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Paper Short Abstract:

While presenting main findings from my PhD research, in which community groups consisting of Coventry-based women were asked to create joint collage artworks to represent human dignity, I reflect on the main lessons I have learned from the blending of arts-based and qualitative methods.

Paper Abstract:

Where is the place of innovative arts-based methodologies in anthropology? I have often asked this question while conducting my PhD research, in which I asked community groups consisting of Coventry-based women to create joint collage artworks. The aim of these was to represent human dignity and two of its related phenomena, vulnerability and respect, from participants’ perspective. My presentation highlights some of the most relevant findings from the work-in-progress PhD thesis, showing how participants in my research raised rather different concerns about human dignity than the ones present in literature. Instead of, for instance, pondering about the exact beginning or end of human life, or debating on legal and bioethical issues, women rather interpreted human life as a process, and discussed the three phenomena in relation to the various phases of human life. They made rather surprising connections between human dignity and food or drink choices, and raised important concerns, from violence against women to multiple identities and belonging. On the one hand, collage-making as an innovative arts-based method was a crucial component in getting to these findings, but on the other hand, supporting methods (participant observation, focus group and interview recording, autoethnography) have also been unavoidable in the process. The presentation ends with some general considerations about how the blending of arts-based and qualitative research might impact the future of anthropological fieldwork.