Trauma-Informed Placemaking (Courage & McKeown, Routledge, 2024) is a pioneering research-as-publication project exploring the critical, yet often overlooked, role of trauma and healing in place-based practice, research, and theory. While place is commonly viewed as either contested or convivial, its potential to hold or cause trauma is rarely acknowledged. This transdisciplinary project brings together placemaking experts, psychologists, artists, and social scientists to propose trauma-informed placemaking as a foundational approach. By centring care, justice, and lived experience, it aims to evolve the field—positioning trauma-awareness not as an optional lens, but as essential to understanding and working meaningfully with place.

As Editor-Convenor of this sector-defining Handbook, I brought together a global cohort of leading placemaking scholars and practitioners to co-curate its seven thematic sections. The first publication to critically explore placemaking through the lens of contemporary research, pedagogy, and practice, it offers cutting-edge interdisciplinary insights that set the agenda for the years ahead. Alongside the book, I programmed a year-long series of online and in-person events with co-editors and contributors to open up its themes in dialogue with wider audiences. This Handbook establishes a new foundation for placemaking—one that is inclusive, practice-evolving, and critically engaged.

With co-editor Dr Nicola Headlam. Emerald, 2022.

With co-editor Dr Nicola Headlam. Emerald, 2021.

Edited my myself and Dr Anita McKeown.

Published with Routledge in 2019.

With co-editor Dr Nicola Headlam. Emerald, 2019.

My PhD thesis.

Published with Routledge in 2017.

With co-editor Dr Nicola Headlam. Emerald, 2017.

With co-editors Dr Nicola Headlam and Dr Peter Matthews. Peter Lang, 2016. 

‘That's special, we'll keep that': A conversation about counter archiving and socially engaged practice at Tate Exchange, by Sarah Haylett et al., in The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context, edited by Sue Breakell & Wendy Russell.

Chapter, The Art of Placemaking: a typology of art practices in placemaking, in The Routledge Handbook of Place, Tim Edensor, Ares Kalandides and Uma Kothari eds. Routledge, 2020.