GET INVOLVED!
We welcome conversations with potential partners, collaborators, affiliates and students.
Contact us opens in a new window
Big Anxiety Research Centre
Transforming mental health through cultural innovation
The Big Anxiety Research Centre [BARC] is a unique transdisciplinary enterprise, dedicated to transforming thinking and practice in mental health through creative collaboration and cultural innovation.
We research lived experience through a distinctive combination of trauma-informed, psychosocial research and creative practice, developing the rich communications and engagement practices we need to understand, connect with and support everyday experiences of mental health, trauma and suicidality.
Our mission is to attune to lived experience, to promote innovative creative experimentation and wide community engagement, and to collectively generate the tools, programs and creative media we need to support mental and emotional health throughout our communities.
BARC has evolved from the former National Institute for Experimental Arts [NIEA] and builds on the success of The Big Anxiety festivals in Sydney (2017 and 2019) and the growing research base in arts and health at UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture.
Participatory Research & Engagement
The Big Anxiety
BARC supports The Big Anxiety - one of the world’s largest mental health arts festivals and an ongoing engagement program. Founded in Sydney 2017, The Big Anxiety is a national festival, staged in both Queensland (Brisbane and Warwick) and Melbourne in 2022.
fEEL Lab
BARC incorporates the ARC Laureate Felt Experience & Empathy Lab (fEEL). The lab brings together specialists in immersive media, participatory design, trauma studies and psychology to advance new methods in the study of embodied subjective experience.
Creating impact by designing immersive experiences
ARC Laureate & UNSW Scientia Professor Jill Bennett and her team co-design immersive art projects with individuals and communities with lived experience of trauma across regional, rural and remote Australia. Founder of the Big Anxiety Festival and the UNSW Big Anxiety Research Centre, Jill shares insights into the kinds of impact immersive art can have, and on the ways we think about mental health services, pointing to new ways of supporting people from the perspective of lived experience. The projects featured are Waumananyi (Man in the Log), led by Uti Kulintjaku (commissioned for The Big Anxiety, 2019), Parragirls Past, Present (The Big Anxiety, 2017) and EmbodiMap (fEEL) - visit fEEL Lab for details.
We are currently reviewing our program for 2023-26. Research areas include:
- Virtual reality environments for mental health and trauma support
- Digital Story-telling with embodied media
- Dementia and ageing experience
- Trauma-informed participatory design
- Psychosocial design and qualitative evaluation
- Suicidality and future thinking
- Transgenerational trauma
- Experience-led research methods
- Music and emotion
- A machine for Shame
Core Team
Highlights from The Big Reach, Brisbane 26 & 27 May 2022
The Big Anxiety – Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2022) brings together essays and dialogues from thinkers and artists across a range of disciplines to re-imagine approaches to crisis, support, and care.
Features artists/writers/researchers from The Big Anxiety festival including Siri Hustvedt, Claudia Rankine, Evelyn Araluen, Noreen Giffney, Lynn Froggett, Marianne Wobcke, Jill Bennett, fEEL Lab, Uti Kulintjaku.
BARC is partnering with the Australia Council for the Arts to advance policy and practice in relation to arts and mental health
Contact us
UNSW School of Art & Design
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd
Paddington NSW 2021
Australia
T: (02) 9065 0455