Topic:  Reading for resilience with adult male prisoners – Dr Elizabeth Hoult

Resources: You can download Elizabeth’s slides.

Session Summary: In this session Dr Elizabeth Hoult will talk about her work on resilience with adult, male offenders in a category D prison in her current Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) / Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project which is part of the Imagine programme.*  She will discuss how she uses science fiction films and books as ways of imaginatively exploring alternative futures with the participants, as well as the links between what Dr Hoult calls plural reading practices and resilience. She will consider the role that hope plays in the formation of resilience and illustrate how imagining utopias can lead to the articulation of personal hopes for the future.  She will explore some of the early findings from the project with the members of the forum and discuss how this work links to existing knowledge about resilience in other contexts.

* This project is part of the large ‘Imagine‘ Programme (external link) in which the University of Brighton is playing a leading role.

Biography:  Dr Elizabeth Chapman Hoult is based in the Department of Psychosocial Studies in Birkbeck, University of London, where she is programme director for the MSc in Education, Power and Social Change and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Practice in Learning and Teaching.  Her main research interest is resilient learning – why some disadvantaged people are able to succeed as learners despite significant disadvantage.  Previously she worked at Canterbury Christ Church University, leading university-community development projects, one of which was the £3 million South East Coastal Communities project which involved nine universities and their communities in Hampshire, Kent and Sussex.

Who might be most interested: Academics, practitioners, researchers, students, parents, carers, community workers, volunteers, public sector workers, young people and service users.

Key Reading:  There is a short, freely available synopsis of Elizabeth’s book (external link).
The section on hope from: Aumann, K., & Hart, A. (2009) Helping children with complex needs bounce back: Resilient Therapy for parents and professionals. London: Jessica Kingsley. ISBN 978-1-84310-948-8, pp. 172-178

This session took place on Wednesday 11 March 2015.

The Resilience Forum is for ANYBODY (with a pulse!) involved with or interested in resilience research!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email