Tristi is a Senior Lecturer in the Public Health team in the Faculty of Health and Wellbeing, Canterbury Christ Church University. She is teaches on the BSc Health Studies and MSc Public Health Programmes. Her scholarship has explored how flourishing and wellbeing can be achieved and measured in workplace and community settings. Tristi recently completed research into the role of Urban Arts and Culture Festivals in promote a sense of community and connectedness for wellbeing. She Brownett is also a co-researcher on a Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health project, examining the motivations of volunteers involved in the in a long running Arts and Culture Festival 2018 – the largest annual community music event in the South East of England.
Tristi is also an International Fellow at the England Centre for Practice Development, Canterbury Christ Church University and a Visiting Fellow of the Institute of Public Policy and Professional Practice at Edge Hill University, where she has collaborated with Professor Owen Evans to develop an arts and wellbeing network and produce two symposia entitled Breaking Out of the Temples of Culture. The purpose of the symposia was to bring practitioners, artists, participants and academics together to highlight examples of best practice and to highlight innovative arts, health and well-being work from around the UK.
This year, Tristi will be co-presenting with Professor Owen Evans on ‘Breaking Out of the Temples of Culture: Moving Art into Communities’. They will document their discrete research into initiatives in East Kent and South Yorkshire, which move art and cultural activity out of the temples into the heart of the communities that might otherwise feel socially excluded and culturally impoverished. These initiatives thus seek in contrasting ways to overcome the psychological barriers that Larson and Andrews highlight. They foster a variety of ways of increasing community participation in the arts and enhance eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing. In this way art is both moved (physically relocated) and moving (emotionally arousing).
