This is an interdisciplinary research residential that brings together community arts-based practice, criminology, public health dietetics, social research and sociology to interrogate and yield new insights into the processes, practicalities and realities of adopting participatory styles of research with vulnerable, marginalised and/or hard-to-reach groups (marginalised*). The aim of the residential is to develop a model of best practice, alongside a website/blog as a research/teaching resource for others.

The benefits of participatory styles of research for engaging marginalised* groups is relatively under explored outside of education. Moreover, there has been a recent resurgence in interest in participatory approaches, particularly in health research, party motivated by an explicit requirement by funding bodies (in the United Kingdom at least) for public and patient involvement (PPI) (Cook 2012).

The reference to a participatory style is deliberate and distinguishes it from participatory action research (PAR), which involves cooperation from research respondents, as they work alongside researchers in the co-production of knowledge, at all stages of the research process from research planning, data collection, analysis and interpretation to the publication of findings (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). Here, a participatory style incorporates creative/arts-based methods, which share attributes in common, notably giving respondents a voice to address, challenge and rebalance power relationships (Clarke et al., 2005; Coad et al., 2009; Parsons and Pettinger 2017, Poudrier and MacLean, 2009). Moreover, participatory styles that incorporate creative/arts-based methods emphasise the importance of democracy, equality, flexibility and reflexivity in the research process, which changes the nature of the traditional research relationship, and can make the researcher more of ‘an outsider in the academic community’ (Bergold and Thomas 2012). Indeed, there are ongoing debates regarding the principles of participatory, creative/arts based and action research methods and these will also need to be teased out in the context of existing and future research problems.