TiPP’s approach to research is founded on the idea that the arts are the perfect way to engage people in research.  The participatory arts allow participants to more directly express their voice and make themselves heard. Our approach is built on the principle that knowledge is co-created through the  creative arts process, an approach which minimises the risks of othering our research partners, exploiting them or leaving them voiceless in the telling of their own stories (Finlay, 2005).

Our research takes different forms depending on who we are working with and what quuestions we want to answer. Some of our projects are concerned with eliciting and recording service users' voices and we have no idea what the creative journey will reveal. We are entirely comfortable with the idea that more questions will crop up along the way. In recent years we have developed "user voice" projects with men living on the offender personaility disorder strategy pathway, resulting in poetry, visual art, music and film (you can see some of the images of this work in Project Gallery 1).  

Other projects have a more specfic focus, and are built around a particular research question.  You can read more about this type of project on the Criminology at the University of Manchester page. Either way, we like to develop art form based approaches that result in output which beguiles and intrigues in equal measure to how it informs.

If you would like to know more about our arts based research approach, get in touch.  We are always interested in finding peculiar ways of answering interesting questions.