Clive Parkinson is the Director of Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he leads the University’s cross-faculty Arts & Health Research Group. Arts for Health is a specialist research unit that explores the relationships between creativity, culture, the arts, and health.  He has worked within the National Health Service and the voluntary sector, supporting people from diverse backgrounds and, wherever possible, placing culture and the arts at the forefront of work which focuses on people and their possibilities, and not upon illness and deficit.

He is particularly interested in the unexpected outcomes that arise from an active engagement in the arts He is a founding member of the UK’s National Alliance for Arts, Health and Wellbeing, and is currently a co-investigator on the Dementia & Imagination project, which explores the links between the visual arts, wellbeing and sense of community. 

In partnership with people recovering from substance addiction, he has recently developed a Recoverist Manifesto. He is currently working with partnerships in Australia, Italy, France, Lithuania and Turkey. 

Clive regularly blogs at:  http://artsforhealthmmu.blogspot.co.uk/ 

Keynote Presentation: ‘Weapons of Mass Happiness'

From Cold War soft diplomacy to contemporary civil unrest, this is a reframing of the arts and health agenda in terms of social justice and inequalities, and an exploration of something more insidious than the instrumental use of the arts in the service of the state.