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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.