Embedding the DEPICT Model Within an Integrated Arts-Based Knowledge Translation Framework: Exploring the Tensions and Benefits in Community-Engaged Graduate Public Health Research

Community-engaged research and integrated arts-based knowledge translation share a drive to expand ways of cultivating and sharing knowledge beyond the boundaries of Western academic norms. Both approaches involve diverse voices and practices that require a flexible and interdisciplinary approach, which can feel difficult to execute and be rendered illegible within the rigid institutional processes and expectations of public health and health sciences programs, marking them especially hard to navigate for graduate-level researchers. In this article, we explore a community partner- and graduate student-led community-engaged research project that employed the DEPICT model within an integrated arts-based knowledge translation framework. This British Columbia-based research project formed a community research team with lived experience of incarceration to explore structural health inequities related to police violence. Focusing on the methods of our integrated and trauma-informed framework, we explore our ethical and procedural considerations, including our learning curves and limitations. We discuss how embedding DEPICT within integrated arts-based knowledge translation offered a powerful roadmap for research that interrogates structural violence by centering community voices, facilitating trauma-informed artistic processes that enhance trust and encourage community healing, and generating accessible, visceral, and targeted knowledge products that spur action for community benefit. We then reflect on the barriers that we experienced in combining these approaches and the facilitators that helped our team navigate those barriers. Barriers included misaligned expectations in institutional and community processes and high demands on time and resources which were met through relational facilitators. This grounded reflection offers supportive insights for emerging structural health researchers and their mentors who are interested in creating research environments that meaningfully involve diverse participants, expansive ways of knowing, and artistic knowledge translation planning.