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About the project

Discovering Liveability: Co-producing Alternatives to Suicide Prevention 

Discovering Liveability is an ambitious 7-year project that aims to disrupt the current focus on crisis interventions in suicide prevention. Instead of asking how we can prevent people dying, Discovering Liveability will explore how we might cultivate environments and societies that are more liveable. It will centre lived and living experiences of suicide and suicidality, working with researchers, activists and collaborators from across the world and exploring what lived/living experience really means in practice.  

While suicide research remains dominated by largely quantitative, psychological and medicalised approaches, Discovering Liveability will carve out alternative ways of ‘doing’ suicide research, centring collaborative exploration, development, and innovation in practices of liveability. Our approach will champion multiple qualitative methods to investigate alternatives to suicide prevention, including: ethnography, in-depth interviewing, critical policy analysis, arts-based, and other collaborative approaches.  

Team and collaborators  

Discovering Liveability is funded by a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award and led by PI Professor Chandler (Edinburgh) and Co-lead Dr Ana Jordan (Lincoln). Our multi-disciplinary research team spans the University of Edinburgh (Co-Investigators Sarah Huque, Hazel Marzetti and Research Fellows Joe Anderson and Emily Yue), University of Lincoln (Co-Investigator Alex Oaten), and Mind in Camden (Co-Investigator Fiona Malpass). Read more about our current team members here. Meet the team.

What do we mean by ‘liveability’ or ‘liveable’? 

Liveability is a term that is being used more often in suicide research and prevention, but it is often not clearly defined. Broadly, it refers to a range of features that can make a life feel or be more ‘liveable’. This includes physical and mental health. However, crucially liveability goes way beyond this, to include a consideration of how the social, political, environmental and cultural contexts that people live in affect liveability.   

What ‘liveability’ means will vary for different people and groups, and a key research question that Discovering Liveability has relates to this variability. We ask – how is liveability understood and made sense of by different individuals and communities? Our research will answer this question both by spending time with different communities, and by exploring the policy contexts that affect liveability.  

What do we mean by ‘lived/living experience?’  

Like liveability, 'lived/living experience’ is increasingly referred to as important in suicide research and prevention. Discovering Liveability has ‘lived/living experience’ at the heart of our project. This includes our interest in the lived/living experiences of people affected by suicide, and our strong belief that attending to these experiences is vital if suicide research and prevention is to be meaningful. It also refers to the lived/living experiences of many members of the research team, and our recognition and interest in ensuring that our research is always informed by a critical consideration of our own – and others – experiences.  

However – what exactly lived/living experience of suicide means, and the different ways it is drawn on in suicide research, policy, practice and prevention is another of our key research questions. We recognise that what ‘lived/living experience’ of suicide means also varies. Across the project, we and our collaborators will be critically and carefully exploring the different ways that lived/living experience is understood, represented and involved in different aspects of suicide research, practice, policy and prevention.  

By Year 3 (2027) of Discovering Liveability we will have established a ‘Hub’ for lived and living experiences in suicide research, policy and prevention. The Hub will host researchers with lived/living experiences of suicide, as well as acting as a point of connection, engagement and knowledge exchange.

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