Research Impact
- The Mapping Stigma and Resilience project facilitated a series of workshops in which women from intersectional backgrounds including diagnosed mental health issues, being of refugee status, and/or living with a disability, participated in a process designed to capture their embodied experiences of stigma, discrimination and resilience. Participants were guided to generate a drawn, life-sized outline of their body and then fill the outline during a creative and reflective process with the goal of representing felt experience or embodied subjectivity.
- The results of this process became the subject of three public exhibitions – two in NSW and one in Victoria – to share participants’ body maps and descriptions, which tell important stories about the very real impacts of discrimination and resilience.
- The workshop series was the subject of a 39-page catalogue which displayed participants’ body maps together with accompanying stories describing their diverse experiences.
- The body mapping workshops enabled collection of rich data, with research translation via the exhibitions and catalogue showcasing deeper insights into the participants’ experiences.
The Need/Challenge
In 2020, 12.6 million people identified as women in Australia. Twenty-two percent identified as experiencing a serious and persistent mental health disorder[1], and 17.3% recorded having a disability[2]. Between 2000 and 2020, at least 220,000 refugees arrived in Australia. Women with significant mental distress, disability, or refugee status are recognised as being among society’s most vulnerable and disenfranchised groups[3], and at higher levels of risk of experiencing significant social exclusion, sexual and gender-based violence, marginalisation and stigma.
Stigma and discrimination can have profound impacts on quality of life, health, employment and access to healthcare, while negative attitudes and experiences of rejection continue to affect the quality of life of marginalised women. This is associated with reduced help-seeking, deprivation of dignity and human rights, and threats to health and wellbeing.
Previous research has assessed the experiences of discrete groups of women but has not considered the intersections of mental health/refugee/disability, and the overlaps in experience. This has meant the complex needs of women affected by multiple disadvantages have been overlooked.
These experiences can be upsetting to talk about, and hard to describe, and typical research methods, such as filling out a survey or conducting an interview or focus group, often fail to capture such difficult-to-verbalise experiences.
Developing the solution
Adopting a creative approach to data generation, a national project team led by Professor Katherine Boydell of the Black Dog Institute/UNSW Sydney, and including Professor Angela Dew of Deakin’s Institute for Health Transformation’s Determinants of Health (DoH) domain to lead the Victorian data collection, established the Mapping Stigma and Resilience project.
The project’s overarching aim was to enrich society’s understanding regarding how women negotiate stigma and marginalisation to better inform health and social policy, and help to develop targeted interventions for women. Drawing on an intersectionality framework, the project aimed to address this gap by examining points of difference and commonalities in experiences of discrimination, stigma and resilience, and exploring the intersections of embodied subjectivity of women with significant mental distress, disability and/or refugee status.
Embodied subjectivity denotes the experience of living in, seeing and experiencing the world from the location of the subject’s own body, always in a social context constructed via interactions. Such complex experiences cannot be fully conveyed via textual data alone, with visual methodologies able to yield critical, engaging, reflexive media for researchers and participants and generate evidence that other methods cannot[1].
The Mapping Stigma and Resilience project used the arts-based qualitative method of body mapping to generate both visual and textual data, to capture women’s embodied experiences of stigma and marginalisation.
Aims included empowering participants to be agentic co-creators of knowledge in the research process; to host a knowledge translation forum with key stakeholders to synthesise and implement findings, and collaboratively develop strategies to address the needs of women impacted by significant mental distress, disability, and refugee status; and to gather public feedback from body mapping exhibitions, as evidence of the impact of arts-based knowledge translation strategies to communicate experiences of stigma, and to reduce stigmatising attitudes.
The project recruited 60 people identifying as women who were experiencing significant mental distress, living with disability, and/or from a refugee background, to attend a series of body mapping workshops.
Participants were guided to generate a drawn, life-sized outline of their body and then fill the outline during a creative and reflective process with the goal of representing felt experience or embodied subjectivity. This process empowered participants to express and symbolise emotions, and to represent stories about their experiences of the world, their lives, and their bodies via visual representation. The resulting image depicts their embodied experience at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalisation.
After maps were completed, participants were interviewed one-on-one, explaining their maps and the narratives, feelings, and ideas represented within them. Collectively, the interviews and body maps revealed much about the complex and diverse impacts of stigma, discrimination and resilience, and formed the data which the research team analysed in order to address the project’s aims.
Outcomes
Following a series of body mapping workshops, subsequent actions included facilitating three public exhibitions displaying a number of participants’ body maps. Two were held in NSW, at UNSW library and at Bowen Library in Randwick Sydney, while a third was hosted by the library at Deakin University’s Burwood Campus, running from August 2023 to the end of January 2024. During this time activities included a launch, an online panel discussion and a body mapping workshop run by Prof Dew, the Chief Investigator leading Victorian data collection on behalf of Deakin University.
The workshop series was also the subject of a 39-page catalogue, Mapping Stigma and Resilience[1] which displayed participant’s body maps together with accompanying stories exploring their diverse experiences including sexual assault, eating disorders, drug use, domestic and physical violence, abuse and discrimination along with examples of resilience.
The workshops were successful because they enabled collection of rich data, and participants also reported a high level of satisfaction with the process.
One key outcome was an increased awareness of the challenges that migrant women in particular can face in accessing health services. Assessment of the workshops and interviews generated further important findings:
- Stigma and discrimination exist on a spectrum ranging from subtle and casual to systemic and overt, with these experiences almost always resulting in self-stigma – internalised feelings of shame or disgust.
- Irrespective of where they fall on this spectrum, stigma and discrimination can have damaging impacts such as making people feel unable to seek help for their health; compounding their mental and physical health challenges; or preventing them leaving unsafe domestic situations.
- The experience of mental illness, disability, or a refugee background can result in women feeling both highly visible and also invisible, often at the same time.
- Participants wanted a more holistic or integrated approach to healthcare and support, having experienced healthcare and support services as fragmented because their physical health, mental health or socio-economic situation were seen as separate issues by clinicians or support workers.
- Words can have a profound impact, and using derogatory language, or saying things that minimise difficult experiences, or are patronising, can have a negative impact on emotions, mental wellbeing and feelings of self-worth.
- Participants were able to reflect on their own strength and resilience by sharing the ways they overcome and combat stigma and discrimination.
- They also noted beneficial effects associated with body mapping, including feelings of affirmation resulting from the opportunity to reflect on their experiences or personal history, and enjoyment derived from art-making in a safe, communal environment.
Project details
Project Time Period 2020 – 2023
Funding
Australia Research Council Discovery Project grant awarded to Chief Investigator, Professor Katherine Boydell
Research Leads
- Professor Katherine Boydell, Black Dog Institute/UNSW Sydney (Chief Investigator)
- Professor Angela Dew, Deakin University Determinants of Health (DoH)
Research team and collaborators
Professor Katherine Boydell, Professor Jill Bennett, Professor Angela Dew, Associate Professor Julia Lappin; Associate Professor Caroline Lenette, Professor Jane Ussher, Dr Priya Vaughan, Dr Ruth Wells
Partners and supporters
- Black Dog Institute (project lead)
- UNSW Sydney
More Information
https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/entities/publication/06153110-c928-433e-849c-a81a3028e9d6
https://www.deakin.edu.au/library/about/exhibitions-and-programs/exhibitions/mapping-stigma
[1] Australian Bureau of Statistics. Disability, Ageing and Carers Australia (No. 4430.0); Australian Bureau of Statistics: Canberra, Australia, 2018.
[2] Refugee Council of Australia. Refugee Resettlement to Australia: What the Statistics Tell Us. Available online: https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/refugee-resettlement-to-australia-what-the-statistics-tell-us/ (accessed on 12 June 2020).
[3] Australian Bureau of Statistics. National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing, (No. 4326.0); Australian Bureau of Statistics: Canberra, Australia, 2007.
[4] Pink, S. Applied Visual Anthropology: Social Intervention, Visual Methodologies and Anthropological Theory; Berghahn Books: London, UK, 2007. [Google Scholar]
[5] Priya Vaughan, Yamamah Agha, Jill Bennett, Alise Blayney, Angela Dew, Ainslee Hooper, Bronwen Iferd, Julia Lappin, Caroline Lenette, Cindy Lui, Apuk Maror, Jacqui McKim, Akii Ngo, Jane Ussher, Ruth Wells, Yassmen Yahya and Katherine Boydell (eds), 2023, Mapping Stigma and Resilience: Body maps created for the Women marginalised by mental health, disability, or refugee background project.
Sydney, Australia: Black Dog Institute.
