Hands-On Art, Hands-Off Gender-Based Violence: Auto-Ethnographic Reflexive and Visual Accounts in a Faculty of Education

• In Event: 18.012 - Challenging Dominant Narratives of Sexual Violence Through Participatory Visual Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper focus on situating and examining the experience of working with students at the McGill Art Hive Initiative (MAHI, a creative space for making community and promoting well-being through the arts in McGill University) to create artwork that responds to gender-based violence. The author offers an autoethnographic reflexive and visual account of facilitating creative workshops to deepen an understanding of the benefits of the arts for a constructive approach to creativity, well-being, and community making to address gender-based violence on university campuses.

Theoretical Perspectives:
This paper is framed around a self-reflective approach to understand how art practices can be used to both create new imaginary realities and to reflect our circumstances to resist sexual violence in university campuses. Clothes are commonly associated to women’s vulnerability and victimization (Hipple, 2000), but can also function as a site of agency and resistance (Mitchell & Author, 2017). By taking part in these workshops at the MAHI, students were creating within a third space (Timm-Bottos & Reilly, 2014), taking ownership of their learning by engaging in crucial discussions and participating in an arts-based process of self-awareness, interaction, and reflection.

Methods and Data Sources:
As an autoethnographic exploration, this study records the author’s personal and cultural experiences (Ellis et al., 2011) of facilitating workshops in which students transformed textile gloves to represent their notions of consent and touch to address sexual violence. Following a critical visual methodology (Rose, 2014), the paper explores the transformation and creation of the gloves from three different sites: the social conditions in which they were produced, the artworks as text and the experience of facilitating the workshop. The paper draws on a self-reflective approach based on the conversations and artworks that diverse participants created. As facilitator of a workshop intended to develop dress narratives, the author also explores the pedagogical possibilities of dress both as phenomenon and method (Weber & Mitchell, 2004). IRB approval is not required as the experiences of the author (not the workshop participants) form the primary data sources.

Results:
This study recognizes art and creativity as useful for and by young people to explore, expose, negotiate and resist discrimination and gender-based violence in post-secondary institutions. Through the use of visual, material and literary narratives such as drawing, sewing, and free writing, participants engaged in a creative process of learning through making that brings new understandings of art-making as a reflective practice that can be successfully used in education to generate new meaning and communicate ideas (Leavy, 2015).

Significance:
The author’s autoethnographic, creative and self-reflective exploration reveals important themes and critical moments in facilitation and creation in a faculty of education. This paper intends to share and exhibit the knowledge creatively generated while working with students in these workshops, with the hope to deepen an understanding of how artistic practices might contribute to expand our knowledge of how young people, and especially girls and young women, could oppose gender-based violence, while reaching communities and policy-makers to create awareness about this issue.

Author

• Maria Ezcurra