Flow Unlocked: project seeking autistic PoC east Londoners

Through creative writing workshops Flow Unlocked will explore how autistic people experience relationships and aims to promote autistic acceptance. This is a creative participatory research project, funded by UCL Culture, for autistic east Londoners to reflect on their relationships and the effects of lockdown.

A previous more general call for participation went out in May 2020, and some really great collaboration has happened already. However, unfortunately, the project team were unsuccessful in attracting participation from People of Colour (PoC) in the pilot project call out. The team feel it is important to include PoC participants, because they make up significant parts of east London‘s population and because they are still very underrepresented in autistic research. So there are 2 more places specifically for PoC autistic east-Londoners.

Flow Unlocked seeks to highlight the importance of relationships to autistic people and rewrite the damaging stereotypes that exist about their lives. We are also investigating the questions of co-authorship and representation inherent to our process. Flow Unlocked invites autistic people to join a collaborative and creative process of knowledge exchange with artists and researchers. Through creative writing workshops we will create a safe space for autistic east Londoners to share their perspectives and ideas on relationships, and the effects of lockdown. We are interested in environmental and sensory relationships as well as interpersonal and human/object/animal relationships. We aim to create honest and compelling art inspired by how autisic people relate to the communities and environments around them.

Who we are

We are a collaborative group of three; Georgia Pavlopoulou, Doctor in Psychology and Mental health, UCL autism researcher & neurodiversity advocate; Jon Adams, neurodivergent poet, polymath, Synaesthete, MHChampion & artist; Briony Campbell, east London photographer, filmmaker & creative facilitator. 

Background info on this call out 

We ran a successful pilot project in which we co-produced the Flow Unlocked objectives and methodologies with seven autistic consultants. You can read about it on the Neurodiverse Self Advocacy website. We will be inviting the same people to join the full project. 

Participants roles

Participants will take part in 4 online creative writing workshops (approx 2.5 hours each). They will happen once a week for 4 weeks. Workshops will be led by Jon Adams, supported by Briony Campbell and Georgia Pavlopoulou, with guest poets contributing. There will be 5 participants.

Find out more on how to get involved