Creative Artifact workshop
Reproductive Citizenship (ReproCit)
ReproCit is a comparative, all-island research study examining how the historic legalisation of abortion in Ireland (2018) and Northern Ireland (2019) has shaped the sense of belonging – or reproductive citizenship – of people who can become pregnant. The study combines qualitative interviews with creative workshops run across multiple countries and contexts, generating artefacts and insights that extend the research beyond traditional academic formats.
Creative Artifact Workshop
A structured creative workshop method using zines, collage, and artefact-making to unlock lateral thinking, surface lived experience, and generate new collective visions – particularly where conventional qualitative methods hit a wall.
Phase 0: Logic Model & Topic Mapping
Identify the “Evaluation Gap” this method fills. It is best suited for contexts where the topic carries stigma, silencing, or emotional weight that inhibits honest participation in traditional interviews or surveys, and for contexts where stakeholders from different disciplines or lived experience need to think together across existing power differentials.
Primary Objective
To generate new, imaginative thinking about a contested or sensitive topic by combining creative making with facilitated dialogue – producing both tangible artefacts as evidence and qualitative insight that goes deeper than conventional methods allow.
Key Stakeholders
Activists, advocates, and campaigners; healthcare or service providers; policymakers; multi-disciplinary researchers; artists; and community members with direct lived experience of the issue.
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Frame the Context
Open the session by introducing the political, legal, or social context of your topic using clear, accessible narrative examples. The goal is not to lecture – it is to give participants enough shared ground to begin thinking and making. Keep it short: you are planting seeds, not delivering a seminar.
The Details:
- Action: Prepare a concise, plain-language briefing (5–10 minutes) covering the key facts, recent changes, and lived stakes of the issue. Use story-based examples over statistics wherever possible.
- Tip: Adapt the framing to your room – what your participants already know will vary enormously. Err on the side of accessibility rather than depth; the making process will generate depth on its own.
Activate with Artivism
Before anyone picks up a pen or a pair of scissors, share concrete examples of artist-led direct action related to your topic. If you have run previous workshops, share artefacts from those sessions too – showing what participants in other rooms made is one of the most powerful ways to give your group permission to make something imperfect and honest.
The Details:
- Action: Curate 3–5 visual or performative examples of creative activism on your topic – photographs, zines, posters, or short video clips. Present them briefly and invite an immediate reaction rather than a formal discussion.
- Tip: Choose examples that are scrappy and accessible alongside any polished work – participants need to see that you do not have to be a trained artist to make something meaningful here.
Run the Zine Sprint
Hand each participant a folded 8-page zine and give them exactly one minute per prompt to respond – no more, no editing, no second-guessing. This timed constraint is the engine of the method: it forces participants out of analytical, guarded thinking and into something more immediate, instinctive, and honest. The marks on the page do not need to be good. They just need to be made.
The Details:
- Action: Prepare 6–8 prompts in advance, mixing reflective questions, spatial tasks (e.g., “draw a map of where you are from”), and imaginative leaps (e.g., “where do you feel most community around this issue?”). Call time firmly after each minute.
- Tip: Model the task yourself – if facilitators also pick up a pen and make marks, it normalises imperfection and removes the sense that participants are being observed or assessed.
Open the Making Space
Move into the extended creative task: a longer session of 45 to 120 minutes where participants develop their thinking through making. This might be collage, further zine development, linocut printing, drawing, or any medium suited to your setting and participants. The making is not separate from the research – it is the research. Conversation flows continuously through the room as people work, and this is where the deepest disclosures and insights emerge.
The Details:
- Action: Lay out materials generously. Have at least two facilitators – one moving through the room to participate in conversations, one available for quieter one-to-one support if the topic prompts personal disclosure. Record conversations with consent.
- Tip: Resist the urge to manage the room too tightly. The de-formalisation of the space is deliberate – conversations that drift into personal territory, generational difference, or unexpected tangents are often where the most important evidence lives.
Surface and Share
Bring the group back together and invite participants to share what they made – not to present a finished product, but to talk about the experience of making and what it uncovered. Ask how the process felt, what it made possible to think about, and what might be useful in their own practice or community. Capture their words, not just their artefacts.
The Details:
- Action: Use a light structure for sharing – for example, invite each person to hold up their zine or collage and say one word or sentence about what surprised them. Avoid forcing a round-the-room report; let sharing be voluntary and conversational.
- Tip: After the session, photograph all artefacts before participants take them away. The physical objects – not just the recorded conversation – are primary evidence. The artefacts carry the emotional register that transcripts alone cannot.
Part 2: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
Documenting how the Mechanism was verified through specific data collection.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Material Participant-Made Artefacts |
That the creative process generates genuine imaginative and emotional engagement – not just compliance with a task. Artefacts carry the affective register of participant experience in a form that transcripts and survey responses cannot replicate. | Zines, collages, linocut prints, and other objects produced in sessions across Belfast, Dublin, Bangkok, and Reykjavik. Photographed and archived by the research team. |
| Qualitative In-Session Recorded Conversation |
That the de-formalised making environment produces richer, more nuanced, and more personal disclosure than conventional focus groups or interviews – including first-time personal disclosures and cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange. | Audio recordings and facilitator field notes from multiple workshop iterations. Post-pilot feedback from Alliance for Choice and Open University participants in Northern Ireland. |
| Participant Self-Reported Capability Shift |
That participation changes how people understand their own creative capacity – with all post-pilot participants reflecting that they had not believed they could write poetry or make art before the workshop. | Post-session reflections collected from Alliance for Choice provider workshop participants facilitated by Martha Nicholson, Open University. 100% of participants reported they would recommend the workshop to colleagues. |
| Digital Live Audience Response Data |
That participants are actively generating new thinking about the topic in real time – not simply receiving information – and that this thinking can be captured at scale even in large workshop settings. | In-workshop Menti.com responses capturing participant conceptualisations of the research theme, collected and analysed as part of the study’s evidence base. |
| Usability Independent Replication by Practitioners |
That the method is transferable beyond the original research team and can be adopted and adapted by practitioners without specialist academic training, demonstrating real-world scalability. | Alliance for Choice independently adopted and ran the toolkit with abortion providers in Northern Ireland following the pilot, without lead researcher involvement. Participant feedback confirmed the method created a “much-needed space” for conversations otherwise silenced in professional settings. |
Don’t just describe what people made. Show it, quote it, and let the objects do the evidential heavy lifting.
The Artefact Gallery
Photographs of participant-made zines and collages are not supplementary material – they are primary evidence. A grid of 6–12 photographed artefacts communicates the range of emotional registers, recurring themes, and individual voices in your group faster than any paragraph could. They also hold up in policy briefs, exhibition catalogues, and funder reports simultaneously.
The Disclosure Quote
When the making process produces a personal disclosure that would not have emerged in a conventional interview – something said quietly over a collage, or written unexpectedly in a zine – that moment is your strongest evidence that the method unlocked something. It proves mechanism, not just output. With participant consent, a single anonymised quote of this kind is worth three pages of thematic analysis.
The Language Shift Report
One of the most reportable outcomes of creative workshop methods is the shift in the language participants use – from professional, guarded, protocol-based language towards sensory, emotional, and relational language. Documenting this shift before and after the making phase, or between early and late conversation in a session, is direct evidence that the method changed how people were thinking, not just what they said.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used creative artefact workshops, participants in your community felt safe and generative enough to share experiences they had never voiced before and imagine futures they had stopped believing were possible.”