- Convenors:
-
Lora Forsythe
(Natural Resources Institute)
Misha Myers (University of Plymouth)
Amala Okwuosa (Women Aid Collective WACOL)
Joanna Wheeler (Coventry University)
Diana Lopez Castaneda
Paula Ramirez
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- Creativity, participation and collaborative co-production in methods and practices
Short Abstract
This panel explores how practice-based, feminist, conflict- sensitive and transdisciplinary methodologies can challenge dominant paradigms and centre lived experiences, agency and creative capacities through a co-constructed approach.
Description
Traditional research methods in development studies – particularly for highly ‘sensitive’ topics such as conflict, gender-based violence - often fail to capture the agency of those most affected, and risk replication of unequal power dynamics and colonial tropes in the research process. This panel explores how practice-based, feminist, conflict- sensitive and transdisciplinary methodologies can challenge dominant paradigms and centre lived experiences, agency and creative capacities through a co-constructed approach.
We invite proposals for “engagements” – short presentations, participatory activities etc., that provoke creative responses and critical reflection on methodological approaches – particularly with regards to research around gender-based violence and conflict. This could include participatory, arts-led, decolonial, and community-led approaches or others that aim to deepen understanding of structural disadvantages but also promote agency in practice. The participants will critically examine if and how these methods disrupt extractive research practices, foster co-production, and contribute to more equitable development outcomes.
Key Questions:
• How do feminist, practice-based and transdisciplinary methods reframe our approach to research, including the meanings of central concepts like agency, power and disadvantage??
• What kind of reflections are necessary to modify research practices in order to enhance autonomy and collective action?
• What does a focus on ‘development outcomes’ mean in the context of transdisciplinary, practice-based and feminist methodologies?
Accepted contributions
Contribution short abstract
The proposed intervention reflects on the importance and impact of feminist, arts-based methodologies in carving out spaces for reflection, care and solidarity, in contexts marked by significant violence and insecurity.
Contribution long abstract
Mode of delivery: Reflective presentation
Contribution: Reflecting on ongoing research addressing racialised gender-based violence in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, our proposed intervention explores the importance and impact of feminist, arts-based methodologies in carving out spaces for reflection, care and solidarity, in contexts marked by significant violence and insecurity. We reflect on how a need to prioritise safety, collective wellbeing and respite for research participants involved convening creative workshops in places outside Esmeraldas province, and explore how this reconfigures the conditions of feminist knowledge production. This spatial and ethical intervention has enabled opportunities for calmness, connection and enjoyment, in turn centring the agency and creative capacities of the peer researchers and opening up possibilities for sensitively tackling the topic of gender-based violence. We explore the ways in which this reconfiguring of care, safety and autonomy requires a commitment to process over outcomes, and consider the implications of this for feminist knowledge co-production in and beyond the academy.
Contribution short abstract
White Bowls Lost Souls is an integrated feminist research and arts project on intimate partner femicide in Vietnam, combining media analysis, documentary film and heritage ceramics.
Contribution long abstract
Lost Souls White Bowls is an integrated research and arts project on femicide in Vietnam. It begins with a systematic media analysis of femicide between 2018 and 2024, identifying 346 reported cases, the first systematic study of femicide in Asia. The findings shape a documentary film, a performance and installation, co-created with bereaved alongside feminist researchers, feminist journalists, lawyers, and service providers.
The feminist orientation of the installation “a Bowl of Love” is enacted through material, procedural, and institutional decisions. White heritage ceramic rice bowls from Bat Trang reference women’s burdens of care through rice cultivation, domestic labour, and spiritual practice, including the use of bowls for incense and communication with the dead. At the entrance in the national Vietnamese women’s museum, a large bowl carries the 346 names in hand-painted lettering, sober, resistant to spectacle.
During two workshops, participants share pre- and post-murder impacts, glaze and carve their own bowl, and make clay shoulder and back impressions. The bowls are placed on a monumental oval table covered with Vietnamese handwoven tussah silk, signalling dignity, history, femininity, labour. Embroidered water rings mark collective responsibility and the continuation of lives after death.
A wall of weapons drawn directly from the dataset confronts viewers; at the exit they may place a modest white flower in an unglazed vase, as acknowledgement not festive closure.
The project connects with research and artistic practices on public secrets, including What We Carry Forward, an installation and performance with families bereaved by femicide in the Netherlands.
Contribution short abstract
CGIAR STIBs Learning Labs in flood-hit West Bengal disrupted agri-research via feminist gaze-shifting. Women farmers architected program design via transdisciplinary dialogues —from literacy to demand-driven collectives - challenging researchers to move beyond gender modules to program re-genesis.
Contribution long abstract
CGIAR GENDER's Learning Labs on Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles (STIBs) in West Bengal represent a deliberate feminist rupture in agricultural research – not through grand theory, but through the quiet insistence of women farmers who refuse to be mere data points. We convened Learning Labs with Scheduled Tribe and Caste women managing poultry, pigs, and goats amid annual prolonged flooding. These spaces disrupted the linear "researcher-to-farmer" pipeline, creating iterative "gaze-shifting" dialogues where women articulated programme models – from functional literacy as livelihood bedrock to demand-driven collectives that outstrip rote SHGs.
Our methodology was feminist because it centred women's dual gazes – the intimate (how trainings rewove household permissions into joint decisions) and the strategic (a blueprint demanding continuous market intel and shock-responsive veterinary care). Transdisciplinary because STIBs fused veterinary science with social network mapping, value chains, gender analysis, and flood-cycle calendars – refusing siloed expertise.
This approach surfaced "sensitive" truths that conventional metrics miss. Women described not just income gains (reinvested poultry earnings funding health check-ups) but eroded dependencies: selling without spousal nod, negotiating trader weights, pooling money for emergency medicines. The "small wins" across STIB causal pathways included gender-sensitized field staff enabling household workload sharing to ethno-vet trainings yielding lightning arrestors women now install independently.
These Labs model feminist disruption at intersections: caste-flood-climate-agency. They challenge researchers to move beyond "gender modules" to program re-genesis. This experience offers a grounded provocation: what if "sensitive" research isn't about protecting subjects, but unleashing their gaze to redesign the systems studying them?
Contribution short abstract
This contribution explores feminist, practice-based and somatic methods within a University of Greenwich project on GBV and food systems in Nigeria and Colombia. It proposes listening to the body as a way of knowing, remembering our connection to land, and challenging extractive research practices.
Contribution long abstract
This engagement draws on a transdisciplinary research collaboration with the University of Greenwich exploring gender-based violence and food systems in Nigeria and Colombia. It examines how feminist, practice-based and somatic methodologies can reframe research practices on GBV in conflict-affected development contexts.
Positioning the body not as an object of analysis but as a site of knowledge, memory and agency, the contribution proposes embodied listening as a methodological intervention in itself. Listening to the body is understood as both a trauma- and conflict-sensitive research practice and a way of re-membering relational connections to land, earth and food systems, relationships often obscured by colonial epistemologies and extractive development frameworks.
Through a short participatory somatic and reflective exercise, participants are invited to experience how attention to sensation, rhythm and relational presence can inform understandings of power, safety and agency in ways that challenge dominant research paradigms. This practice-based approach foregrounds reflexivity and co-construction, disrupting extractive tendencies in knowledge production while acknowledging the situated and embodied nature of research encounters.
The engagement critically examines how such methodologies complicate conventional notions of development “outcomes,” shifting emphasis from linear, measurable indicators towards relational, ethical and ecological forms of change. It contributes to debates on how feminist and transdisciplinary approaches can foster greater autonomy, accountability and collective action in research on gendered violence within complex, conflict-affected systems.