Street Drinking, New Media Arts and Community Engagement

Summary
Street drinking is a complex problem and impacts negatively on wider communities while street drinking communities themselves are often claimed to provide fellowship and support to their members. Regarded as a public health problem and a public nuisance by wider communities, strategies to address the problems caused by street drinking include enforcement and environmental controls, harm reduction and treatment. However both hedonistic binge drinking and chronic addiction persist in the UK, and there are diverse reactions to it informed by religious and cultural traditions and moral/ethical convictions. Increasingly, excessive alcohol consumption is also presented as a public health issue. This proposal will bring New Media Arts and Humanities perspectives to bear on street drinking, conceived as a health problem and a key issue for connected communities.

The research questions posed in relation to the problems caused by street drinking are:

What role can New Media Arts play in engaging communities to address the issue?
What can an assets based approach offer in addressing the problems caused by street drinking?
Can community based strategies be realistically grounded in an ethical/theologial framework?
How can the sometimes conflicting socio-cultural interests at stake be accommodated?

Research Strategy
1)The academic team will work with FACT in Liverpool to investigate diverse community responses and assets in relation to street drinking, using FACT's established model of community inquiry, based on the methods of a local TV station. Community stakeholders engaged will include: residents, retailers, health and social care professionals, the leisure industry and cultural sector.
2) Information collected will feed into a live web-cast, hosted at FACT, enabling participation remotely or in person. This will be aimed at the whole community including those with experience of street drinking.
3)The film of the event will be a focus for a multi-disciplinary and cross-professional seminar, which will also discuss a dramaturgical enactment of responses to a street drinking problem scenario using the on-line virtual community 'Stilwell'. This interactive resource, will present a virtual case-study situation requiring a response from community members and services. It will engage seminar members cognitively and affectively in decision-making.
4)The seminar will consider the material presented to it via new media through three lenses:
a)a socio-cultural lens based on the work of cultural analyst Alfred Lorenzer (Bereswill et al 2010) in which cultural traditions of stakeholder communities are seen to inform perceptions and to influence each other.
b)an ethical/theological lens based on Cook (2006) who explores the basis in Christian ethics of 12 steps programmes used by Alcoholics Anonymous
c)An assets based social policy lens which seeks to identify community resources in addressing problems (Kretzmann & McNight 1993)
5) The recorded seminar discussion will be subject to in-depth panel analysis by the research team using an interpretive method derived from the socio-cultural lens. This method (Leithaeuser and Volmerg 1988) has been adapted for the analysis of visual data such as the web-cast and the Stilwill scenario (Froggett and Hollway 2010). It enables researchers to analyse decisions, utterances and actions within the context whole 'scenes' rather than as discrete events.
6)The final report directed at academics and communities of professional practice will detail:
a) the perspectives on street drinking developed by the seminar and their implications for policy and practice in the areas of public health and community connectedness.
(b)the value of New Media in raising community awareness, enhancing community participation, and mobilising community assets to address problems caused by street drinking.

In the first instance the research will benefit the partner organisation FACT in assessing and explaining the specific contribution of their models of community engagement to the problem of street drinking. This will have wider implications for other organisations wishing to use new media arts as compared with traditional text-based public information/education materials.
In the second instance it will offer new ways of conceptualising the complex causes of street drinking, and possible solutions to the problems caused to communities by street drinking. It will inform local policy and practice communities responsible for devising sustainable strategies which will differ from approaches currently in use in that they are designed to promote community engagement, deliberation and ownership in the contexts of public health and community connectedness. The research will also have contribute to the wider evidence base informing effective interventions in this area thus generating longer term benefits for street drinkers and for practitioners, researchers, the wider international research community, policy makers and the general public.

Impact on practice
The community based inquiry and webcast will provide an opportunity for those taking part, including participants and professionals involved with participatory arts for health activities, to connect with others to share information, knowledge and experience in relation to community assets which can be mobilised to address the problems posed by street drinking. It will enable participants to consider how such assets might change and enrich current professional practice. In turn this will inform commissioners and funding bodies contributing to the support and development of arts and health based approaches to these problems.
The seminar and subsequent analysis will make a conceptual and theoretical contribution to the field in respect of the contribution of Arts and Humanities based approaches to addressing what is perceived as an intractable social problem. Using the Stilwell learning resource will ensure that the experiential dimension and the strong emotions aroused by street drinking are not neglected. This will contribute to an understanding of the psychosocial pathways whereby street drinkers become de-humanised and stigmatised - provoking community 'disconnection' from a group of people, some of whom are very vulnerable and struggle to attract public sympathy.

Impact on policy
The research will promote effective planning, by identifying the resources needed for sustainable community based strategies in this field, which will complement existing strategies of harm reduction, enforcement and treatment by foregrounding the importance of intra- and inter- community relations in the formulation of policy. The project will also forge connections between policy areas including arts, culture and health, identifying assets and resources within the arts and health sector for programme and project development.

Impact on the Public
The community inquiry and live webcast are designed to provide a deliberative space, using new media - a virtual agora - which will appeal to different sections of the public and offer a forum in which many voices can be heard. It will facilitate inclusion of hard to reach groups though interactive participation. It will appeal to young people who are at the centre of Liverpool's binge drinking culture, and whose views are difficult to engage by more conventional methods of community consultation. By raising public awareness and debate it will seek to establish the principle that behaviours which cause friction between members of communities can be addressed by community ownership of the problem. Web-based dissemination will ensure that the experience is easily accessible to communities elsewhere.