Navigating Identities and Wellbeing
This theme investigates diverse aspects of identity and wellbeing across various contexts. It examines how identities are shaped, negotiated, and developed within social interactions, groups, institutions, physical spaces, and cultural contexts. The research explores how individuals experience and derive wellbeing and and implications thereof, considering mental, physical, and sociocultural processes. Current projects include studying how adolescent identities are co-constructed during parent-child conversations, how academic identities take shape in classroom interactions, how the arts are supporting wellbeing in care settings and contributing to the future of our healthcare system, investigating experiences of inclusion/exclusion in everyday places and practices, examining what the how the arts facilitate processes of sense-making and self-awareness of children, adolescents and adults, and how these dynamics change over the course of development.
Project Showcases

Alongside UCG teaching, Dr. Ferdinand Lewis is also Director of Science and Education for Arts in Health Netherlands (AiHN), which is a project of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health and is supported by
Nationaal Programma Groningen, University of Groningen, and University College Groningen.
The mission of AiHN is to advance the arts in health field in the Netherlands. This means that I write, design, and facilitate research. I am always trying to move the field forward by advocating for arts in health research among scholars, agencies, and policy-makers. At AiHN we network very actively to connect researchers with funders, projects, and other resources. At this moment, we are working on an arts-based community project in the earthquake region of the Netherlands, and and also leading the development of a national white paper that will set the agenda for the research, education, and practice of arts in health in the Netherlands. Also, because arts in health is an emerging field, I make certain that our new educational programs and curricula are rigorously supported by research. I oversee a number of student arts in health researchers, and each year I co-supervise the annual UCG Year Two research-based project on an arts-in health theme.