title: Managing the spatialities of arts-based practices with school children: an interdisciplinary exploration of engagement, movement and wellbeing.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The paper aims to provoke new pathways within arts and health research that engage with the spatialities of arts-based interventions for building social and emotional wellbeing. We adopt an understanding of social and emotional wellbeing as a situated and relational effect rather than an individually acquired attribute.
  
  
  METHODS
  A social scientist and a choreographer both accompanied a mask-making workshop for exploring identity and body language with children aged five and six at a primary school in the North of England.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The collaboration generated an alternative emphasis on movement, rather than behaviour, as the focus of managing spatialities.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The arts practitioner has to facilitate a balance of movements that, within the intended practices of the session, can be categorised as controlled, uncontrolled and improvised. This attention to movement enables a versatile conceptualisation of social and emotional wellbeing that is still situated and relational but also expressive of habituation and improvisation.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Atkinson
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Rubidge
keywords: movement; practice; school children; space; wellbeing