This evening presents the work of two collaborations on the topic of gender and exclusion with a playwriter/actress/director and animation artist and two feminist geographers. 

Prof Cathy McIlwaine, Department of Geography and actor, playwright and director, Gaël Le Cornec will present their collaborative work 'The Right to Be Believed',a short voice installation based on as part of the  Step Up Migrant Women campaign  led by the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS) with migrant women with insecure immigration status who have experienced gender-based violence. 

Afterwards, a short animation film 'Nadirah' will be screened. The film draws on the collaborative project between Dr Negar Elodie Behzadi, Department of International Development, and  Kate Jessop. Negar and Kate will show the animated portrait of one stigmatised female coal miner in Tajikistan. Based on ethnographic research in a coal mining community undertaken by Negar in 2014-5 where women miners were stigmatised and excluded, this portrait aims to make visible otherwise invisibilised stories of shame. In particular, it aims to raise awareness of issues of gender and exclusion in a context of resource extraction and economic desolation.

Cathy and Negar will then discuss implications of their work for social science research on sensitive issues around gender and exclusion.

Exclusion - socio-spatial  and emotional -  is heavily gendered. Specific norms of femininity and masculinity define who is 'in place' or 'out of place', leading to some voices to be silenced, sometimes with violence. Such norms intersect with various axes of identity - including nationality, sexuality, livelihood, age, race, religion, ability/disability, citizenship. To what extent can feminist research help us uncover such exclusions? What does the use of 'art' as a medium/and or a method can bring to their understanding? How do art-based approaches to sensitive issues relate to feminist methodologies and epistemologies - and in particular their objective to produce embodied forms knowledge capable of unearthing subjugated voices?

This event raises these questions by drawing on the work of two feminist geographers at KCL, Prof Cathy McIlwaine (Department of Geography), and Dr Negar Elodie Behzadi (Department of International Development) .

This event is part of the Art & Exclusions Exhibition series, hosted by the VEM+

 

Image credit: Lyanne Wilde

About VEM +

These collaborations, held at the Somerset House Studios in July 2019, are part of the ‘VEM+’ project within the SSPP. Drawing on the emerging VEM Network (Visual, Embodied and Art-based Methodologies in the social sciences) at KCL, the VEM+ Collaborations is a cross-departmental project engaging artists and academics in an innovative dialogue about methodological practices in the arts and social sciences, moving beyond viewing culture as a site through which more standard social science research methods can be applied or as a means to illustrate social science research. Instead, these collaborations explore how visual, embodied and arts-based methodologies might transform research practices in social science , interrogating the potential of such methodologies to generate new, insightful and ultimately emancipatory knowledge for both the researcher and the researched, particularly in the study of sensitive issues.  4 collaborations were included in the VEM + in 2019: