Photo by Taylor Friehl on Unsplash
What’s on offer?
An exhibition exploring the link between excess weight and unemployment – and how research could tackle the problem through positive lifestyle change. This event is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2023, you may want to explore what other events Bournemouth University is organising this year.
This exhibition will showcase the photography and stories of people who were involved in a research project called ASPIRE, which supported people who were unemployed and living with overweight to develop new skills and confidence.
Drop in at any time throughout the day, no booking required.
What’s it about?
The research
Obesity and unemployment are linked problems that harm our health, happiness, and lifespan. They can cause or result from each other. Research shows that long-term joblessness, insecure work, and low income lead to poor health, obesity, and bad diets. These issues worsen with the current cost-of-living crisis. People in deprived areas and on low incomes face more barriers to healthy diets and suffer more health problems.
The Adding to Social capital and individual Potential In disadvantaged REgions (ASPIRE) project was a European-funded project to co-create activities to tackle obesity and unemployment. It targeted adults who were jobless or overweight. The project helped participants grow fresh food, learn new skills, boost their self-confidence, diet, and wellbeing. By living healthier and learning more, they could improve their confidence, wellbeing, weight, activity, work, volunteering, or training.
The exhibition
In order to find out whether these activities helped participants or not, the researchers talked to participants using photography. This method is called Photovoice and helps participants to share their experiences by taking photos that show their experience and gives participants a voice.
They found that, before coming to ASPIRE, a lot of the participants experienced significant challenges with unemployment, healthy weight status with underlying causes linked to mental wellbeing, anxiety, depression and hopelessness. Taking part in ASPIRE led to a lot of positive results including improved mental wellbeing, self-efficacy, value of healthy produce, cooking and eating and an overall sense of hopefulness. Participants also enjoyed taking the photos which provided them an opportunity to reflect on their progress.
This exhibition will show photos and stories from the ASPIRE photovoice study and provide an opportunity for you to talk directly to the researchers from the project and some of the participants, too.
How to find it
This exhibition will be open all day in Gather, a community space in the Dolphin Centre, Poole. You can find it on the ground floor opposite Beales Department Store.
The nearest bus stops are at Poole Bus Station on the other side of the Dolphin Centre and Poole Railway Station is roughly a 5 minute walk away. The nearest parking is the multistorey in the Dolphin Centre.
What is the ESRC Festival of Social Science?
This event is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, an annual, UK-wide, free celebration of the social sciences. You may wish to explore other events being held by other organisers around the UK .