Headway Memory Mapping: Cultural Heritage for wellbeing in contexts of Acquired Brain Injury
The Challenge
Memory-mapping for wellbeing, belonging, confidence and self-esteem
How can Cultural Heritage techniques be mobilized to support the wellbeing of diverse groups? The Headway Resilience Map, a community storytelling project in Cork City, is a pilot project exploring this question. In it, the Cork Folklore Project’s methods of digital oral history memory mapping (www.corkmemorymap.org) were developed with people living with acquired brain injuries who attend Headway Ireland services in the city.
The project set out to capture personal memories and stories connected to participants’ lives in and around the city, building confidence and social connection while also creating a public cultural resource. The project was initiated at the request of Headway Acquired Brain Injury Services and Support, and the first phase culminated in the launch of the Headway Resilience Map during Cork Lifelong Learning Festival, April 2025. Phase 2 was developed by Headway, who obtained Cork County Council funding for a similar project with the Cork Folklore Project and Mallow service users.
The Project
Support from the Future Humanities Institute allowed project coordinator James Furey, supported by Clíona O’Carroll (Béaloideas) and Caroline Dalton O’Connor (Nursing and Midwifery), to carry out a full cycle of map-browsing, discussion, recording, and the creation of a new map layer of Headway stories and memories.
We carried out eight story-mapping sessions with a group of 10 Headway service users in Cork City, who identified gaps and priorities with regard to the existing Cork Memory Map and their own experiences. Participants went on to be recorded and to record each other and community members, and produced a 10-point map layer, with themes including childhood and local traditions, hidden places, historical memories, and resilience and belonging, subsequently expanded to North Cork throughout 2025.
These stories together offer a rich picture of Cork’s cultural and social history, while also demonstrating the resilience and creativity of people living with acquired brain injury.
The Impact
The Cork Folklore Project has been developing our Cultural Heritage methodologies of interviewing, listening, archiving, and providing access to people’s memories and stories for 30 years. In this project, we build on our experience of putting oral testimony at the heart of initiatives where diverse individuals and groups can engage with belonging and wellbeing. Both the process and the product are important to us all. Interviews and recordings are safeguarded in the Cork Folklore Project’s audio archives as a long-term resource and the online map is maintained as a showcase and a launchpad for future action. Whether individuals contribute a piece to the map or not, the reminiscing sessions and conversations spark a level of vibrant and deep communication that, in this case, has spread to the broader Headway group and their other activities and interactions.
Here, Headway participants characterise the experience of creating the map:
It’s from the heart.
It’s therapeutic as well. The good we get out of that; it’s unbelievable.
I keep going back into the stories.
It’s therapy without going to a therapist
The confidence I’ve acquired through doing this is through the roof.
We have something to show at the end of it that’ll always be there.
It’s from Cork and by Cork, it’s part of our recovery but it’s also something that we give Cork. The fact that it’s by people missing some of their faculties is not the main part of it. Everyone has stories, the injury part isn’t to the fore. It’s for the broader community.
For More Information
- You can access our range of Memory Maps here: https://corkfolklore.org/memorymap/
- The Headway Resilience Map, with contributions in Cork City and North County Cork, here: https://corkfolklore.org/cmm/neatline/fullscreen/headway-resilience-map
- For more on Headway (Ireland): https://headway.ie/
- For more information on the Cork Folklore Project, see https://corkfolklore.org/ We are a community-based folklore collection and archiving centre, established by UCC’s Department of Folklore and Ethnology in 1996.
Follow us on https://www.instagram.com/corkfolklore
‘As a nurse working with people with a range of neurological conditions, such as intellectual disability and acquired brain injury, I observed the positive therapeutic impact of this process. Developing the Memory Map supported individuals with acquired brain injury to actively engage in conversations, remember past events , and learn new skills.’
– Caroline Dalton O’Connor, School of Nursing and Midwifery, UCC
‘In here we are using part of the brain that we never thought we had or we had forgotten. The memories coming back were created before the brain injury, and that’s amazing because some people here say they can’t remember what they did yesterday, but as [another participant] says you can remember what they did 50 years ago, and that in itself is amazing.”
— Headway Service User and Mapmaker
Banner Image:
Cork Folklore Project and Headway participants celebrate the Headway Resilience Map process, April 2025
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