Patchworked Care

Patchworked Care is the first project in our wider programme of work around women’s recovery, care proceedings, and motherhood. This project engages design-led feminist action research to explore experiences of care proceedings for mothers using substances, and to facilitate dialogue across lived experience and professional practice. Patchworked Care develops through four main phases:

Voices of lived experience: In the first phase, we explore the intersections of care proceedings and addiction/recovery through the voices of women who have lived through these experiences. This includes a series of creative focus groups with mothers in various community venues. It also includes an extended programme of workshops with residents of a specialist accommodation project that supports mothers struggling with addiction and at risk of, or involved with, children’s services intervention.

Making: In the second phase, we engage design-led methods to create interactive textiles pieces. One piece maps women’s experiences across different stages of the care proceedings process and the second presents lessons learnt from the residents in specialist accommodation project. 

Voices of practitioners: In the third phase, we facilitate a series of workshops with social work professionals, students in social work and allied professions, support staff from women’s services, and recovery workers. Using our interactive textiles map, we engage professionals in dialogue around women’s experiences to build shared understanding and explore how services can better meet the needs of mothers who use substances.

Dialogues: We bring together the voices of lived experience and the voiecs of practitioners in an interactive installation. This installation is made up of a collection of scripts that were produced from transcripts of our previous workshops. These were read by actors and embedded into an installation that invites two people to listen to the audio clips and then engage in conversation about what they have heard. 

In the end, we bring together made objects, images and text-based outputs from the project in a public exhibition and project report.

The project was carried out by Dr Faye Green and Dr Angelika Strohmayer, with support from Ridley Villas. It was funded by Newcastle City Council, with support form Will McGovern.