Jean McEwan – Visual Artist and Creative Facilitator

Jean has been working with participatory research project Changing Realities (previously Covid Realities) to support zine making since 2021.

Covid Realities was a national research project working alongside parents and carers to share experiences of life on a low-income during Covid-19, developing ideas together for what needs to change and why.
Changing Realities is a collaboration between parents and carers, researchers at the University of York, and Child Poverty Action Group, coming together to share experiences of life on a low-income in the UK and to make change happen.

Zine making has been a space to creatively explore lived experiences, and to communicate what needs to change and why.
Jean has worked with participants, research team and close colleagues to collectively make the following zines shown below.

‘Doing It Together: An (un) guide to making zines with people’

This shares our learnings about using zine-making as part of the Covid Realities research. It includes reflections and insights from participants and researchers from the project as other zine makers who we have learned from.
Read the zine online here.

Read a blog post from Jean about her experiences of making the zines with Covid Realities here. 

Visit the Navigating Digital Welfare website

Jean is working with Music, Creativity and Wellbeing a research project led by Dr Una MacGlone investigating mental health impacts of community music participation for children and young people.
Jean has been working with Una MacGlone since 2016, devising instant graphic score packs comprised of collage elements ( e.g paper, tissue, images cut from magazines, plastic, painted card, sections of text). These scores have been used with a range of groups as an improvisational tool to create musical scores.

For Music Creativity and Wellbeing, Jean is working in collaboration with Una to further develop this work and to design and investigate instant graphic scores to be used by children and young people with additional support needs (ASN) in creative music workshops.
These materials were tested out in community setting in 2022 and will be piloted in school settings in 2023.