大象传媒

This article is authored by Emily R. Blyth (she/her), a past CERi Graduate Fellow and 2024 recipient of CERi鈥檚 Graduate Sholar Award. Emily is completing her PhD in Health Sciences at 大象传媒 with a focus on the health impacts of police violence and media coverage of police violence in the lands colonially called Canada. Community Voices is a research project focused on actionable analysis of news coverage of police violence. Through partnership with Unlocking the Gates Services Society, Community Voices describes harmful reporting patterns and community-developed standards to guide reporting on police violence.

Creativity in the Research Process

In the process of doing the research, we used an approach called integrated arts-based knowledge translation. This means that we began the research with goals to share our research through creative ways 鈥� and that we started engaging in that creativity from the very beginning of our focus group meetings. In June 2024, we held up our first focus group meeting at The Create Shop, a clay making and painting studio owned by Mo Korchinski, the project鈥檚 community Co-Lead, and her daughter. Mo is also the co-founder of Unlocking the Gates Services Society; she is deeply connected with the community members who make up or focus groups, and most of them had met Mo at the shop and were familiar with the space. Hosting our meeting in The Create Shop provided us with an informal and familiar space to come together. This also provided us with a creative outlet for our first icebreaker.

In this first day, we focused on sitting together as our hands became increasingly covered in clay, working on creating pieces that reflected our experiences of police violence. With Mo鈥檚 guidance 鈥� our community research team members, research leads, and student support team all became novices alongside each other. As we learned to work with the clay, we shared laughter, contented silences, and uncertainty over how to bring our creations to life. When we were done, each of us had created something unique and deeply personal. We then shared what each of our pieces meant to us 鈥� giving each person the opportunity to share their experiences through their artwork.

Relating with the community members that make our work what it is a shared priority for many community-engaged researchers. The artistic activities that we integrated into the Community Voices project became a foundational part of ethical relationship building. In these first moments, creating together helped ease the divisive hierarchies of researchers vs. community members. It gave us a way to talk about our experiences through a proxy 鈥� offering a way to talk about our experiences through our art rather than through the intensity of sharing our experiences through words alone. It offered a space for meditative healing, where expressing discontent with police and engaging in our creative spirits was encouraged. We returned to the clay activities on our last focus group meeting in November 2024, where the team provided feedback on our public report. This bookended our research with an opportunity to reflect on the process and share space and creativity together.

Creativity in How We Share our Research

Integrating creativity also gave the project Co-Leads a way to demonstrate our commitment to sharing this research beyond academic circles; from the first day we met the community research team we already had a show confirmed with Gallery Gachet 鈥� a Downtown Eastside art gallery that put aside professionalized ideas of what art can and should be to support us on our journey to share this important work through the power of creative expression. Our community research team talked about how they were excited for the opportunity to share their experiences with the public through the show and for the opportunity to see their work in a gallery setting.

As impact-driven research was another key priority for this project, bringing the findings out of academic papers and into the world in this visceral and experiential way was essential. The exhibit at Gachet gave us the chance to bring together creative works from the community research team, researchers, and project advisors from the community and academia alike. Together, the show that we created at Gachet offered space to reflect on the stories that we tell about police violence, how we have become to desensitized to stories that protect police at the expense of the people they harm, and how we can work towards narratives that center community and accountability. To reach our intended audiences, we also organized panels and workshops to invite journalists, advocates, and community members into the space.

Art holds profound possibilities for transformative change, marking creative engagement as a natural compliment to community-engaged research.

For those interested in learning more, please join us at Walk in Gratitude; Write in Empathy: Lenses of Safety in Police News Reporting our exhibit at Gallery Gachet.

Details:

路 Opening: Oct 22, 5pm

路 Run Dates: Oct 22-Nov 14, 2025

路 Location: Gallery Gachet (9 W Hastings St., Vancouver)

路 Description: Walk in Gratitude; Write in Empathy Lenses of Safety in Police News Reporting brings together voices of community members, activists, and researchers to imagine a world beyond police violence. Too often, when police cause harm that violence goes unnamed. This exhibition asks: how might language instead become a tool for healing, for witness, and for accountability?