Creative Research and Interventions in Exploitation and Trauma Recovery

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue brings together contributions from across the social sciences and allied disciplines to critically examine creative research methodologies and interventions in the context of exploitation and trauma recovery.

Survivors of exploitation, abuse, and trauma, including those affected by modern slavery, human trafficking, domestic and sexual violence, stalking, and online harms, often experience profound and enduring impacts on their mental health, wellbeing, and social participation. While statutory and third-sector responses frequently prioritise immediate material needs such as housing, legal status, safety, and physical health, survivors’ longer-term psychosocial recovery is frequently under-resourced, fragmented, or addressed through narrowly biomedical, culturally limited, or short-term models of care. These approaches may be inaccessible, culturally incongruent, stigmatising, or experienced as re-traumatising by those they seek to support.

In parallel, a growing body of interdisciplinary research and practice highlights the potential of creative, cultural, and body-based approaches, including arts-based, participatory, somatic, and performance-led methods, to support recovery, restore agency, strengthen social connection, and address the relational and structural dimensions of trauma. Situated within broader debates on creative health, social determinants of health, and community assets, these approaches challenge extractive research paradigms and blur conventional boundaries between research, intervention, and knowledge exchange. Despite this growing interest, significant gaps remain within the social sciences. Evidence is uneven, methodological debates are ongoing, and creative interventions are often marginalised or treated as supplementary to ‘core’ services.

We are particularly interested in studies that foreground participation, co-production, survivor leadership, and lived experience and that attend to the ethical, political, and structural conditions shaping both harm and healing. Contributions may engage with phenomenological, feminist, decolonial, participatory action research, and trauma-informed frameworks and may span empirical research, methodological innovation, critical reflection, and evaluated practice.

By centring creativity not as an adjunct but as a social, relational, and embodied process, this Special Issue will advance debates on how creative approaches can contribute to more equitable, sustainable, safe, and survivor-informed systems of care, research, and policy in the field of discrimination, exploitation, and trauma recovery.

This Special Issue seeks to explore the following overarching questions:

1. How can creative and participatory research methodologies generate ethical, non-extractive knowledge about exploitation and trauma?
2. In what ways do creative and embodied interventions support recovery, agency, and social connection among survivors of exploitation and abuse?
3. How are survivors’ experiences represented, negotiated, and contested through creative research and dissemination practices?
4. What role can creative health and community-based approaches play within wider systems of care, support, and policy for trauma recovery?

We welcome original research articles, methodological papers, critical reviews, and practice-based contributions based in both Global South and Global North contexts, addressing (but not limited to) the following:

• Creative, arts-based, cultural, and body-based interventions in trauma recovery;
• Participatory, co-creative, and survivor-led research methodologies;
• Creative health and social prescribing in the context of exploitation and abuse;
• Embodied, and phenomenological approaches to trauma recovery;
• Creative practices addressing social isolation, belonging, and social health;
• Ethical challenges in creative and participatory research with survivors;
• Intersections of trauma with gender, race, migration status, disability, age, and sexuality and how these are addressed in creative research and interventions;
• Creative methods in research on modern slavery, human trafficking, domestic abuse, and gender-based discrimination;
• Practice-research collaborations across academia, the voluntary sector, health, and community organisations in creative health and interventions;
• Creative dissemination, storytelling, film, performance, and digital methods for impact and policy engagement.

Prof. Dr. Carole Murphy
Dr. Runa Lazzarino
Dr. Anna Westin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• creative health
• creative research
• trauma recovery
• exploitation
• gender-based discrimination
• participatory methodologies
• embodied approaches
• survivor-led practice
• social determinants of health
• representation and storytelling