Professor Ioan Fazey, Director of the Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR), Dundee University, delivers the second lecture in this Seminar Series. This presentation sought to examine issues around change, and how people respond to change using a case study from the Solomon Islands. The case study highlighted the need for improving our understanding of change and how desired change can be brought about. Towards the end, the presentation briefly touched on the kinds of things that might need to be considered if we are to facilitate transformative shifts that assist societies to work within the new normal of rapid and extensive change.

Julia Unwin CBE, Chief Executive of The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, delivers the third lecture in this Seminar Series. Julia discuses the great opportunity Scotland now has to do something positive about poverty and in particular, how people, communities, governments, businesses and housing providers can contribute towards a poverty-free Scotland.

Geoffrey Pleyers, FNRS Researcher & Associate Professor of Sociology, Universite de Louvain, Belgium delivers the fourth lecture in this Seminar Series. He addressed the following question: If we are discontent with the present order of things, particularly the overarching structures and mindset of neoliberal globalisation, how can we become effective agents of change when decisions that matter are as likely to be taken in Washington, New York, Beijing or Brussels as they are in London, Edinburgh or Govan?

Jane Ellen Stevens, founder and publisher of the ACEs Connection Network, which focuses on research about adverse childhood experiences and how people are implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on that research, delivers the sixth and final lecture of this Seminar Series. We are entering an age that might be the modern equivalent of the Renaissance, a new understanding about ourselves, why we behave the way we do, and how we can solve our most intractable problems, such as poverty, chronic disease, mental illness, and violence. Some people call this new understanding the “theory of everything”, a “unified science” of human development. This understanding will have a profound impact on our lives, and already is, in astounding ways. The five parts of this “theory of everything” are the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) and subsequent ACE surveys and studies (epidemiology); how toxic stress from ACEs affects the brain (neurobiology) and the body (biomedical consequences of toxic stress); how ACEs are passed from one generation to the next (epigenetic consequences of toxic stress); and resilience research, which takes advantage of the brain being plastic and the body wanting to heal. Based on this research, people, organizations and communities are putting into place trauma-informed and resilience-building practices that are already showing remarkable results, as long as those practices integrate an understanding of ACEs.

In this seminar, Ian shared some insights from the work of Bromley by Bow Health Partnership in East London including social prescribing, methods of co-production and work on integrating across a bio-medical approach and a community approach. He talked about a process of organisational change that they have embarked on which seeks to re-situate them as enablers of wellbeing rather than providers of health products.

The majority of people in Scotland’s prisons come from marginalised communities of profound deprivation and poverty. Their lives are generally shorter, their levels of addiction higher and their mental health wellbeing poorer than the wider population. This raises questions as to whether incarceration is a civilised and just response to structural disadvantage. Can the experience of prison be reimagined to set people on positive trajectories? And if so, how can the range of other services tasked with transforming lives understand the place of ‘dark experiences’? This talk will explore and share some of the progress that has been made in changes to Scottish policy, practice and legislation by sharing the lived dark experience of punishment with those who can bring about purposeful and systemic change. It will consider ways the involvement of people who do not see themselves as having a role to play in justice could bring about a reduction in offending and re-offending in Scotland. It will explore the role of prison as a step on a road to change, thereby reducing the number of victims and levels of harm.

Mark is the former Head of Glasgow Museums and Associate Professor, College of Arts, University of Glasgow. Museums all over the world are developing projects and programmes aiming to improve the health and wellbeing of their visitors, from dementia-friendly tours to art therapy, and from exhibitions promoting healthy living, to projects for people with mental health issues. Can museums make a difference to health and wellbeing? Even if they can, do museums have the capacity to make a real difference at a population level? This talk explored historical and recent evidence to formulate some conclusions about the potential of museums to improve health and wellbeing. Using Glasgow as an example, this talk explored the connected histories of public health and public museums, as products of the Victorian era. Leading politicians of the time made an explicit link between cultural provision, and museums in particular, with public health. But were they right to do so? The second theme of this talk was recent epidemiological evidence that cultural attendance – simply visiting a museum or art gallery – has an influence on people’s health to such an extent that regular attenders live longer than infrequent visitors. Today we face different disease challenges than those that faced the Victorians. The emergent disease conditions of the 21st century are poor mental health, loneliness, suicide, substance abuse and obesity. Against such a backdrop, what is the contemporary role of museums as part of a shared public sector contribution to human flourishing? And if museums do really make a difference to health and wellbeing, how can we maximise that contribution?

Sue is the Chair of Upstart Scotland. Over the last few decades, evidence has been steadily growing on the importance of play in child development. Simultaneously, opportunities for children to engage in active, creative, outdoor play have declined and, in many cases, have disappeared from young children’s lives. Since we now know that this sort of ‘real play’ (especially in early childhood) is extremely important for children’s long-term physical and mental health, it is becoming a matter of urgency to find ways of reinstating it into children’s lives. In this seminar, Sue Palmer argues that the most effective way to reinstate play at the heart of early childhood is to introduce a Nordic-style kindergarten stage for 3-7 year-olds, with particular emphasis on outdoor play. As well as the undoubted health benefits of such a culture change, the evidence suggests it would also bring educational benefits, including a narrowing of the current ‘attainment gap’ between rich and poor.