The Immobilities of Gender-Based Violence in Lockdown: Devising Workshops to Support Women Who Experienced Gender-Based Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic to Tell and Share Their Stories

Authors: Mel Parks, Jessica Moriarty, Hannah Vincent

Abstract:

This article reports on a UK-wide, transdisciplinary project between creative writers and social scientists that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), exploring how storytelling workshops with women who experienced gender-based violence (GBV) in lockdown could be used to inform and change social and legal policies. The article is split into two sections: in the first, we give an outline of the project and how the creative workshops were devised, and in the second, we adopt a trioethnographic stance, enabling us to contextualise and present our dialogues that 1) reflect on our lived experience of devising the workshops and 2) draw on interview data with writers and artists who coled the project to make recommendations for workshop facilitation with people who have experienced GBV.