Abstract: Participatory research is an area of social science research where the effect of COVID19 pandemic has been felt most acutely. The study presented in this paper focuses on participatory arts-based methods that were delivered at a distance in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and sought to address one specific challenge, namely the need to support young people affected by mental health issues to access psychosocial support. We will present a research study conducted as part of Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) at Home project (https://map.lincoln.ac.uk/map-at-home/) in Rwanda at a time where COVID19 pandemic disrupted services and has placed mental health support under enormous strain resulting in a scarcity of resources, high mental health nurse turnover, and an overburdening of community health workers (Louis et al. 2020). The MAP at Home project was designed with an aim to lessen the negative impacts of COVID19 on young people’s mental health and explore how arts-based youth engagement can be extended through the use of digital and online technologies.
In this talk we will outline the study and discuss data generated through synchronous interaction via video conferencing software such as Zoom. By providing an example from this empirical study, we will share our attempts to examine what it means to be using arts-based methods for psychosocial support with participants who have not met face-to-face and are not in the same space or time zones. We are particularly concerned with the following questions: What is a participatory arts-based workshop at a distance? How it is enabled, how it is impeded, and what possibilities does it create? How are we to think about the participatory workshop space enacted in the context of this study? These questions encourage us to start thinking about space and time differently and not in terms of “static” (e.g. topographical) representations of space and “linear” (e.g. chronological) models of time” (Decuypere et al., 2022:1). By seeking to extend our spatiotemporal understanding we thus begin to develop a more nuanced way of understanding the many, complex spatial and temporal arrangements of arts-based research at a distance and online and the various ways in which participants, facilitators, researchers and psychosocial support workers were mobilised within it.
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