Complutense University of Madrid

This project focuses on digital health promotion, understood as those messages and initiatives that encourage the adoption of healthy lifestyles (physical activity, diet, psychological well-being, etc.) through digital technologies (websites, apps, social networks, or self-monitoring devices). The main hypothesis is that these digital technologies play a fundamental pedagogical role in how young people learn about and understand their bodies, health, fitness and well-being. Specifically, they promote normative gendered body ideals and norms, neoliberal notions of the self and discourses of health consumption, which generate risks and inequalities. In addition, it is worrying that these public or informal pedagogies often come into tension with the health-related learnings provided by formal education.
The final goal of this project responds to the urgent need to understand and address how school education could help young people to successfully navigate through this complex landscape of digital health promotion. To this end, the purpose of this project will be to co-develop with young people innovative and critical pedagogical ideas about digital health technologies in schools, informed by a deep understanding of the meanings, contexts and social factors that shape Spanish young peoples relation with digital health promotion.
The project has three objectives:
1) To co-research with young people of diverse social profiles about the role of digital technologies for healthy lifestyles on their lives, exploring the impact over their health, health behaviours and identities as well as the affects, relations and learnings that emerge;
2) To co-create with young people critical digital health pedagogies aimed at challenging normative meanings and affects on health, health behaviours and identities;
3) To design an educational proposal aimed at the critical digital health education of young people.
The research design will be participatory, multi-method, iterative and multi-site, with the development of fieldwork in two Autonomous Communities, selected by their different socio-demographic characteristics: Madrid (urban) and Galicia (rural). It will consist of the following Research Stages:
1) Survey of a representative sample of young people to map their uses of these technologies;
2) Digital diaries, as participatory visual methods to delve into the meanings and impact of these technologies;
3) Co-creation workshops through participatory creative methodologies for the development of critical digital health pedagogies.
Additionally, a transversal stage of Participatory Action Research will be developed with young people who will collaborate closely with the research team. This project involves the design of an audiovisual educational proposal aimed at critical education on digital health promotion. The project plans to have an impact on young people and educational agents, as well as policy makers in the areas of Education and Health Promotion.

The pilot program "Tenemos cita con el Arte", made by art educators from the Complutense University with people affected with Alzheimer and other dementias and their caregivers. In this program the organisers have developed a series of visits to the Prado Museum and the National Museum Art Center Reina Sofía as well as workshops of artistic creation related to these visits. The aim of this project is to create some protocols of visits and workshops that can work as reference to artists, educators and other professionals.

Brundibar: The creative process as a path to wellbeing of childhood trauma is a National funded R&D research project, which aims to investigate intervention methodologies through art that help children and adolescents to overcome adverse experiences, as well as to develop observation, evaluation and research records. It is also committed to developing prevention strategies in social, cultural, clinical and educational spheres in interdisciplinary collaboration with different professional teams.
With a four-year lifespan (2021-2025) Brundibar develops pilot workshops with methodologies based on metaphor and narrative therapies, with the participation of museums and cultural institutions and the collaboration of Save The Children. The following products are planned to be developed:
- Validated intervention methodologies that promote the improvement of well-being in vulnerable children and adolescents.
- Observation register with validated observable indicators to measure the degree of improvement.
- Intervention tool through art, which can be applied as an evaluation and intervention tool.

In 2011 Madrid Salud, the public body of the Madrid City Council that is responsible for the prevention and promotion of health in the city, signed an agreement with the Complutense University of Madrid, in anticipation of possible benefits from the collaboration of art with prevention and health promotion. Madrid Salud has a network of 16 community health centres at its disposal and 5 dedicated specialist centres, Youth’s or Prevention of Cognitive’s ones, distributed over the city. Around 400 professionals work in interdisciplinary teams (including nurses, doctors, specialists in gynaecology, psychiatry, pediatrics and psychology, social workers, health auxiliaries and administrative staff).
After several years of collaboration and evidence of very positive results, both institutions are convinced that this partnership offers great opportunities and potential, and this cross- sectoral collaboration (university-health service) has been enabling the benefits of Arts in prevention and health promotion programmes in Madrid city. Since 2011, students and Early Career Researcher in Arts and Health, have joined in Madrid Salud’s teams and art professionals have been recruited also, for some specific programmes about isolation or grief. Madrid Salud is working on ensuring sustainability in these Arts and Health approach, supporting Early Career Researchers in Arts and Health and providing scholarships for researchers in Arts and Health every year, since 2017.
Photography, performance, drawing, sculpture, textile art, painting, water colours, calligraphy, visual poetry, haiku, sculpture, vertical gardens, urban allotments, graffiti, among other techniques and artistic workshops, have been developing in collaboration with students and researchers in different community health centres in collaboration with the health professionals. This arts and health approach has been incorporated in programs as healthy diet, physical activity, sexual and reproductive health, active ageing, or mental health. The evidence of this cross-sectoral collaboration has been compiled in conferences, papers, and doctoral thesis, co-creating meaningful knowledge about the role of the arts in Prevention and Promotion.