BackgroundA significant challenge in Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) in health research is to include a wide range of opinions and experiences, including from those who repeatedly find themselves at the margins of society.ObjectiveTo contribute to the debate around PPIE by introducing a bottom‐up methodology: cultural animation (CA). Cultural Animation is an arts‐based methodology of knowledge co‐production and community engagement which employs a variety of creative and participatory exercises to help build trusting relationships between diverse participants (expert and non‐experts) and democratize the process of research.DesignThree CA full‐day workshops for the research project “A Picture of Health.”ParticipantsEach workshop was attended by 20‐25 participants including 4 academics, 5 retired health professionals who volunteered in the local community and 15 community members. Participants ranged in age from 25 to 75 years, and 80% of the participants were women over the age of 60.ResultsThe CA workshops unearthed a diversity of hidden assets, increased human connectivity, led to rethinking of and co‐creating new health indicators and enabled participants to think of community health in a positive way and to consider what can be developed.DiscussionCultural animation encourages participants to imagine and create ideal pictures of health by experimenting with new ways of working together.ConclusionWe conclude by highlighting the main advantages to PPIE as follows: CA provides a route to co‐produce research agendas, empowers the public to engage actively with health professionals and make a positive contribution to their community.

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In an increasingly mobile world, transience is becoming the norm. Sustainable community food initiatives, therefore, must organise to withstand high turnover of volunteers. Using a case study of the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students’ food growing scheme in universities, this paper aims to map the causes and effects of short-term, irregular, and low participation using a causal loop diagram to understand how to mitigate their negative impacts and improve participation. Data was gathered through interviews, workshops, photovoice, a fishbowl discussion, and a reflective diary. We found three amplifying feedback loops increasing short-term, irregular and low participation, their causes, and their impacts. These feedback loops were precariously buffered by a continuous in-flow of new potential participants each academic year. We also found that the stakeholders of these gardens conceptualised time akin to both temporary and permanent organisations, and these differing conceptualisations were a source of tension. Furthermore, although ‘organisational amnesia’ was a problem, the gardens were still learningful spaces. We recommend both upstream and downstream solutions are implemented to buffer the impacts of transience and suggest that university and students’ union staff could play a crucial and subtle supporting role.

Food banks are organisations which occupy an uncomfortable position, being seen both as a manifestation of caring communities as well as an undesirable feature of neoliberal government. By focusing on the encounters between volunteers and food bank users within these organisations, we excavate their caring side to find three forms of compassion: compassion ‘for’, compassion ‘with’ and compassion ‘within’. We show that while compassion ‘for’ can lead to countless selfless acts, it remains embedded within neoliberal discourses. This can serve to reinforce distance and inequalities between giver (volunteer) and receiver (food bank user), creating a chain of indebtedness as compassion becomes part of a transactional exchange offered to those seen as worthy. Compassion ‘with’ others focuses on the person rather than the problem of food poverty and manifests itself in expressions of connection and responsibility which can, however, become possessive at times. Compassion ‘within’ is a form of compassion that, although less visible and demonstrative in response to the immediate suffering of others, provokes ethical and political reflection for individual volunteers who at times may challenge the very need for food banks. By grounding compassion in a specific social and organisational context, we highlight its relational nature and the dynamic and uncomfortable relation between different forms of compassion in the context of UK food banks. We conclude that compassion is a socially embedded and differentiated relationship which can activate affective, ethical and political responses to food poverty.

This article adopts a phenomenological perspective to illustrate how gardens become important spaces where children informally encounter, produce, consume and learn about food. We extend the theoretical concept of the 'foodscape' by applying it to both childhood production and consumption and, drawing on qualitative insights from two UK school gardening clubs, show why bodily and sensory phenomena are central to unlocking the potential for foodscapes as learning environments. We highlight how sensory engagement with 'mess' and 'dirt' normally dissociated from food retail and service enhances the agentic capacity of children as growers and consumers. Our central contribution to the sociology of food is to advance the argument that sensory learning is vital if children are to successfully negotiate between abstract and experiential awareness of the taste and source of myriad consumables, something which currently exacerbates the culture of anxiety and mistrust in contemporary food consumption.

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