Outputs: Mapping, Making, and Mobilising in Merthyr

Video

SAGE Research Methods video (forthcoming)

Members of the 4Ms project talk in-situ about the challenges and affordances of using creative and affective methodologies with young people living in economically marginalized post-industrial places for SAGE Video Research Methods master series on Participatory Research: Creative Methods.

Professor Gabrielle Ivinson talks about how academics, artists and young people entangle with the transformative potentialities of creative methodologies that demand a process of ‘un-knowing’. She draws out some of the micro-moments in the workshops that formed the series of installations and film in the exhibition Graphic Moves.

Professor Emma Renold talks about the Relationship Matters case study and the unexpected twists and turns in using creative methodologies to explore teen girls’ experiences of sexual safety and violence. She maps the journey of how data becomes da(r)ta to produce artefacts, crafted from experience, that ripple through and affect peer cultures, school assemblies and national policy landscapes.

Feminist Posthumanism and New Materialisam Research Methodologies conference and workshops

This short documentary about the day, features clips and reflections from the 3 hour workshop, led by Gabrielle Ivinson and Emma Renold, that was designed to demonstrate the affective power of projected moving images how this method stimulates and generates unexpected and emergent issue specifically around bodies and landscape.

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Academic publications

Papers

  • Thomas, G. M.  (2016) It’s not that bad’: stigma, health, and place in a post-industrial community, Health & Place 38, pp. 1-7
  • Renold, Emma (forthcoming 2017) “Feel what I Feel”: Creating d(a)rta with teen girls to make sexual violence matter, Journal of Gender Studies
  • Thomas, G.M., Renold, E. et al. (in progress) Dark matters: the impact of street lighting on young people’s sense of safety in post-industrial places (journal to be decided)

Presentations and workshops

 2016

  • June 2016. (Renold) When data becomes da(r)ta: an onto-cartography of teen girls, sexual violence and creative activism, Gender and Education Bi-Annual Conference, University of Linkoping, Sweden, 14-17 June 2016
  • June 2016. (Renold) How the ‘ruler skirt’ came to matter and other creative activisms addressing teen sexual violence, in keynote panel Feminist activisms, public engagement and impact in Education, Gender and Education Bi-Annual Conference, University of Linkoping, Sweden, 14-17 June 2016
  • June 2016, (Renold) The Wales Agenda: engaging creative and affective methodologies with young people to address gender and sexual violence. 2 day invited international Sex Education symposia, Norrköping, June 13-14
  • May 2016 (Ivinson and Renold) Graphic Moves: attuning to the materialities of arts based practices as a basis for social resistance, The Twelfth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,  May 18-21, 2016
  • February 2016 (Ivinson, Renold and Thomas) Counteracting pathologising discourses of poverty and creating radical pedagogies, invited symposia, Challenging Deficit Models of Poverty series, British Education Research Association,  (BERA) Poverty and Policy Advocacy Research Commission, 15 February 2016
  • June, 2016 ( Ivinson) Making, Mapping and Mobilising in Merthyr: using visual and creative methods to engage change with young peopleSheffield University Student Conference

2015

Presentations

  • September 2015: (Renold, Ivinson, Elliot and Thomas) Graphic Moves: Artful, aleatory and posthuman methodologies in creative research with young people, for Symposium, Leaning to be affected: Mapping young people’s more than human relations, RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, University of Exeter
  • September 2015: (Thomas) ‘It’s just a normal place’: how young people imagine, negotiate and resist the stigmatisation of a post-industrial community. ESHMS 3rd Special Interest Meeting: Europe in a Global Perspective, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • August 2015: Sticky reputations: young peoples’ negotiation of stigma and place in a post-industrial community. American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. Chicago Hilton, Illinois
  • June 2015: (Ivinson and Renold) Light Moves and Graphic Moves: artful intra-ventions in co-produced participatory research with young people in Symposium: Beyond representation: engaging creative and affective methodologies for re-imagining girlhood in place, history and time for the Gender and Education bi-annual conference
  • June 2015: (Elliott, Byrne, Thomas, Renold, and Ivinson) Creating mobilisation: making participatory arts-based methodologies matter in place-based research WISERD Annual Conference (Panel Session), Cardiff Millennium Stadium
  • May 2015 (Ivinson and Renold) Graphic Moves: attuning to the materialities of arts based practices as a basis for social resistance. ICQI University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chicago, Illinois
  • April 2015. Having a hard(d) time? Young peoples’ experiences of safety, regulation, and place in a marginalised South Wales community. Pacific Sociology Association Annual Conference, Hyatt Regency Long Beach, California
  • March 2015, (Renold) Keynote, Research more-than-human assemblages: working with creative and affective methodologies in researching teen girls,  Utrecht Univeristy, 5 March 2015
  • March 2015 (Renold and Young people), Making Healthy Relationships Matter, invited address, Welsh Women’s Aid National Conference, Cardiff City Hall, 27th March 2016

Workshops

  • December 2015 (Renold) The STARTER Project: how to work with young people to creatively and safely address sexual violence in schools, Keeping Learners Safe: Everybody’s Business, 3rd December, Welsh Government conference. Delivered to over 100 educational practitioners and policy makers, this workshop featured the case study from the Relationship Matters project on how young people can creatively and safely promote gender equalities for respectful relationships. The middle section of the Graphic Moves (“words won’t pin me down” was also shown, alongside the ruler skirt and the tagged heart, see publications).
  • October 2015, (Renold) Relationship Matters: Using Arts-based Methods to Address Sexual Harassment in Schools and Communities, Giving Girls a Fair Chance: International Day of the Girl conference, Mercure Holland House Hotel in central Cardiff on Friday 9th October. See the Storify of the day. This presentation and workshop was delivered to over 40 practitioners. Through film, poems, and other artefacts, and drawing upon the Relationship Matters activist-engagement project, it explored how creative methods can be used with young people to support them in raising awareness of sexual harassment in schools and communities.
  • July 2015: Ivinson, Renold and Angharad, led a 3 hour workshop, Moving with Affective Methodologies, for Provocations, Improvisations: Encounters between Art, Sciences & Qualitative Research At the 4th Summer Institute in Qualitative Research, 2015 Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), Education & Social Research Institute (ESRI), Monday 6th July – Friday 10th July. Inspired by the work of Erin Manning we offer two films: Light Moves and Dance of the Not-Yet. Each film enables us to glimpse how the body, entangled in objects, landscape, movement and light align, interact and call our participants and us into the world. Led by Jên Anghared, the workshop then opens up to encourage participants to think with the body and affect, and how ‘movement moves’ and composes us.
  • June 2015 (Elliott, Byrne, Ivinson, Thomas – also Richard Davies (filmmaker), Nicola Ebdon (filmmaker), Heloise-Godfrey Talbot [artists], Seth Oliver [artist], and Rowan Talbot [artist]) Merthyr moves: an artistic celebration of life in the Welsh Valleys. Connected Communities Festival, Cardiff, UK
  • June 2015 (Ivinson and Renold) Projecting Life, for Feminist Posthumanism and New Materialism Research Methodologies in Education (Emma Renold, Cardiff University, Jessica Ringrose, IoE, and Anna Hickey-Moody, Goldsmiths, Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University), 11-12 June, 2015. This 3 hour workshop was designed to demonstrate the affective power of moving images that are multiply projected and how this method stimulates and generates unexpected and emergent issue specifically around bodies and landscape. Watch conference video.
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Policy

Zebras Campaign for better street lighting

Read about young people’s creative activism in fighting for better street lighting and safer routes in their local community: Young People, GIS Mapping, and Zebra (PDF, 2.2MB).

Relationship Matters Campaign for better healthy relationships education4ms

The Relationship Matters campaign informed national policy and continues to impact upon practitioners and policy makers through artefacts.

A case study also features in the Welsh Government’s Good practice guide: a whole education approach to violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence.

Key members of the group have also been involved in co-producing  AGENDA: A young people’s guide to making positive relationships matter.

Newspaper articles

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Artwork

Light Moves

In 2014, Courtney, Katie, Renee and Shonice from the Forsythia Youth Centre and pupils from St Aloysius Primary School in North Merthyr, Wales created a film to speak back to numerous press and media reports that stigmatised the post-industrial locality where the young people are growing up. This film, Light Moves, stunningly captures the vibrancy of moving bodies in space.

Light Moves also became a catalyst for inspiring artistic responses to a GCSE art examination question about ‘Connections’ in a local school.

Graphic Moves

In 2015, the team came together again to work on a series of arts-based workshops: Mashing Up The Land, Projections and Found Sounds and Street Beats. Young people created a wide range of artefacts, stories, soundscapes and moving images that became part of the co-produced film Graphic Moves.

The film includes a selection of art work and poetry from girls who created artistic ways to communicate and express issues around sexual violence. The film also speaks back to the pathologising images of North Merthyr that appeared in the BBC documentary SKINT and allowed the young people to reclaim and publically display images of the post industrial place where they are growing up.

Body Swings

This 3 minute short film features movement artist Jên Angharad as she swings through the exhibition of Graphic Moves at The Riverfront in Newport (5 June – 28 June 2015).

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Events

  • Light Moves and Graphic Moves shown at  international event Global Girls, Manchester, 13 May 2016
  • Graphic Moves exhibition, Riverfront Art Centre, Newport, 2015. View exhibition photographs.
  • Graphic Moves exhibition with Dance Performance, Merthyr Tydfil, 2015
  • Graphic Moves exhibition, Red House/Theatr Soar, Merthyr Tydfil, 2015. View exhibition photographs.
  • Graphic Moves exhibitions, Abacus Art Gallery, Cardiff, 2015
  • Cardiff University Engagement Project: Strong People, Healthier Places, Cardiff, 2015
  • Theatre Soar and Red House, Merthyr Tydfil, 2015
  • Connected Communities Festival, Cardiff, 2015
  • Citizens Cymru Assembly, Merthyr Tydfil, 2015
  • Citizens Cymru Founding Youth Assembly, Cardiff, 2015
  • Citizens UK Training Programme for Local Community Organisers, Cardiff, 2015
  • Connected Communities Festival, Cardiff, 2014
  • Citizens UK Training Programme (Gareth Thomas), Leicester, 2014
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Productive Margins, University of Bristol
8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1HH

Tel: +44 (0)117 3940042

Email: productive-margins@bristol.ac.uk