We know from social media that the immediate impact of the International Creative Research Methods Conference is always very positive. You can see some recent examples on the website (scroll down) with links to their sources for verification. But now that the conference is in its fourth year, we are beginning to see some of the longer-term impacts.

At our first conference, in 2023, academic Heather Bullen met artist Jean McEwan and they generated an idea for a collaborative zine-making project for women asylum seekers and refugees in Liverpool. They got funding from Research England via the University of Liverpool. Through local charity Asylum Link Merseyside (ALM), they gathered a group of women, focused on them as artists, and helped them to use their artwork to build resilience. ALM launched the zine on 27 June 2024 and it was reported in the Liverpool Echo.

Independent researchers Rowena Hay and Fran Harkness met at the second conference in 2024. That autumn they set up the Mighty Mini Research Collective, a peer support group for independent researchers which is going from strength to strength. They have an active group on LinkedIn with 200 members, and this year they are holding their first event, an unconference in Stockport, Manchester, on 16 June 2026. All independent researchers are welcome and tickets are available until 5 June.

Our third conference in 2025 was attended by Anita Barrand who is a Community Engagement Officer in the Centre for Ethnic Health Research at the University of Leicester. Although she is based in a university centre, Anita is not an academic herself, she is a creative professional and a researcher. She told me that the conference inspired ideas for her work on a study investigating ways to empower care home and home care staff through research. This study is part of the National Institutes for Health Research Applied Research Collaboration in the East Midlands. Anita’s study is called Living Labs for Care (LiLaC) and has tested creative research methods in two care homes. Fabric printmaking was used with international care home staff, and cultural food and recipes were used with staff at an Asian-led care home, to explain the stages of research. These creative methods helped to connect a diverse group of people with the research process.

The Binks Hub is a network of academics, community members, artists and policy-makers, based at the University of Edinburgh, who use creativity and the arts to co-create research for social change. In 2024 The Binks Hub was a sponsor of ICRMC, and several of their members attended the conference: Jimmy Turner (Binks Hub Research Fellow), artist and doctoral student Rhiannon Bull, comedian and writer Susan Morrison, and artist Jean McEwan (who we have already met earlier in this post). They ran a workshop to share some working drafts of a book they were creating: A Field Guide to Artist-Researcher Collaborations. That book was published open access in March 2026 and I cannot recommend it highly enough. There is also a booklet of activities you can download. Jimmy told me,

“The opportunity to workshop some work-in-progress material for our book at the 2024 International Creative Research Methods Conference was invaluable. We had just completed the workshops we had run with the artists who would become our co-authors, so for the conference workshop we drafted up some plans of chapters and creative activities to share with our participants. Sharing at a conference like this, which brings together experienced creative methods researchers, artists, and folk who were taking their first steps into creative methods research, meant we were able to identify any gaps and assess whether the approach we were developing would be helpful.”

Then of course there is the Journal of Creative Research Methods. Sadly this is not fully open access at present, as the publisher has not yet been able to secure funding for that, but some articles are open access and we hope that in time we will be able to find funding to make it all OA. The journal and the conference are closely linked. The existence and popularity of the conference helped Bristol University Press decide to take on the journal. Many of the articles in the first two issues were created by people who had been to the conference. The journal was launched at the conference in 2025 (there were cupcakes!) and is now receiving a steady stream of submissions. And the journal editors and board members scrutinise the conference programme for potential article creators. (I say ‘creators’ rather than ‘writers’ because we welcome conventional formats with creative elements, such as a research article including illustrative sketches or audio files, as well as creative formats, such as a research article produced as a video or written as a comic.)

I’m sure there is lots of other impact I don’t know about. If you have stories, please share! I didn’t see this coming – I didn’t think so far ahead – I just knew the creative research methods community needed a place to come together. So it is truly heartening for the organising team to see the conference having such a positive impact.