Join us for the launch event of the exhibition "DIGNITY AND RESISTANCE: Community pathways for resisting gendered urban violence in Rio de Janeiro and in London", which explores the multilayered, formal and informal initiatives built by women to create community agency and map individual and collective routes for resistance against gendered urban violence.

The event will include a round table led by Professor Cathy McIlwaine (Vice Dean for Research, Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Geography) sharing the findings of the research 'Resisting Violence, Creating Dignity: negotiating Violence Against Women and Girls through community history-making in Rio de Janeiro', developed collaboratively with grassroots organisation Redes da Maré, in partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, People's Palace Projects, Queen Mary University of London and Museum of the Person and is supported by the British Academy via the GCRF - Global Challenges Research Fund (Heritage, Dignity and Violence programme).

Julia Leal and Fernanda Vieira, both managers at the Women's House of Maré (Rio de Janeiro) will also be present the research alongside the research team.

Talk + Exhibition open will run from 6pm-8pm at The Exchange (Bush House - North West Wing57 Aldwych, London, England, WC2B 4PA).

About the exhibition

Exhibition runs from the 3rd to the 14th May.

The exhibition draws on the recent body of collaborative research led by Professor Cathy McIlwaine (Department of Geography, King’s College London) with a number of international and local partners, gathering evidence around the pathways that women living in peripheral communities in Brazil, and Brazilian migrants in London develop - consciously and unconsciously - to resist direct and indirect gender-based violence.

Although geographically and culturally focused on the Brazilian community, the interdisciplinary and multi-method approaches capture the many forms in which direct and indirect violence occur, and the ways they are embedded in women’s everyday lives yet stretching from the scale of the body to the global. When women are targeted by an unimaginable variety of forms of gendered urban violence, they are also agents of coping with this same violence - from individual small daily acts to collective and structural political actions.