Seedcorn 2023/2024

Research in Ageing Studies highlights the positive impacts of being able to continue to engage in life-long leisure pursuits and social activities when living in a care home, such as gardening, music, singing, cooking, and arts and crafts. Engaging in such activities has been shown to have rehabilitating affects, support agency in self-expression and enable meaningful forms of reminiscence and social connection that contribute to wellbeing. Researchers also highlight the importance of collective place-making activities in care homes, such as the creation of hair salons, barbers and clothes shops. Visiting these familiar sites has been found to be socially and culturally meaningful, enabling the expression and maintenance of identity, individuality and selfhood.

Literatures on ageing, dementia and care homes only tend to mention alcohol in relation to organisational policies and practices, and the potential for misuse. The lack of attention towards the social and cultural significance of brewing and drinking, is perhaps indicative of the biomedical focus in gerontological research that positions people with dementia as removed from or outside of culture.

What will the project involve? 

The Hoppiness project involves working alongside older adults living in care homes, their carers, and local brewers to explore the histories and cultures of brewing in the South West and build towards the production of a beer through communal hop growing. This co-produced project was borne out of a desire to disrupt entrenched cultural representations of people with dementia, which deprive them of personhood by defining them purely in terms of cognitive decline that results in an ‘unbecoming’ or loss of self. It also seeks to break from the largely biomedical focus of research on people with dementia in care homes, in which they are often framed as passive recipients of care that is oriented purely around the meeting of bodily needs.

This interdisciplinary project brings together a team of Early Career Researchers with Alive Activities (a charity with expertise in dementia friendly gardening and growing activities) and The Bristol Hops Collective (a community of home and allotment hop growers from across the city that works in partnerships with local breweries to nurture the tradition of brewing). Collectively the team brings individual expertise in research co-production, arts and cultural evaluation, sensory arts-based methods, and therapeutic horticulture, and community arts and wellbeing practice in the context of dementia care. Drawing across this expertise the researchers will design and deliver a series of creative activity sessions at two care homes based in Bristol. The sessions will explore and celebrate the cultural heritage of brewing and drinking, and provide an opportunity for reminiscence and connection to the natural world, the local brewing community, and therapeutic horticulture. The activities will enable rich sensory experiences through gardening, singing folk songs, object handling sessions with beer and growing related memorabilia, brewery visits to a local tap room, and beer tasting. While the sessions will engage residents of all genders, they particularly speak to the social and leisure pursuits of men who tend to be under-represented in activity provision.

The project aims to enact the following timeline:

Jan – Feb: Planning and ethics. The project will partner with two under-resourced care homes who tend to have less activity provision for residents. The researchers will work collectively to design activity sessions, gather relevant materials and create an ethics application to conduct the research.

March – Oct: 6-part series of Hoppiness activity sessions to be run in two care homes. These monthly sessions will have a meaningful progression in line with the seasonal change over the year (see session outlines in outputs section). The sessions will be collaboratively designed and delivered, with care home staff, and documented through ethnographic note taking, photos and short video recordings (with consent from the care home and individual residents). The researchers will hold two audio recorded reflective debrief sessions, in which they will reflect on the process, the response of residents (including non-verbal responses) and our experience running the sessions.

Hoppiness Activity Sessions:

• Visit 1 (March): Introduction. Re-create the socio-material and atmospheric experience of a pub, e.g. a bar with a keg and pump to pour beer, beer mats, glasses, snacks, music and other memorabilia. Run hop and beer-related sensory exploration and reminiscence activities with photos, objects, dried hops, songs and beer sampling.
• Visit 2 (April): Incorporating residents' knowledge of gardening and growing, they will plant the hop, creating watering rota and engage with the garden. Indoor supporting activity to increase accessibility - cuttings from hop rhizomes, lavender and hop bags.
• Visit 3 (May/June): Tending to the hop. Add manure and create a structure for the hop. Indoor supporting activity to increase accessibility - potting cuttings and creating a sign for the hop.
• Visit 4 (August): A tour of a local brewery, Wiper and True. The brewery has great accessibility and staff with experience in engaging with people living with dementia. We will be joined by a couple of members from the Bristol Hops Collective.
• Visit 5 (September): Harvesting. Cut the vines down and harvest the cones together. The harvested hops will be brought together with those grown across the Bristol brewing community to create the Bristol Hops Collective’s 2024 ‘Homebrew’.
• Visit 6 (October): Party! Participants will be brought together from care homes to connect over the beer they have helped produce, and share stories as well as their own reflections on the process.

August – Oct: Development of Hoppiness activities pack, video and presentation to Drinking Studies Network.

Who are the team and what do they bring?

• Alice Williatt (Education, University of Bristol) is a researcher who brings together feminist theories of care and materiality with participatory research practice to explore themes around ageing, care, wellbeing, culture and creativity.
• Martin Preston (Education, University of Bristol) is a researcher with extensive experience in the education sector. He is interested in co-produced research achieved through creative methods. He has volunteered with Alive Activities for several years in his community in Barton Hill Bristol, and in a pilot hop growing project. He is a qualified teacher and forest school leader trained in learner-directed approaches to education and have built and managed an award-winning garden focused upon inter-generational learning.
• Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith (History, University of Bristol) brings specialism in designing and using embodied, sensory, and creative research methods in health / care settings.
• Karen Gray (Policy Studies, University of Bristol) interests lie at the intersection between arts, health, and cultural studies. Her doctoral research built on prior experience in evaluating arts for health programmes and examined the methodological challenges of evaluating arts activities for dementia.
• Camilla Adams is a socially engaged filmmaker and artist with 20 years' experience of working with community arts organisations to document creative process and productions (e.g. Travelling Light Theatre Company, Creative Youth Network).
• Guy Manchester (Community Gardening Facilitator, Alive Activities and Co-Founder of Bristol Hops Collective) set up Bristol’s first dementia friendly allotment. He has experience working with people with dementia through growing activities, including growing hops in care homes. He also brings long-established relationships with brewers, tap rooms and community brewing networks in Bristol.
• George Densley (Service Development Manager, Alive Activities) has extensive experience running community arts and wellbeing services in the community and cultural sector and specialises in working with people with dementia.

What is to come?

The project responds to the stigmatisation and social exclusion that people with dementia often face by developing opportunities for social connection beyond care homes and through the co-creation of creative outputs that challenge deficit representations. Outputs include a Hoppiness activities pack to disseminate guidance on how to run sensory brewing activities for other care homes, and a short film that shares the experiences and stories of the people who took part in the project.

The primary output of the project is the 6-part series of activity sessions which will run in two Bristol-based care homes.

The Hoppiness Activities Pack: The pack will enable other practitioners to engage residents in other care homes by providing written and visual guidance on how to run activities sessions, the process, and resources needed. This will be illustrated by Cam and made freely available on the Alive Activities website. Alive will disseminate the pack via their networks in the ageing and charity sector.

Hoppiness film: The film will share the experiences and stories of those who live in care homes who took part in the project. It aims to challenge stereotypical representations of people with dementia and life in a care home, sharing their stories, experiences, and connections to cultures of brewing and drinking. The film will be screened at the care homes involved, at the 2024 Bristol Hops Collective Party (Oct) held in the Wiper and True Tap room in Old Market, and will feature on Alive and Brigstow’s websites.

Journal Article Alice, Martin, Rebecka and Karen will co-author a peer-review article based on the empirical findings and use of creative methods.

Session with Drinking Studies Network: By invitation of Mark Hailwood (Co-Director) the team will present the Hoppiness project, including the findings, activities pack and film to members of the Network at one of their sessions.

Bid Development: The findings and partnerships will feed into the on-going development of a larger co-produced grant (led by Alice) focused on understanding and strengthening creative health and wellbeing ecosystem in the City of Bristol