Summary of the impact

Research undertaken in the School of English into the interrelations between memory, trauma, and narrative led to the `Storying Sheffield' project, which gives a voice to a diverse range of people, including long-term users of mental health services, people with physical disabilities, older people with degenerative conditions, migrants, and people in areas of socio-economic disadvantage. This has had significant socio-cultural impact for its participants, who have benefitted from an increased sense of well-being and belonging. There are also benefits for the wider community, through increasing understanding of these often marginalised sectors of society. In addition, the project has impacted on policy-making, through collaborations with Sheffield City Council, and emergency service providers, and on therapeutic training and practice, through collaborations with Rampton Hospital (a secure unit) and Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Trust.

Summary of the impact

This case study describes impact derived from Fisher's practice-as-research, during which, through painting and printmaking, he sought to develop approaches to image making involving narrative structures, and formal and technical methods and procedures, that achieved `visual equivalents' of the nineteenth century `texts' of Schubert's Winterreise song cycle and poet John Clare's Journey from Essex (both narratives of walking). The outcomes of the research were publicly exhibited and discussed in a variety of contexts during the period under review, thereby contributing to public engagement with, and understanding of, contemporary art as well as to critical/professional discourses surrounding contemporary painting and printmaking. Secondary impact was derived from the introduction of Clare and Clare's poetry and Schubert's song cycle to many hundreds of people previously unfamiliar with them.

Summary of the impact

Georgakopoulou's research in discourse analysis has from around 2000 pioneered — and promoted the academic and pedagogical importance of — the study of `small stories', that is everyday narrative conversations, using data drawn primarily from schoolchildren in Greece, including their communications through electronic media. Through her contributions to handbooks officially designated for teacher training in Greece, her work has become influential on teachers and hence classroom practices at secondary level, especially in the fast growing and crucial field of teaching Greek as a second language to migrant and minority children. The primary beneficiaries are teachers and pupils in secondary schools in Greece, but in other countries too Georgakopoulou's research has started to influence educational theory and practice in teaching English as a foreign or second language, and is also beginning to arouse interest for the psychotherapy of groups unable to construct coherent narrative accounts of their lives.