Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Victoria Christodoulides, PhD
Bringing together research, lived experience and creative practice to reimagine trauma and recovery.
My research explores how trauma, recovery and mental health are understood, experienced and practised, with a particular interest in forms of knowledge and experience that can be overlooked within dominant clinical, individualised and outcomes-driven approaches.
My work is shaped by both academic research and lived experience. I use participatory, creative and interdisciplinary approaches, with particular interests in co-production, arts-based research, feminist new materialism, mental health measurement, outcomes and evaluation, and the relationship between research, practice and public engagement.
Across my work, I am interested in how we understand and evidence change: what gets measured, whose knowledge counts, what may be missed by conventional approaches, and how research and evaluation can better reflect the complexity of people's lives and the communities and systems in which they live.
Project Becomings grew from this work and from a commitment to making research about trauma and recovery accessible beyond academic spaces.
My Story
My interest in trauma and recovery is not only academic. I am a survivor of childhood trauma, and my own experiences of trying to understand and navigate recovery have profoundly shaped the questions I ask through my research.
For many years, I encountered approaches to recovery that did not always reflect the complexity of how recovery felt or was lived. This left me questioning what might be missing when recovery is understood primarily through symptoms, treatment or individual change — and what we might learn by paying attention to relationships, bodies, environments, creativity, time and the knowledge held through lived experience.
Those questions became the foundations of my doctoral research and Project Becomings.
My lived experience does not make me an authority on anyone else's recovery. Rather, it shapes my commitment to creating research in which different forms of knowledge can meet, dominant assumptions can be questioned, and people with lived experience can participate in producing knowledge rather than simply being the subjects of it.
Project Becomings grew from that commitment: creating space to explore what recovery can mean, how we come to know it, and what might become possible when we allow ourselves to think about it differently.
