG aims to brings together 25 leading experts from ten universities and eleven hospitals in six countries to address the following objective:

What are the main economic, medical, psychological, and social barriers and enablers for people with long-term health conditions to initiate and maintain physical activity, including how to overcome these barriers and positively reinforce enablers?

We welcome everyone to contribute to this symposium, as everyone is a stakeholder in their own physical and mental health and others around them. We aim to use the insights and contributions to further fine-tune our UKRI proposal and we welcome contributions from across the disciplines.

Overcoming Tyrannies in Campaigns for Impact

Anne Adams (IET), Gareth Davies (RES), Gabi Kent (FASS), Gaia Cantellia (RES)

Abstract:  From the Northern Ireland Learning from ‘Why Riot?’ (LfWR) action research to ‘Spinal Injury Association’ projects we have been supporting impact for overcoming real-world problems.  In this paper we present how evidence cafés (EC) (Clough & Adams, 2020) produced engagement insights, challenges and impact opportunities.  A series of decision makers ‘Tyrannies’ were identified  (‘timeliness’, ‘accountability’ and ‘ownership’). Using change models ( Kotter, 1996; Reed et al., 2018), enablers (‘understanding’, ‘communities’ and ‘processes’) were identified as impact mechanisms.

LfWR (Kent et al, 2025) supported locally-led youth interventions in areas of political violence and social marginalisation. In it’s EC the tyranny of accountability was found to skew policy narratives producing familiar rationalities rather than addressing underlying drivers. A tyranny of timeliness also constrained interventions. The EC process helped crystallise policy messages that rather than containment or criminalisation, impact and meaningful change comes from re-framing youth violence as a social issue and legitimising youth and community agency in informing social policy responses benefitting all .

The Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) project (with the Spinal Injuries Association, see SIA 2030 strategy) developed a Theory of Change for UK-wide policy-engagement strategy. The tyranny of timeliness emerged through health and social care systems’ inability to deliver long-term coordination across life-course needs. Accountability was diffused across services, diluting responsibility and delaying systemic reform. SCI lived experiences were tokenistic with a tyranny of ownership focused on people as service users rather than policy co-creators. The campaign is now shifting narratives by positioning lived experience as essential evidence for national strategy, opening new opportunities for policy innovation grounded in user-led insights.

Organisations often fail to link policy solutions to realistic problem understanding or community realities. To achieve project impact, we need to overcome the three tyrannies with a sequenced progression through engagement enablers of ‘engaged understanding’ (evidence-based and relevant), ‘engaged community’ (lived with agency) and processes (realistic and effective) supporting creation of a joint vision.

References: 

  • Kent, et al (2025) Learning from Why Riot? The Whys beneath youth violence (forthcoming).

Using Digital Platforms for Inclusive Citizen Science and Sustainability in the PEACE of Mind Youth Wellbeing Intervention 

Jessica Carr[1]; Natalie Divin[1]; Caoimhe Millar[2], Geraint Griffiths[3], Kathryn Stanford[4]; Christothea Herodotou[1] 

[1] Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University; [2] Verbal Arts Centre
[3] Cedar Foundation; [4] Inspire Wellbeing 

Abstract: Rates of poor youth wellbeing in Northern Ireland are 25% higher than other regions of the United Kingdom (Bunting et al., 2020), with young people’s self-reported mental health in Northern Ireland recently reaching its lowest recorded levels (Bond & O’Neill, 2023). In the Republic of Ireland, over one in five young people report symptoms of depression, yet only 44% of those identified as requiring support are actively receiving mental health care (Lynch et al., 2022). Commonly cited reasons for poor youth wellbeing include school pressure, maintaining healthy relationships and more (Bond et al., 2023).  

In response to poor youth wellbeing in Ireland, the Peace of Mind project has been designed as a cross-border, multi-partner project to improve mental wellbeing and build resilience in young people aged 9-25 years. This project uses a multi-modal delivery model to deliver wellbeing interventions within mainstream schools, special schools and community groups to maximise inclusivity. Each project partner delivers a six-week tailored intervention using creative methods to deliver lessons on self-esteem, developing healthy relationships and more. 

Steps have been taken to undergo continuous co-production and co-research with young people such as the creation of a project Youth Advisory Assembly. Using existing online platforms for inclusive co-production and co-research, such as nQuire, ensures that a wide range of young people’s voices are continuously represented. A community-led citizen science approach will enable us to co-produce aspects of the projects such as a mental health and wellbeing online platform, peer mentor training, citizen science studies and other project resources that support Peace of Mind’s sustainability. 

This presentation will share preliminary findings from the Peace of Mind’s pilot phase from multiple project partners, and will detail how digital platforms are being used for co-production, citizen science and project sustainability to capture and represent the voices of young people. 

Podcasting and Peacebuilding: Stories from Rwanda, Nepal, Indonesia and Kyrgyzstan in the Everyday Peacebuilding through the Arts Podcast

Sherezade García Rangel and Koula Charitonos

Abstract: In his 2021 paper, ‘Everyday peace: how so-called ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict’, Roger Mac Ginty explains that everyday peace attends to the “personal, informal , hyper-local and relational” which, he says, create “small acts of peace.” These small acts enable ordinary people “to navigate through life in societies affected by violent conflict” (Mac Ginty, 2021: 2-3). Our podcast, Everyday Peacebuilding through the Arts, examines how through the use of participatory arts-based methods, young people got involved in peacebuilding across four countries: Rwanda, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan and Indonesia as part of the Mobile Arts for Peace project (MAP, 2018-2024). This podcast brings together explores artworks created by young people from these countries and how these artworks can travel across personal narratives, project activities, contexts, themes of violence and displacements, and different geographies. Each episode explores how art reflects not only individual and context-specific experiences, but also universal experiences. The podcast asks young people, researchers and practitioners to reflect on how they use participatory arts-methods for peacebuilding in conflict settings (Breed et al. 2024. Mkwananzi and Cin, 2022). Examining the art works, ideas and learnings from the MAP project, this project understands podcasting as a wide-span cultural practice (Llinares et al. 2018: 2) from which to enable an open-ended conversation on the meaning of art for identity, community and peacebuilding. In this paper, we will discuss the making of Everyday Peacebuilding through the Arts through innovative podcasting practice. We will explore how we navigated the challenges of a podcast that conjures visual arts through the use of creative and evocative storytelling; how we went about creating a translingual space that could hold the knowledge, experiences and insights of practitioners, young people and researchers across four different countries; and how we built soundscapes to position the listener at the centre of this multilingual and art-forward experience. Reflecting on remote recording techniques and dynamic editing practices, we will bring together our insights into capturing the making of art for peacebuilding in meaningful international collaborations and holding the podcast as an intentional digital archive of learning for a multinational project.

nQuire for students: Enabling students to develop scientific thinking skills 

Sagun Shrestha and Christothea Herodotou

Abstract :  nQuire for students (https://learn.nquire.org.uk/)  is a home-grown digital survey tool for use by schools, teachers, and students. It has been developed by the IET team who are part of Exten.(D.T.)2 project (https://extendt2.eu/). Within a password-protected environment, students design, manage, pilot and improve their own studies and collect data from their peers to examine socio-scientific issues of interest. Teachers can review studies created by students and provide them with feedback as to how these could be improved. The designed and perceived affordances of nQuire for students are that this tool enables learners to develop research and inquiry skills related to the design of a scientific study. In this presentation, we will discuss how UK school students developed scientific thinking skills with the support of nQuire for students. We will report findings from UK primary and secondary schools across three years. Data from the analysis of students’ artefacts (nQuire for Students missions), the user experience journey, student focus group discussions and teachers’ interviews will be presented. Through this presentation, it is expected that researchers, learning technologists and primary educational stakeholders will gain insights on how a web-based, interactive technology enables learners to develop scientific thinking skills.

Relational Research as a Civic Method for Generating Policy Impact from Community Engagement 

Gareth Davies, Anne Adams, Nudrat Hopper and Timothy Hall

Abstract: This presentation introduces relational research as a distinct civic method that offers a systematic, collective, and equity-oriented approach to generating impact from community engagement. Unlike traditional academic models that emphasise detached observation or researcher-led agendas, relational research is grounded in the organising principles of civil society. It centres relationships, shared power, and long-term collaboration – offering practitioners a structured yet adaptive way to co-create knowledge with communities, particularly those historically excluded from policy processes. Drawing on insights from a recent international roundtable at King’s College London, and informed by The Relational Method (Tattersall & Stears, 2025), we explore how this approach prioritises lived experience, fosters iterative cycles of listening and action, and repositions research as a tool for collective agency and democratic change.

The session will discuss how relational methods offer value to education technology researchers interested in digital inclusion, widening participation, and policy engagement. Examples include Parent Power, work within a local faith-based initiative and a South African HIV/AIDS charity (Chiva Africa), where relational principles inform both engagement and impact strategies. These cases illustrate how anecdotal evidence—when embedded in civic coalitions—can be applied rigorously to shape bottom-up policy insights.

We argue that relational research is equitable, timely and relevant in the context of place-based funding initiatives, such as the UK’s civic missions and local innovation partnerships, which increasingly call for participatory, place-sensitive evidence. For researchers working with digital technologies, the method offers both a framework and a set of tools (e.g. relational meetings, power mapping, civic feedback loops) that can elevate the voice of marginalised communities and create more meaningful metrics for social impact.

This presentation will be of interest to those working on citizen science, public engagement, widening access, and researchers grappling with how to legitimise lived experience evidence within systems still shaped by positivist assumptions.