“When you have been in prison for a long-time like any of us, it is easy to become numb, you forget what you were like before... During Beside Me they see you more as Dad and whatever other relationships you are.” – project participant

Between March and October 2023, a team of artists from Dundee Rep Theatre worked with Dads currently living in HMP Perth and their children. The goal of the BESIDE ME project, was to co-create a performance that would enable the families to connect, spend quality time and co create something brand new together.

Supported by Families Outside and the Scottish Prison Service, BESIDE ME was part family party, part performance and part creative learning project. It was structured around weekly rehearsals held in the social hub (former wood assembly shed) at HMP Perth and culminated in three performances for a public audience. It was specifically designed to provide practical and creative opportunities for Dads to connect with their children, and discover new things about them (and themselves). Finally, there was an emphasis on children to have extended and meaningful access to their Dads in a creative environment.

This presentation will share the key learning and experiences that have emerged from the project, in so doing it will examine the power and potential of the arts as a tool to support families separated by incarceration. Ultimately, BESIDE ME represents the possibility for new narratives around love and connection in the criminal justice system, that to a significant extent alleviate the pains of imprisonment through improved family connections.

All research needs to be ethically conscious and navigate substantial obstacles, but arts-based research demands dualistic ethical considerations from researchers (Leavy, 2009; Park, 2004). Considerations are also often interrelated when conducting visual methods research (Cox et al., 2016), further complicating ethical dilemmas for arts-based researchers. Simultaneously, arts-based researchers exploring topics considered ‘sensitive,’ where participants may have lived experience, must also be given added consideration, additional protections and special procedures (Lee and Renzetti, 1990). This creates a fraught tightrope for researchers wishing to use creative research methods to study sensitive topics, which they must traverse carefully.
This paper will explore five ethical dimensions central to conducting arts-based research in sensitive topics: 1) creative approaches to informed consent, 2) authorship and ownership, 3) representation and authenticity, particularly when researching with marginalised populations, 4) anonymity and confidentiality and 5) creating art on a sensitive topic.

Crucially, this shall be approached from a situated-ethics standpoint, where participants' welfare must be at the centre of the research design (Rutanen and Vehkalahati, 2019). Whilst the need to obtain informed consent is a key ethical absolute, researchers must be extremely cautious of assuming people with lived experience are automatically incapable of making decisions about wishing to participate. Furthermore, creativity in obtaining consent, and moving away from contractual ethical models to ongoing consent procedures can allow people to be better equipped to make fully-informed decisions about participating, particularly in creative methods, as they have a clear awareness of what they are consenting to. Finally, arts-based research has added dimensions of anonymity, and as art is a sensory experience, it can place greater emotional demands on participants. Yet the positive benefits of ABR are rarely highlighted, which this session will ground discussions of sensitive topics in.

In this paper, I explore the possibilities afforded by arts and creative spaces as sites of radical possibility for a rearticulation of policing, in its broadest sense. In doing so, I draw on findings from my current partnership with the Coventry Belgrade Theatre, in which we are co-creating spaces for secondary school pupils to produce artistic outputs which explore, challenge, and reimagine their own experiences and understandings of policing – both by the police as a force, and by other state and non-state actors. In this paper, I draw on insights from the ‘affective turn’ across diverse sociological and legal fields (e.g. Fortier 2016; Zembylas 2021; and Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2018) to centre emotion in my analysis, asking how these creative spaces might operate as sites of affective power within and through which those involved might begin to disrupt existing power dynamics, and to ‘think otherwise’ (Carlen, 2017) - to challenge accepted social arrangements and hierarchies, and to make space for a more radical reimagining of the social world. In doing so, I consider the generative possibilities within these spaces to contest and rearticulate policing, community, safety, and care.