The Imagining Resistance Project
Exploring resistance with young people who have experiences of sexual and interpersonal violence
Imagining Resistance
The project
Imagining Resistance is a three-year AHRC-funded project utilising participatory visual methods to develop new knowledge about the presence, role and space for resistance in the lives of young women who have experienced sexual and interpersonal violence.
Project updates
What do we resist?
Resistance often involves acts that are framed in social contexts as either pro-social or anti-social. They are conceived out of a desire to communicate something about an experience to either a real or imagined audience.
We resist people and the institutions they represent, and sometimes we do so in ways that are covert; that is, our imagined audience might not ever know what acts of resistance we are secretly engaging in or thinking about. Other times, our acts of resistance are overt: we have a real audience we want to communicate something directly about experiences of powerlessness, oppression, and subjugation.
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We resist feeling a certain way about ourselves; maybe in these instances the real audience is singular (me). One project participant explained this, saying of an abusive ex-partner: 'you can’t take away from me the fact that I don’t want to be with you'.
Image credit: Nicole
Image credit: Lizzie
Image credit: Jannay
Image credit: Nicole
Project 1: 'I have a right to be the person I want to be. I have a right to a full life'
When we began this project, we wondered how we might understand acts of resistance as self-preservation, and if we- as researchers and artists- could make the concept of resistance accessible for young women to both identify their acts of resistance and make the connection between these acts and their desire to protect a core self. We were curious if we might arrive, through the process of creative exploration, at a place where they could identify the times when they acted out of a need to retain something of themselves that remained untouchable in the face of abusive and exploitative relationships alongside pressures from the varied contexts they found themselves within and beholden to (i.e. the context of the child welfare or criminal justice systems).
Our first Imagining Resistance project took place in the summer of 2021, involving 5 young women who shared their creativity, strength, and resilience with us. Through this first project, we learned (among other things!) how choosing to act in ways that defy others’ expectations enabled young women to understand their own power in situations where disempowering interactions (eg. with professionals and romantic partners) made it otherwise hard to know their own strength or feel in control of their lives.
Together, we decided to create a zine from the project. Here is some of the creative work represented in the zine; if you would like a copy, please contact Kristi (link below).
Image credit: Laila
Image credit: Feyi
Image credit: Laila
Image credit: Laila
Project 2: 'We are loud, kind, and fiery'
Weightless.
Powerful.
Free.
Fun.
We went into this second project, in the summer of 2022, with the images, metaphors, and symbols of resistance from the first project. We felt more confident that this was a concept we could work with, and was accessible to the five young women who joined us and stuck with us through heat waves and Deliveroo order debacles, babies born and school ending. We brought out the studio equipment, went on a field trip to an art gallery (Home), and spent hours mono-printing with photographs pulled from mobile phones.
And together, we learned more about how acts of resistance are about feeling weightless, powerful, and free. We sat with the intensity of expectations placed upon young people, and wondered why interventions never seem to be designed intentionally to help anyone feel weightless, powerful, or free.
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We don’t know where we will end up yet, but we are immeasurably grateful to be in the presence of young people who are - as one participant aptly described herself and her peers: ‘loud, kind, and fiery’.
Resistance stories
In this project, we're interested in the experience - or the 'felt sense'* of resistance. Johnson (2018)* describes a felt sense as embodied knowing, or a way of understanding ourselves that is sensory, emotive, and perhaps difficult to rationalise and communicate verbally. That's why we've drawn upon creative methods such as photography, and experimented with metaphor and symbolism in drawing out young people's capacity for understanding and recognising their own acts of resistance as evidence of inherent strengths and resilience. We are developing a practice tool to facilitate resistance conversations and image-making. If you are interested in sharing your own stories of resistance or working with young people to creatively explore resistance, please contact us!
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*Johnson, R (2018). Embodied Social Justice. London: Routledge
Contact Me
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