Surfacing interpretations of economic regeneration and community development needs - using creative research methods

Introduction
The research project is designed to undertake data collection, build and maintain collaborative relationships, and scope out a tripartite town centre economic regeneration and community development research project to be co-led by Aberystwyth University and the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt.

Research methods
The Wales and Austria based workshops will run concurrently involving the use of zine creation (Melik et al, 2024; Sou and Hall, 2024) to help surface interpretations of the challenges facing economic regeneration and community development activities in the towns of Aberystwyth, Holywell, and Mürzzuschlag.

The use of zines to creatively analyse and evaluate economic regeneration is a comparatively recently adopted phenomenon. Zine making is a research method which enables participation and helps surface conversations which may not emerge from traditional interview led research methods or focus groups (Melik et al, 2024). The Aberystwyth and Mürzzuschlag based workshops will employ zine creation to explore local narratives, cultural identity, socio-economic issues. Inspired by initiatives like "Madzines" (Spandler and Poursanidou, 2019) both workshops will encourage participants to creatively express their experiences, particularly focused on their experiences of economic regeneration and community development.

Anticipated outcomes
By creating the zines as cultural texts, we can analyse how business owner/managers, local authority officers, and residents depict their socio-economic realities, values, and challenges. The workshops will serve as a platform for an ongoing creative dialogue. We will collaborate with local organizations to ensure the workshops are accessible and relevant, and the outcomes will be shared through community exhibitions and publications. This approach will provide new insights into the economic regeneration and community development in Aberystwyth, Holywell, and Mürzzuschlag while empowering participants through creative expression. The workshops will support the collaboration between project stakeholders in Wales and Austria. It is anticipated that a member of the Aberystwyth University based team will travel to Mürzzuschlag to help facilitate Workshop A2 and continue building collaborative relationships with the research team in Austria.

Feedback from the workshop events will be received via a participatory dissemination exercise (Valli, 2012) where project stakeholders will use zines to provide their interpretations of the outcomes emerging from Workshops A1 and A2. This exercise will help interpret whether the activities have achieved the aim of building and maintaining collaborative relationships and scoping out the research project parameters.

References
Sou, G. & Hall, S. (2023). Comics and Zines for Creative Research Impact: Ethics, Politics and Praxis in Geographical Research. ACME, 22(1), 817–841.
Spandler, H. and Poursanidou, D. (2019) Who’s included in the Mad Studies Project? Journal of Ethics in Mental Health. V1
Van Melik, R., Kofi, J. & Landau-Donnelly, F. (2024) Studying and stimulating a sense of community through co-productive zine-making in public libraries. Area, 56.
Valli, C. (2021) Participatory dissemination: bridging in-depth interviews, participation, and creative visual methods through Interview-Based ZineMaking (IBZM). Fennia 199(1).