Blog post written by Sian Aggett (South West AHECRN Area Representative)
The Brighton ECRN meet up was held at the North Laines Brewhouse on the 6th November 2017. This was an initial meet up to meet with others interested in Arts and Health in Brighton. We hoped to discuss our interest areas and potential venues and themes for future events.
This was a small meeting of only three people all doing PhDs or recently completed PhDs at Sussex University. We discussed PhD write up timescales and management and the stresses of being interdisciplinary within Sussex University. We also thought a bit about next career steps within academic careers and discussed when an appropriate time might be to start making post doc or other grant applications and how to go about this process.
We also discussed what we thought the purpose of the group should be and felt that it’s primary aim should be to allow networking between researchers, health workers and practitioners so that we could share learning and build partnerships. This would require an event with a broader invite list than the one we had (not necessarily solely early career researchers).
I was also informed of a Brighton and Hove Council meeting in which the council are soliciting advice from across the arts and culture sector to develop a cultural framework for the city. I attended this one day meeting and met with a lot of interesting professionals working in the sector broadly. In particular I introduced myself to Dominique De-Light who is the director of Creative Future in Brighton and runs a Health & Wellbeing Working Group. I attended a meeting of this group in which the attendees discussed the Council’s framework, funding difficulties and the need for improved mapping and synergising across the sector (and the barriers to this). I shared the ECRN flyers and asked that he group help promote the network through their own contacts. Hopefully this will bring some new members to the South East Region.
Thanks to Sian for writing this blog post. If you are interested in writing a blog post about an arts and health event please get in touch.