Webinar: Relationships before & during the pandemic

A live exploration of key principles of creative coproduction exploring autistic people's relationships before and during the pandemic.  

We invite you to join us for a live webinar with Dr Georgia Pavlopoulou and Jon Adams to hear more about Flow Unlocked, a creative autistic led collaborative project which highlights the importance of relationships to autistic people.

The intense sensitivity with which autistic people relate to the world is rarely recognised, let alone celebrated. The Flow Unlocked collective has been reflecting on personal and sensory relationships that have sustained them during the pandemic, as well as those they have missed. These reflections are revealed through poetry, photography, drawing and film.  

The visual art is created by co-artists Jon Adams and Briony Campbell, in collaboration with the Flow Unlocked participants and Georgia Pavlopoulou, University College London lecturer and autism researcher. Her work on autistic mental health and relationships is at the root of Flow Unlocked.    

Traditionally, projects are made about autistic people not with them, but Flow Unlocked breaks the mould by redefining autistic narratives from the perspective of lived experience. We invite you to join us in exploring the ways Flow Unlocked aims to ditch damaging stereotypes that exist about autistic people, and celebrate their diverse talents and unique perspectives.   

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Dr Georgia Pavlopoulou 

Georgia was awarded with a PhD from University College London (UCL) in 2019, examining the relationships of autistic and non-autistic siblings, and then went on to a post-doc at UCL looking at personalised care in sleep management with autistic adolescents and sleep research priorities of autistic adults. 

Georgia is a teaching Lecturer based at UCL, Department of Psychology and Human Development teaching Psychological aspects of counselling and is lead autism workforce trainer at Anna Freud Centre. She is the Founder of Group for Research in Relationships in Neurodiversity  based at UCL Institute of Education. 

Georgia is passionate about working with multidisciplinary teams, experts by experience and scholar activists in community-based mental health research. Georgia is using a combination of behavioural, phenomenological and participatory techniques together with a developmental approach to understand social determinants of autistic mental health through autistic people's personal accounts (stress, belonging, loneliness, low mood, family experiences). Georgia is committed to creative participatory health and educational research, co-producing work with community members. Georgia has been leading national and international Short Courses for mental health practitioners who work in educational and NHS systems with young people with atypical development, funded by Health England Education. Georgia is passionate about working with marginalized groups, service users, scholar activists and Trusts to facilitate service transformation and advance mental health practice through better cross agency collaboration and better service user participation. 

Flow Unlocked, funded by UCL Culture, is rooted in Georgia's ongoing work on understanding autistic people's relationships, aiming to communicate with the public the importance of relationships in the life of autistic people. The project is an opportunity to address the questions of authenticity and representation pertinent to creative interdisciplinary collaboration with neurodivergent participants in research and public engagement. 

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Jon Adams

Jon Adams is a polymath artist working cross-platform with image, poetry, sound, performance and spoken word. His work references synaesthesia, autism, dyslexia, autobiography, science and hidden metaphor, resulting in unique visual perspectives of systemizing history, time and place.  

During Flow Unlocked Jon was co-leading 3 months consultations to coestablish objectives and aims, led a series of creative workshops and reflected the collective experiences through his drawings. 

His national artist profile includes commissions from Parliament, Autism Research Centre Cambridge, London2012, Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England & Leverhulme grants and has worked alongside Sir Peter Brook. He campaigns for wider recognition, equity and understanding of Neurodivergent Culture within the arts as ‘Flow Observatorium’. He actively promotes research into suicide in autism, mental health of artists and dismantling barriers to inclusion and participation.

Image by Portsmouth Grammar School