How to Publish a RAT

It's often said that RAT has its fingers in a lot of pies. We offer spaces for fun, for connection, for peer support, for activism, for self-discovery, for creative skills building. We put on shows for survivors, for the public, for professionals across a range of sectors, in a mix of traditional and unusual venues. We offer training in trauma-conscious practice, we help survivors understand what's going on inside them, we guest lecture and guest speak to others trying to make the world a better place with survivors, we bring survivors and others in their lives together for mutual growth and recognition.

For us, these actions don't carry separate purposes: they all build towards supporting and platforming people living with post-traumatic stress to lead on how stories like ours are told and learned from. We're often happiest when we get to combine all these practices into the same projects. And once or twice, we have been able to overcome funding barriers and do just that.

On this, the first day of Creativity and Wellbeing Week, we are over the moon to announce that our paper WHAT DOES THEATRE AS A MODE OF RESEARCH COMMUNICATION TELL US ABOUT HOW WE SHOULD BE CONDUCTING THAT RESEARCH? AN EXPLORATION OF TRAUMA-CONSCIOUS THEATRE PROCESSES IN PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCH has been published in the most recent, second volume of the Theatre About Science journal.

(Not the snappiest title we've ever written, but that's academia for you!)

The paper charts our collaboration with CHAMPIONS, a national research project into the effects of living in temporary accommodation on the development of under 5s. It starts with an exploration of how theatre communicates the impact of trauma to audiences by provoking a dance between the body and the brain, using our first show NoMad as an example (as it was when Prof Monica Lakhanpaul saw NoMad and told Prof Nadia Svirydzenka about it that the seeds of our collaboration with CHAMPIONS were sown).

It then looks at the discoveries we made through the process of making Milestones: a semi-verbatim piece using transcripts of interviews from CHAMPIONS' first leg of research to illustrate the recommendations being made.

Finally, it looks at how that learning informed our approach to their next leg of research, co-creating a culturally sensitive parenting support programme for migrant and asylum-seeking parents of under 5s in temporary accommodation - in which we didn't just use theatre to communicate the findings, but embedded theatre-based workshops with mums both before and after they were interviewed, followed by a sharing of a co-created short play Wash My Mind, Heal My Heart and a documentary charting the process.

Those who know us well will be aware that this has not been our only engagement with research. The Abuse in Religious Contexts research project was the origin of our series of short filmed plays Something We Can All Agree On, and our latest (and first) full-length play to be co-created with some of our regular participants, COMPLEX, was inspired by the shared experiences and observations between our community and the PATHWAY study at Kings College London exploring routes into complex trauma care.

But this is the first time that our words have been published in a journal with a rigorous selection and editing process - and so marks a real leap in our work from throwing our insights to anyone who will have them, to having the backing that may just help to improve the chances of creative survivor-led approaches like this being taken seriously and resourced in future.

It's an honour to be published alongside others we met at Theatre About Science conferences: both in 2023 when we performed an extract of Milestones, and in 2025 when we delivered an abridged version of our trauma-conscious communication training, Duty of Hope.

On the topic of hope, the theme of this year's Creativity and Wellbeing Week is 'critical hope': have a look at their website to see what's going on. And if you can pick up a Big Issue this week, dedicated to critical hope, have a flip through and see if you recognise a few RATs on one of the pages...!

Meanwhile, we also look forward to attending the launch of Nadine Holdsworth's book Homelessness in Performance, Art and Society: Becoming Visible next month, for which Nadine interviewed Nell a few years back on NoMad. Nadine is an incisive thinker, a bold academic feeler and a pleasure to know as a person: we can't wait to read the book. Visibility takes time, but some of our long waits don't land on dead ends.

Why not round up your Creativity and Wellbeing Week by coming to RAT LAB this Saturday (23rd May)? This month, Claire and Alain are up: Claire helping us explore the difference between hard and soft boundaries when making new connections as part of designing her project Commonalities, and Alain bringing us up to date with his progress on the final performance poem in his trilogy, Archean. Both are artists who are as committed to the wellbeing of their audiences and participants, as they are to the creativity and artistic quality of what they make - and who, like us, see the two as going hand in hand.