Join us for a talk innovative research methods capturing formal and informal resistance against gendered violence in Favelas da Maré, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), as part of the research 'Resisting Violence, Creating Dignity: negotiating Violence Against Women and Girls through community history-making in Rio de Janeiro'* is a multidisciplinary research project which maps the formal and informal, individual and collective pathways that women living in peripheral urban communities, develop in order to resist gendered urban violence.

Conversations will present findings on two specific research methods: body-territory maps and social technology memory.

The Body-Territory maps were inspired by Latin American indigenous women’s cosmologies which conceive bodies and territories as part of the same ontological continuum: Cuerpo-Território. These maps show how women (cis and trans) living in Maré embody feelings and emotions as effects of and responses to various forms of gendered urban violence. In the research it was led by Rosa Heimer, in partnership with the Women's House of Maré (Casa das Mulheres.

The methodology of Social Memory Technology was delivered in partnership with Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person), Brazil, creating a digital oral history archive, where ten women from Maré have shared not only their life stories but also how, throughout their lives and in different ways, they have turned creativity and the arts as a tool to challenge and resist violence and social vulnerabilities.

Professor Cathy McIlwaine (Vice Dean for Research, Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Geography) will be joined by Rosa Heimer (PhD student in the Department of Geography), Julia Leal and Fernanda Vieira, both managers at the Women's House of Maré (Rio de Janeiro), and Moniza Rizzini Ansari (Research Associate, Department of Geography)

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

This talk is part of the activities showcased as part 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.

About the exhibition

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.