Dr Emma Smith is a Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London, where she has been based since 2021 within the Addictions research group. Her work focuses on substance use, recovery, and improving care for families impacted by parental substance use.

Emma has extensive experience using visual and creative research methods to explore lived experience and engage communities who are often excluded from traditional research. Her work draws on participatory and co-produced approaches, including photovoice, visual storytelling, and creative dissemination, to support more inclusive and meaningful forms of knowledge production.

She has worked closely with a range of diverse and underserved communities, including women who use drugs, people in recovery, and individuals involved in the criminal justice system. She has extensive experience integrating creative and participatory approaches to better understand complex social and health needs, and to inform the design of more responsive services. Her work also extends beyond academia through collaborations with arts and community organisations, using creative outputs and public engagement to translate research into accessible and impactful formats for wider audiences, policymakers, and practitioners.

Workshop: Beyond words: Creative methods in addiction health research

Creative methodologies are increasingly recognised as powerful tools for engaging research participants, eliciting rich data, and amplifying lived experience. However, they remain underutilised within UK addiction health research. This interactive workshop, facilitated by Dr Emma Smith and Dr Polly Radcliffe, aims to address this gap by introducing researchers to the potential of creative approaches in this field.

Drawing on their collaborative work, the facilitators will present examples of creative methodologies in practice. Dr Smith will discuss her use of photovoice with recovery communities and postpartum women who use drugs, highlighting how visual methods can support participant-led storytelling and insight generation. Dr Radcliffe will present on the development of Mum’s Point, a performance piece co-created with the Outside Edge Theatre Company, which translates qualitative research on perinatal substance use into an educational resource for student midwives.

Participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own research agendas and consider how creative methodologies might enhance their work. The workshop will also introduce a broader range of creative methodologies, offering participants new perspectives and approaches to consider. Attendees will take part in short creative exercises designed to help them experience these methods from the perspective of a research participant and gain insight into how they can shape data generation and engagement. Key strengths, limitations, and ethical considerations associated with these approaches will be discussed to support thoughtful and appropriate application.

The session aims to build confidence and capacity among addiction researchers to incorporate creative methodologies into their research design and practice.