As part of VDay Sussex 2012, and in conjunction with the LGBT History Month, Elizabeth Mills and myself will be running a series of body mapping and digital storytelling workshops, using various media ranging from paints and pens to digital art, film and music.
We invite LBTQ identified women to participate in the three workshops and create these body maps and digital stories. The workshops will take place at the University of Sussex on Wednesday 29th February, 2-5pm, Friday 2nd March, 2-5pm and Friday 27th April, 2-5pm.
Body mapping can be understood as a form of visual storytelling; a narrative of one’s life. Through the VDay Sussex workshops, body mapping will be used to narrate experiences linked to living as gendered bodies. In practice, body mapping entails tracing the outline of the body, and then using pens and paints to reflect on and narrate salient aspects of our lives. Taking this practice a step further, in the digital storytelling session we will be working with digital media to create ‘digital body maps’. Through these workshops we will explore ways of storytelling using both visual and non-visual media, ways of mapping our embodied journeys across spaces and places, as well as issues of online moderation, visibility and access. After the first two workshops participants will create and update their digital body maps on the online for approximately one month and then come together again for a final reflection session.
Participants will need to commit to attending all three workshops and participating in a group and online arena. If you are interested in participating, please send a short motivation (no longer than 300 words) to Aristea Fotopoulou (a.fotopoulou@sussex.ac.uk) and Elizabeth Mills (e.mills@ids.ac.uk) by 15 February 2011. In the motivation please tell us a bit about yourself and why you would like to participate in the workshops. We aim for these workshops to offer spaces for exploring issues around the personal and the political dimensions of our lives as LBTQ women; the workshops are not intended to provide research methods training.
A few words about VDAY Sussex 2012
During the VDay Sussex 2012 season, which runs from February 1st through April 30th , we are not only concerned with raising awareness about the negative reality of violence against women and girls, but also with enabling and inspiring positive social scripts on campus in order to challenge those realities. V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. It is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money, and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.
This year, dozens of motivated students, faculty members and staff on the Sussex campus are working to produce a benefit production of The Vagina Monologues. But performance is only the beginning, we are also designing complementary artistic, participatory and experiential workshops.
For more info about body mapping see:
Cornwall, A. (2002) Body mapping: Bridging the gap between biomedical messages, popular knowledge and lived experience. IN CORNWALL, A. & WELBOURNE, A. (Eds.) Realizing rights: Transforming approaches to sexual and reproductive well-being. London, Zed Books.
Aristea Fotopoulou 