The art of public health

Outside the crisp air and sunshine of a Friday afternoon beckoned. But inside the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, nobody so much as glanced out a window.

Interactive workshops, artists’ displays and a hot topic drew almost 200 students, faculty, artists, community activists, researchers and public health practitioners to the school’s third annual student-led conference: Art of Public Health. And playing hooky seemed to be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

“This is my first time attending this conference and it’s great,” said Melissa Dickie, manager of health publications for CATIE (Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange). “I’m so impressed that this is a student-led conference.”

Workshops ranging from the practical to the theoretical examined art’s potential in everything from health promotion and community development to research, data collection and analysis and knowledge translation. Topics included the use of photovoice, which blends photography with social action. The technique, increasingly used in public health, community development and education, sees participants taking photographs to illustrate or represent their experiences or perspectives and discussing and analyzing them with facilitators or researchers.

“For someone who’s set in a biomedical model it may seem hard to incorporate an alternative arts-based approach,” said Alison Crepinsek, co-chair of the conference. “But it can be a very effective way of engaging different groups of people and there is a ton of momentum being built for using arts-based approaches as a methodology.”

The conference attracted a broad range of participants, said Crepinsek, a second-year student in the master of public health in health promotion program.

“It was almost a 50-50 split between people from the academic world — students, faculty and staff — and people from the community, artists, health promoters and physicians,” she said. “And since we were asking people to take a day off work or off school, we wanted it to feel very different from a conference where you’re sitting all day and to make it very hands-on and interactive.

“We wanted to make it so that people could walk away with something applicable to their work or their studies.”

For expressive arts therapist Lesley Swartz, the workshop Rewriting the Script: Queer-Positive Health Care in Action offered a new take on the use of theatre. Developed by recent graduates Kira Abelsohn and Jessica Ferne, co-ordinators of last year’s conference, along with community worker and activist Kyle Scanlon, the workshop used skits to demonstrate the educational potential of theatre-based approaches, with a focus on challenges faced by LGBTQ communities.

“It was really useful,” said Swartz. “It’s a different way of working, using the arts as an educational tool as opposed to a therapeutic tool.”

Conference co-chair Laura White said the previous year’s conference, Research with Pride, set the bar high but when this year’s organizing committee decided to focus on arts and public health, they knew they had a compelling topic.

“It’s a topic that just seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue,” White said. “It was an emerging issue that we all agreed merited examination and we felt there would be an interesting dynamic with people coming together from across disciplines and across all kinds of fields.”

Faculty such as professors Blake Poland and Michael Goodstadt were supportive, White said.

“More is being done with arts in the field of health care but in public health, it’s still emerging and there needs to be discussion about how to do it meaningfully and ethically,” said White.