This chapter begins with compositions from the Brazilian women who are at the core of this book. Iraci de Rosa is a popular singer and songwriter who is registered with the Order of Musicians of Brazil. She writes about love, God and the Rio favela. Through her music, she describes her life in the favela and challenges the prevailing images that the word ‘favela’ conjures: scenes of endemic urban violence that incorrectly stereotype those who live there. Iraci participated in our digital storytelling project with the Museu da Pessoa in São Paulo. The poem above was written collectively by Brazilian migrant women, all of whom are survivors of gendered urban violence, as part of the We Still Fight in the Dark creative project with MinA. Their poem outlines the difficulties migrant women face as they develop a sense of belonging in a society that perpetrates structural and symbolic violence against them. This song and poem communicate many of the key aspects of the locations where the favelada and migrant Brazilian women included in the book speak from. While this research gives them voice through surveys, interviews and focus groups, we argue that it is the art forms which succinctly convey the realities of their lives. The aim of this chapter is to outline the epistemological and methodological approaches of the empirical research on which the book draws.

From mapping to resistance: translocational feminist tracing methodological framework

The empirical research has evolved between 2016 and 2023 across six projects as we have explored the experiences of gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in Maré in Rio de Janeiro. All the projects have been collaborations between universities (King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)), civil society partners (the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS), Redes da Maré, Migrants in Action (MinA) and the Latin America Bureau (LAB)), arts organisations (People’s Palace Projects (PPP), the CASA Latin American Theatre Festival and the Museu da Pessoa) and individual artists (Bia Lessa and Gaël Le Cornec). Since 2016, the research has become a body of collaborative and interdisciplinary work rather than a one-off research project. The projects have included questionnaire surveys, interviews and focus group discussions with more than 1,200 women, together with a range of creative outputs (Table 2.1; also Appendix 1). The majority of these women were cisgender, although in London, one transgender woman was interviewed and in Rio de Janeiro, five. In addition, three transgender women were included in the body-mapping workshops. Questions on gender identity or sexual orientation were not included in the surveys in either city.

All of the projects addressed gendered urban violence against women, but with different emphases. The original research project entailed a transnational analysis of the nature and causes of gender-based violence among Brazilian migrants in London and favela residents in Maré, Rio de Janeiro, and aimed to map reporting and support for survivors (Projects A and B, Table 2.1). The Step Up Migrant Women (SUMW) project with the LAWRS included migrant women from twenty-two different countries, five of whom were Brazilian, and represented a shift towards capturing women’s responses to gender-based violence through campaigning (Project C, Table 2.1). This move towards identifying women as agents resisting gendered violence was the focus of subsequent projects in Rio de Janeiro and in London (Projects D and E, Table 2.1). The most recent iteration of the research has brought the various strands of the work together to reflect on what has been learned, in part through developing a transnational exchange programme between the LAWRS and Redes da Maré (through Casa das Mulheres) involving visits and identification of key areas of mutual learning together with two Photovoice projects (Project F, Table 2.1; see also Appendix 1).

A translocational feminist theoretical approach influenced the methodological and epistemological perspectives of the research. The starting point was that gendered urban violence is always localised and embodied and so must be situated and understood within the spaces and places where it occurs. Yet, the research acknowledged that gendered urban violence is also part of wider translocational processes and that to truly comprehend the realities of violence, these global urban relations need to be studied from their grounding within the local. We were able to capture these processes given that we were working in two cities linked through transnational migration and ‘translocal fields of power’ (Ong, 1999). Without engaging in ongoing debates around comparative urbanism and the role of comparison in thinking about cities (Robinson, 2011), we draw on and adapt some recent conceptualisations around the notion of ‘tracing’ as a process for comparing and connecting cities (Wood, 2020, 2022). Here, ‘tracing’ refers to ‘pathways through which ideas, innovations and impressions flow’ (Wood, 2022: 1751) that are attentive to the specificities and subjectivities of the urban. In thinking across two cities as interlinked, we have developed a ‘translocational feminist tracing’ methodological approach based on transnational dialogue around the tools that make sense for each urban context and the research as a whole. Rooted in a feminist epistemological approach and drawing from decolonial feminist thinking (Alvarez et al., 2014; Smith, 1999), these tracings have also spoken across disciplines through combining social science and creative and arts-based methods, as well as generating transnational mutual learning across borders and beyond the academy. Our approach also incorporates methods that are relevant to policy and are co-produced and collaborative, following Parnell and Pieterse’s (2016: 236) ‘translational urban research praxis’.

We have developed our ‘translocational feminist tracing’ approach through transnational praxis that has strengthened gradually as we have learned from what works and what does not (Jenkins et al., 2020). Indeed, many aspects of our failures revolve around co-production, itself developed through more than two decades of participatory research approaches (Moser and McIlwaine, 1999). In essence, co-production refers to the collective production of research aims and objectives, addressing issues most relevant to non-academic co-producers with a view to developing more equitable relationships within the research process from design through to dissemination (Bell and Pahl, 2018). Establishing co-inquiry is challenging and ultimately ‘utopian’ in nature given that overcoming inherent power relations among researchers is extremely difficult (Zielke et al., 2023). When researching gendered urban violence and the associated pains that this entails, it is useful to engender empathetic, transformative approaches to understand and resist such violence (Bondi, 2003). In turn, challenging extractive approaches and foregrounding women’s voices through an ethics of care are also key (Askins, 2018). This is especially important when researching the lives of those actively marginalised (hooks, 1990), like migrants and those residing in favelas. Indeed, in relation to Rio de Janeiro, Scott (2021) challenges academic extractivism by foreign researchers in the favelas and argues for developing and acknowledging the capacity of those from these territories who are often university-educated. He suggests a ‘paradigmatic shift from studying a favela na universidade (studying the favela in the university) to building a universidade na favela (the university in the favela)’ as a way to disrupt legacies of academic authority and be more collaborative (Scott, 2021: 490). Central to this is working beyond the social sciences with artistic methods and through a range of translations: literally (between English and Portuguese) and epistemologically, through a more co-produced approach.

Creative translation pathways: engaging arts-based methods

As also noted in the introduction and Chapter 1, a key element of our translocational approach has been to work with creative methods and encounters, developed through ‘creative translation pathways’ (McIlwaine, 2024). These pathways reflected a range of interpretative framings around how engagements with artists and artistic methods have different epistemological logics. While overlapping, there were two main types of pathways. The first focuses on a curatorial perspective where the artist(s) interpret research through their eyes and communicate this to wide and diverse audiences, thus depending on their own and the audience’s understanding of gendered urban violence. SCAR, Efêmera and Ana fall within this pathway. The second is more co-produced and participatory. Here, research participants develop artistic outputs with artists for a range of audiences, creating reflective spaces aiming to enhance wellbeing. MinA’s work on We Still Fight in the Dark reflects this pathway. The Museu da Pessoa’s digital storytelling is a combination of these pathways, given the focus on women artists from the territory whose narratives were curated (see Table 2.1; Appendix 1).

Underlying these creative translation pathways are debates around the value of using arts-based methods in addressing social science challenges and specifically gendered violence. These focus on the benefits of creative work including the visceral, sensory and provocative powers of communicating in embodied ways, as well as the ethical advantages of participatory approaches (Leavy, 2017), especially when working with those in vulnerable situations (Keifer-Boyd, 2011). Indeed, arts-based approaches are often regarded as having transformative potential, offering a way for participants to address social injustices. They are also understood to have wider impact through influencing policy and/or audiences (Coemans and Hannes, 2017). Yet, there are also drawbacks, including the challenges of bringing about significant structural change and the possibility of artists creating problematic representations from a curatorial perspective. These might arise from lack of alignment and/or collaboration among researchers, artists and research participants, especially where the narrative and dramatic effect may be deemed more important than the honesty to the research (Jeffery et al., 2019). This can result in ‘uneasy translations’ (Johnstone and Pratt, 2020) relating to concerns including over- or under-emphasising certain issues; in the case of gendered violence, these may entail reinforcing damaging representations of pain and suffering and a colonial gaze that reproduces violence (Tuck, 2009). Yet, such approaches may do the opposite in allowing women’s voices to be heard without re-traumatising them (Pain and Cahill, 2022). Ultimately, the effects of creative translations depend on the type of artistic work developed in terms of visual arts, embodied performance, literary engagements, music, sound, movement and so on (Rose, 2016).

We as authors have taken a dramaturgical role at various points in the research. We have been what Bleeker (2003: 163) notes as ‘external eye, the first audience, the observer at a distance, or even the critic’, while also collaborating through ‘both closeness and distance, both similarity and difference’. In considering a dramaturgical lens for understanding the relationships between the social science research and the artistic engagements, we draw on Barba’s (1985) notion of ‘weaving’. This relates to analysis beyond the performance to include the overall framing, the context and background (the research) and dialogues with audiences, here recalling Boal’s forum theatre approach (Boal, 1979). It also reflects recent moves to adapt dramaturgy in different contexts such as workshops as part of the performance of international development (Shutt et al., 2023) and in classroom teaching (Bakke and Lindstøl, 2021).

Specifically in Latin America, artistic expression as a political tool has a long history. In Brazil, Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal have pioneered ways to develop alternative forms of education and the arts to build social transformation (Boal, 1979; Heritage, 1994). The work of PPP has been integral to raising awareness of Freire and Boal with a global audience (Heritage and Steffen, 2022). They have also long argued for recognising the potential of artistic engagements to support residents of peripheral territories, as Heritage (2018a: 31) notes in regard to Maré:

There is increasing acknowledgement that creating art in the peripheries challenges perceptions of what art is and who produces it. It also ensures visibility for residents of marginalised spaces, allowing them to exercise their agency (Moura and Cerdeira, 2021).

Mapping gendered urban violence in Maré and London

The first project in stage one focused on mapping gender-based violence in London and Rio de Janeiro through collaborations with different universities and civil society organisations. It was collaborative in that we worked with our civil society partner organisations, Redes da Maré in Rio de Janeiro and the LAWRS in London, to identify the issues around gender-based violence that were of most importance to them as service providers. We collaboratively developed a series of tools: a questionnaire survey and a series of interview and focus group questions, with the aim of addressing the same broad questions in each locality. The survey was adapted from the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (2014) questionnaire on gender-based violence addressing the types, frequency and spaces where gender-based violence occurred, identification of the perpetrators and the nature of reporting. While the survey was translated into Portuguese and adapted for both the UK and Brazilian contexts, the use of an EU survey is arguably not appropriate. While the logic was to think about comparing the findings in other contexts, with hindsight, adapting a European survey could be problematic given its ethnocentric perspective. In Maré, the survey was conducted by five field researchers working for Redes da Maré, in person, with a total of 801 participants and was overseen by Sousa Silva and Krenzinger. In London, it was undertaken online by a total of 175 participants and run by Evans. This produced different types of outcomes: notably, the UK survey overestimated participants’ access to the internet and, as a result, online participants tended to be more educated and work in formal occupations compared to those interviewed in person (Krenzinger et al., 2018a; McIlwaine et al., 2020; McIlwaine and Evans, 2018, 2023).

In both contexts, the interviews and focus groups were conducted by a combination of fieldworkers from the organisations and academic researchers. In Maré, five fieldworkers conducted the twenty interviews with a range of women, including two transgender women, together with seven focus groups with a total of fifty-nine people (fifty-two women and seven men) within themed groups, including older women, female members of local religious organisations, LGBTQI+ people, drug users and community activists, with inputs from Krenzinger, Sousa Silva, Heritage and others from the UFRJ team. In London, Evans and one fieldworker conducted twenty-five interviews with women (twenty who had used the services of the LAWRS and five who had not), with Evans carrying out five focus groups with six men and nine women with inputs from McIlwaine. Each team then analysed and wrote up reports that outlined the main findings (translated into Portuguese and English) (Krenzinger et al., 2018b; McIlwaine and Evans, 2018). These were complemented by a series of interviews – with twelve service providers in London and fourteen organisations in Rio de Janeiro – that explored the ways in which state and non-state organisations supported women survivors of violence (Evans and McIlwaine, 2017; Morgado et al., 2018).

The aim of the first project was to centre women’s voices and experiences of gender-based violence through various forms of mapping. However, as noted in the introduction, there are dangers in ‘giving voice’ to those on the so-called margins and emphasising narratives of pain without acknowledging agency and resistance. It was always our intention to visibilise women’s experiences through telling their ‘painful truths’ as a feminist and political act, especially those whose voices have been muted. However, we also reflected on the implications of this, prompted through the creative engagements and artistic encounters.

In Maré, our key collaborators, Redes da Maré, had a history of ongoing work with Heritage and PPP. Therefore, relations of trust were already established, which is crucial when working in peripheral territories where conducting fieldwork must be carefully negotiated given high levels of urban violence. In turn, Sousa Silva (Redes da Maré) already worked closely with Krenzinger and her team from the UFRJ, who had developed an initiative with her social work students in Redes da Maré to provide weekly legal support services. Our research on gendered violence fortuitously coincided with the creation of Casa das Mulheres da Maré in 2016, a space created by Redes da Maré to encourage women in the territory to become protagonists and to address and improve their living conditions. The core aim of the Casa das Mulheres da Maré was to recognise the historical role of women in the emergence of social movements and struggles for infrastructure in Maré since the 1980s. According to Casa das Mulheres, the research provided an essential foundation for understanding women’s lives in the territory in general and in relation to gendered urban violence. Indeed, one of the reasons for conducting a survey with 801 women based on random sampling in fifteen of the sixteen favelas that make up Maré was to build up a picture of their lives. This also helped Casa das Mulheres to develop as an organisation. One of the field researchers, herself a Maré resident, noted:

As an organisation, Casa das Mulheres noted the importance of the research: ‘carrying out the research and systematising it is the first public step we are taking to develop strategies for tackling the many problems that our work has mapped out, and to signal that solutions are urgently needed’ (Casa das Mulheres, 2019: 4). Working in collaboration with Casa das Mulheres (and Redes da Maré), who were trusted in the territory, facilitated the research process, especially given the sensitive issues being discussed. Indeed, while the survey was conducted on a house-to-house basis, the interviews were conducted on the premises of Casa das Mulheres where counsellors were available to support if necessary.

Similar processes occurred in London where our partners the LAWRS noted the importance of mapping the situation of Brazilian migrant women experiencing gender-based violence. This work drew on a long history of co-production and collaboration between McIlwaine and the LAWRS with the aim of raising awareness of the Latin American/Latinx community in the city and the UK more broadly (McIlwaine and Bunge, 2016; McIlwaine et al., 2011). The prior research and sustained engagement with this group helped establish trust, which was crucial in facilitating the subsequent work on gender-based violence (Jiménez-Yáñez and McIlwaine, 2021). This relationship meant that research participants could speak about intimate aspects of their experiences of violence, which was especially significant when women had insecure immigration status. As in Maré, the majority of the interviews were conducted on LAWRS premises alongside a researcher trusted by the women and with a trained counsellor on hand in case women required support.

The work with Brazilian migrant women also influenced and overlapped with the SUMW campaign established by the LAWRS in 2018 and developed in collaboration with over sixty organisations from the women and migrant sectors. McIlwaine worked with SUMW to provide an evidence base on migrant women’s experiences of gender-based violence when they had insecure immigration status. This was linked with SUMW’s wider lobbying of Parliament regarding the Domestic Abuse Bill (now the Domestic Abuse Act 2021) around the rights of migrant women as well as their ongoing campaigning for the police and other state bodies to prevent data on immigration status being shared with border agencies. The research entailed a questionnaire survey with fifty migrant women (two of whom were Brazilian) and interviews with ten migrant women (three of whom were Brazilian), all of which are included here (McIlwaine et al., 2019; see below). This mapping was published as a report titled The Right to Be Believed and used in raising awareness of migrant women’s lives. The research has been cited in numerous submissions to Parliament (Joint Submission to the Domestic Abuse Bill Committee 2020; Submission on Amendment 140 – Victims of Domestic Abuse: Data-Sharing for Immigration Purposes to the Nationality and Borders Bill 2022)¹ and by international organisations such as Human Rights Watch 2022.²

While not inherently participatory, these projects have given Brazilian migrants and those from the urban peripheries some voice, recalling Valentina’s words around the need to uncover the ‘painful truths’ which opened this book. The Director of the LAWRS has repeatedly noted that both research projects are the only available data providing information about the lives of these women. Similarly, the coordinator of the Casa das Mulheres da Maré has commented on how the research was central to the establishment of the organisation, especially the various projects they run such as their cooperative cooking project, Maré de Sabores (Flavours of Maré). The mapping in both places has provided the foundations for subsequent research that has focused on resistance and co-production. Before turning to discuss this, we outline how the research in London and Rio de Janeiro was interpreted through creative translations.

Curating gendered urban violence research through creative translations in Maré and London

The mapping of women’s experiences of gendered urban violence was explored artistically through several forms of critical curatorial processes and practices. As noted above, this entailed creating SCAR by Bia Lessa with PPP, based on the Maré research, and Efêmera and Ana by Gaël Le Cornec in London, the former with CASA Latin American Theatre Festival. The aim was to develop artwork that could communicate these experiences to wide audiences in the form of a creative product rather than a participatory and/or therapeutic piece with research participants.

Addressing SCAR first, Bia Lessa was commissioned by PPP and Redes da Maré to respond creatively to the research from Maré with inputs from Paul Heritage, Eliana Sousa Silva and Miriam Krenzinger. This resulted in a multimedia installation staged at the Women of the World (WOW) Festival at London’s Southbank Centre over three days in March 2018. The aim was to create a piece of art which centred the twenty testimonies from the interviews as well as acknowledged the survey and focus groups. Initially, the proposal was to develop a theatrical performance based on verbatim theatre techniques using the exact words, speech patterns and ‘raw’ personal perspectives of those interviewed. However, once Bia Lessa read the women’s testimonies, she was very keen to reduce the barriers between the women and the audience – which would emerge if their words were spoken by actors. She then turned to the video files initially made to facilitate the interview transcription process. In conversations with Paul and Miriam, Bia noted that the research was written on the faces of the women, in their gestures, in their voices. She thus proposed to use the videos to create a multimedia installation rather than a theatrical performance as a way to create an innovative narrative that would allow the women to tell their own stories. The participants were contacted for permission to use the videos. Miriam commented that ‘We did not want to cut them but wanted to include them in their entirety’ (Heritage, 2018b: 154). Bia was also keen to understand how the audience would hear these narratives, and so we hired a British writer, Chrissie Tiller, to act in the space between the public and the installation. She assessed the impact on the audience from within the installation, saying: ‘I am here in this space as audience and evaluator … living and responding to the work personally, while seeking to capture the experience of others in relation to the work’ (Tiller, 2018: 4).

The installation, a box-like structure that appears to be made from newspapers, was constructed within London’s Southbank Centre. The structure aimed to evoke living in the favelas of Maré, reflecting the precarity of its buildings and of the favela more widely. It also aimed to highlight constant media reports about the interpersonal and state violence of living there. There was a bed or ‘city of nails’ outside the structure with the word ‘survival’ written into the nails, suggesting that there is both optimism and resignation in the favelas. Inside the box, there were piles of newspapers for people to sit and watch the videos of women retelling their stories to an invisible interviewer. Their words were translated and projected on to the walls and the text, images and voices overlapped, although the women spoke in Portuguese without subtitles (Figure 2.1). As Tiller (2018: 4–5) notes:

Figure 2.1Inside SCAR at the WOW Festival (credit: André Camara)

Entry to the box was through a black curtain via a vestibule. Objects chosen by the women as important were hung on the vestibule walls including a china cup, a plate, a set of baby clothes and a handbag. There was also an image of Christ as Sacred Heart, signifying suffering and hope (Figure 2.2). Two of the women who participated in the research visited London from Maré and attended the event. They spoke about the objects they had contributed; one brought a handbag which ‘symbolised a division of the waters for me’ in her life as a trans woman. The other noted: ‘I chose the first clothes I bought for my daughter when, after a whole period of abuse, I separated from my husband’. According to Miriam, these objects are ‘a symbol or story of a moment of empowerment – not of the abuse’ (Tiller, 2018: 10).

Figure 2.2Entry vestibule to SCAR at the WOW Festival (credit: André Camara)

A core idea of the installation was to reveal the ‘painful truths’ of the violence that women live through in Maré. It aimed to provide an opportunity for the women to speak about their lives and to be believed. Chrissie recounted the first conversation she had as she left the SCAR space with a young Black woman:

Raising awareness was an essential element of the installation, as one audience member noted:

SCAR was designed to influence audiences and to develop a dialogue. Not only was Chrissie Tiller speaking to people and recording their views but the audience was also encouraged to leave messages on Post-it notes near the structure. As Paul Heritage (2018b: 154) notes:

The responses to SCAR reflect the power of the installation in bringing women’s voices about gendered violence, both direct and indirect, to London. A conversation between the women in the artwork and the audience emerged as a transnational, translocational feminist connection. The particularities of the women’s experiences were key to the work, as noted by one audience member: ‘This [installation] is strong and has opened my eyes, giving us a perspective on the dangerous conditions women in Brazil still experience’. Yet, it also spoke more widely around shared pain, with many reacting to the work as a piece ‘about the suffering experienced by women all over the world’. Bia Lessa was able to curate and translate, figuratively and creatively, the power of the voices and faces of women from Maré through SCAR, as one viewer commented: ‘the artist brought visibility to the women, to the stories’. According to Paul:

On a final note in relation to consent, the film that is integral to the installation was shown in Maré prior to the WOW Festival in 2018 and included the women interviewed in the audience. At this stage, they were happy and indeed proud with the result. Later in 2018, the video from the installation was shown at the UFRJ at an event with some of the research participants present. After this, the women began to feel uncomfortable and subsequently withdrew their consent. As a result, the installation has not been staged again.

A curatorial, verbatim creative translation was also developed by Gaël Le Cornec: in the theatre play Efêmera, based on the London research, and the short film Ana, which draws on the play. Gaël, a Brazilian writer, director and actor, was commissioned by CASA Latin American Theatre Festival (another partner in the first research project) to develop a play in 2017. Together with her creative team (actor Rosie MacPherson and assistant director Angie Peña Arenas), Gaël created the text through reading interview transcripts and a draft report of our key findings. In relation to process, Gaël has reflected on how she ‘wanted the idea to come from the source material … I guess I wanted to be faithful to the material and trust I’d find the shape of the artistic outcome during rehearsals’. The story evolved into an interview between a Brazilian woman survivor (Ana) and a British documentary filmmaker (Joanne), with Ana becoming what Gaël called ‘a symbolic figure and a vector for all these stories’. She also spoke of her vision for the play: ‘To push the boundaries of what a verbatim play could be, I wanted to see if I could somehow shift between the real and fictional realms … as long as you respect those real words, then you can push the boundaries’ (Le Cornec in Stevens, 2021: 188).

Again, the idea was to foreground the ‘painful truths’ of Brazilian migrant women whose voices have been silenced and to tell a wider audience about the challenges they face in London. However, Gaël decided to use another metatheatrical layer. She and Rosie performed as themselves, discussing their own experiences of gender-based violence with a view to highlight how women everywhere suffered such abuse. The play therefore became only loosely verbatim. On one hand, it used many passages from the interview transcripts, spoken by Ana (in Portuguese and English). For example, one scene where Ana describes what happens when she arrives at the airport in London is almost verbatim: ‘After three hours of interviewing, they let me go to get my luggage. An English immigration officer accompanied me. Inside the elevator, he looked at me up and down then said: “wow you’ve got cute breasts, can I touch them?”’. Yet on the other hand, the introduction of new characters in the form of Gaël and Rosie led to an ‘uneasy translation’ (Johnstone and Pratt, 2020) because it diverted the focus from the testimonies of the women in the research towards the artists. Having said this, the play shielded the original research participants from scrutiny and also depicted verbal and physical violence on stage through what Gaël noted as ‘a surreal choreography between me and Rosie’ (Figure 2.3). This was especially effective at communicating the embodied brutality of gender-based violence.

Figure 2.3On-stage violence in Efêmera by Gaël Le Cornec (credit: Luciana Whitaker Aikins)

Efêmera was performed in both the UK and Brazil in 2017 and 2018 – at the Southwark Playhouse in London, at the Maré Casa de Bellas Artes, at a theatre festival at Sede das Cias in Rio de Janeiro and at the Brighton Fringe Festival, where they played eight shows in total. In London, the play was mainly staged in English, with some Portuguese, while in Rio de Janeiro, it was performed in Portuguese with simultaneous translation into English. Unlike SCAR, the aim of Efêmera was not audience engagement and dialogue. However, post-show discussions and feedback cards elicited important responses to the performance and Gaël noted that people approached her after all the shows to share their own ‘painful truths’ of violence. The reactions to Efêmera revolved around the power of the play to evoke emotion, as noted by one audience member in Brighton: ‘This needs to be seen, to be heard, to be felt. Because, in a way, everyone needs to know this hurt, to feel this pain, until nobody does’. Many also made links between the UK and Brazil: ‘Love how it connected Brazil and England – made the issue of abuse and violence toward women more of a global problem’ (see also McIlwaine et al., 2021b McIlwaine, 2022).

The end of the play depicts a resolution of sorts for Gaël and Rosie and for Ana and Joanne; Gaël agrees to be interviewed by Rosie as herself and not as Ana. The final words of the play reflect the importance of revealing the ‘painful truths’ of gender-based violence:

There is a sense of hope and urgency to bring about transformation which Gaël views as part of her activism: ‘For me as an artist, my work is always about creating awareness. Art can pressure to make change happen and support the change’ (Le Cornec in Stevens, 2021: 191–92).

This sentiment was at the root of the creation of two films of Efêmera. The first was a viral video, Raising Awareness of Violence against Brazilian Women in London, commissioned by PPP. This used filmed excerpts from the play interspersed with key findings and recommendations from the research and animation. The second was a short film, Ana, created by Gaël and Rosie focusing only on the characters of Ana and Joanne. Ana found a wider audience at several international film festivals: the Davis Feminist Film Festival and the NYC Directed by Women Festival (US), the Vox Feminae Festival (Croatia), the WOW Festival (Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia) and the Kautik Festival (India), where it won several awards (Figure 2.4).³ Gaël also created a sound piece for McIlwaine’s work with the LAWRS based on the report The Right to Be Believed (see above). Based on an artist’s residency funded and supported by the King’s Visual and Embodied Methodologies (VEM) network, and also made from a curatorial perspective, Believe told the stories of three migrant women included in the research who were unable to secure support when they experienced violence because of their insecure status. Their stories were voiced by actors to protect the women. Importantly, this sound piece has been used by the LAWRS and SUMW in training about the realities faced by these women in the UK.⁴

Figure 2.4Film poster for Ana by Gaël Le Cornec (credit: Eloise Carles)

The ideas around women’s protagonism, resilience and resistance to gendered urban violence emerged more forcefully in the creative work than in the surveys and interviews in the cases of both SCAR and Efêmera and Ana. This explicitly led to a subsequent phase of the research that focused on this more closely.

Resisting gendered urban violence through co-production in Maré

In its second stage, the research shifted from mapping gendered urban violence towards exploring how it could be resisted. In Maré, this entailed examining how resistance and dignity could be built through community history-making, again with Redes da Maré (Casa das Mulheres) and the UFRJ, and with new partners, Museu da Pessoa (Table 2.1). While the subject matter shifted towards exploring resistance practices, the methodological and epistemological approaches became more co-produced. There is real value in both contexts in developing long-term sustainable engagements that evolve over time rather than using an extractive model. While the first stage of the research was collaborative and actively valued the local partners, field researchers and views of research participants, there was a sense of discomfort at times in that we could have been more democratic in how we organised the work between partners. In part, this was initially because we felt we needed to be very careful in researching gender-based violence given the sensitivities involved and thought that distance might be better. However, in the second stage, we realised that this was not the case.

In Maré, our research sought to analyse practices of resistance created by women throughout their lives, reflecting a collective memory of struggle. Our stance from the beginning was that all participants and field researchers were protagonists of the knowledge they shared. Yet, we were also careful not to objectify favelas, nor to romanticise the way women coped with gendered urban violence. While we fully acknowledged that the funding for the research came from the UK and that this created hierarchical power relations in the process, we designed the work together through an effective transnational partnership that remains ongoing (dependent on funding). We sought collective decision-making, consensus-building and acknowledgement of each partner as a co-author of the knowledge production process. We developed our translocational feminist epistemological approach, valuing collective processes, spaces of care and affects from an intersectional and anti-racist perspective.

The field research started in 2020 and was organised transnationally between the Brazil-based team at Casa das Mulheres da Maré and the UK-based team at PPP and King’s College London. Miriam from the UFRJ and Eliana from Redes da Maré provided strategic advice throughout. The fieldwork consisted of five phases: in-depth interviews with thirty-two women and five focus groups with women from Maré (McIlwaine et al., 2022c); filmed oral history biographic interviews with ten artists from Maré, working with the Museu da Pessoa’s methodology of social memory technology (McIlwaine et al., 2022a); five body-mapping workshops with ten women (Lopes Heimer et al., 2022); participatory geographic information system (GIS) mapping through storymapping (McIlwaine et al., 2023b);⁵ and nine interviews with women working on two initiatives organised after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic: the Women’s Support Network of Maré (RAMM) and the Maré Says No to Coronavirus campaign (McIlwaine et al., 2022c). The latter informed the participatory territory-mapping and GIS storymap (see Table 2.1; Appendix 1).

This research was not simply outsourced to those on the frontline in Maré while the foreign and academic institutions remained distant. Instead, a space for collective reflection was established among the early-career researchers in both teams led by Moniza Rizzini Ansari. On a weekly basis, they held online debrief meetings where they shared difficult stories and interpretations of the interviews to collectively explore nuances and subtleties. Gradually, the weekly debrief space that began without much planning became ever more important as a space of power, where decisions were taken and narratives about the research produced. This routine of reflections produced collective knowledge that later served as the basis for a theoretical production. This process of co-production resulted not only in the valorisation of the field team but also defined new research paths that made sense to the Maré women. It was more centred on their power and agency, and the autonomy of the Maré team was ensured at all times (Rizzini Ansari et al., 2023).

The empathetic and co-produced approach among the teams extended to individual and group interactions among participants, which spontaneously developed therapeutic dimensions. One interviewee, Angela, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two who was mixed race/parda, spoke of the importance of crying and protecting her children from the abuse she suffered:

Participants in focus groups shared their testimonials with trusted facilitators and other members of their group, and often reflected on how empowering the experience was in producing feelings of trust and building affective networks of mutual support, as reported by one woman:

Many women, during and after the activities, expressed appreciation and a desire to repeat the meeting on a regular basis (see Figure 2.5). Given the role of Casa das Mulheres in the community, this became possible for many who have continued to engage in various ways, either through accessing services or participating in projects. Being heard and refusing to be silenced emerged as an important therapeutic factor, as another woman from a focus group stated: ‘I think it helps a lot, just the fact that we are here today, that someone listens to what the other has to say, already makes everything lighter, makes you want to face the world, gives you the feeling that you will be able to face the world’.

Figure 2.5Observational drawing from a focus group with six women (credit: Mila de Choch; adapted from McIlwaine et al., 2022c)

The two main field researchers, Julia Leal and Fernanda Vieira, kept field diaries, and in 2020, Fernanda identified this issue of silence in her reflections as being linked to the wider conditions of exclusion and endemic urban violence in Maré:

While the COVID-19 pandemic caused a halt in the research process for several months in 2020, we continued our transnational online meetings throughout, not least because the staff at Casa das Mulheres did not stop working there. Indeed, the majority of the interviews and all of the focus groups took place in person at Casa das Mulheres, with free COVID-19 testing available on site. The pandemic also strengthened the autonomy of the Brazil team in positive ways. Not only did they control and decide on levels of risk, but they also decided to include women’s responses to the pandemic within the research process. This was done through interviews with participants involved with the Redes da Maré campaign, Maré Says No to Coronovirus, which involved territorial actions such as delivery of food baskets to families in situations of social vulnerability and sewing face masks. In addition, interviews were conducted with the RAMM that began in May 2020 following an initiative by Fight for Peace, a local civil society organisation. The RAMM is a collaborative network developed among women’s support services due to concern about a potential increase in domestic violence related to social isolation (McIlwaine et al., 2022c, 2023a).

Resisting gendered urban violence through arts-based methods in Maré

The second phase of the research in Maré entailed using arts-based methods with research participants. This was distinctive from the curatorial approach identified above and focused mainly on co-produced engagements with research participants to produce knowledge revolving around visual and embodied methodologies. Here, we discuss observational drawings/sketching body-territory mapping and GIS counter-mapping and digital storytelling using social memory technology.

Starting with observational drawings, this approach was the least participatory of all the methods we developed. Reflecting wider shifts towards using drawing methods as part of a visual methods repertoire, this is often developed with participants (Antona, 2019). However, more recently, collaborations with artists have become popular (Heath et al., 2018). We decided to use in situ observational drawing as part of the focus groups, working with artist Mila de Choch. She sat in on four of the five focus groups to capture the nuance of the discussions, incorporating participants’ oral and body language in her drawings (see Figure 2.5). These were shared with the women after the event and became a key part of our Dignity and Resistance exhibition in London and are being permanently exhibited at Casa das Mulheres da Maré (McIlwaine et al., 2022b).

Another key creative method that we used was ‘body-territory mapping’, which was inherently visual, embodied and participatory. This was part of a wider effort within the research to develop counter-mapping initiatives. This approach draws on research and debates that aim to develop counter-hegemonic narratives about the history and territorial distribution of a community based on knowledge produced by residents (McIlwaine et al., 2023b). In Maré, we developed body-territory mapping led by Rosa Heimer, who had previously used this method in the context of Latin American migrants in the UK (Lopes Heimer, 2021, 2022, 2023). In brief, this methodology draws on communitarian Latin American feminist ideas around Territorio Cuerpo-Tierra (Body-Earth Territory) or Cuerpo-Territorio (Body-Territory) emerging from Maya-Xinka Indigenous women in Guatemala and is central to the political project of community feminists as well as territorial feminisms in Latin America (Cabnal, 2010). This approach has been further developed by various Latin American feminist collectives, who highlight its transformative and decolonial potential in emphasising processes of embodiment (Lopes Heimer, 2021, 2022; Zaragocín and Caretta, 2021). As in other stages of the research in Maré, the design and facilitation of the body-territory mapping involved a transnational online collaboration (the method was introduced through a video made by London-based Rosa Heimer and facilitated by the Brazil team – Andreza Dionísio, Fernanda Vieira and Natalia Trindade, overseen by Julia Leal).⁶ In the body-territory mapping sessions, two women per group traced an outline around the other’s body (true to size) and then each woman annotated her own map to reflect how gendered violence and resistance was inscribed on her body and was embodied by her. The women also drew territorial maps on paper and were asked to identify places that they considered to be associated with violence, risk and/or fear, as well as potency or power (see Figure 2.6). The base map for this activity was an outline drawing of Maré that the workshop facilitator had tattooed on her arm. Lopes Heimer et al. (2022: 9) described how ‘she herself carries this territory in her body, as a form of community self-affirmation’.

Figure 2.6Body-territory map by Lívia (cis, preta, lesbian woman living in Morro do Timbau, thirty-six years old) (adapted from Lopes Heimer et al., 2022)

Again, these activities emerged as spaces for the research participants to reflect collectively. For example, Neide, a parda trans woman, noted: ‘We don’t realise how many things have happened and today, here we were realising, looking at how much we suffered, how much we fought and struggled … and we are still resisting today’. Lívia, whose body map is shown in Figure 2.6, spoke of the therapeutic nature of the process, asking to keep her map afterwards as she felt it was a source of self-knowledge:

The counter-mapping was further developed through a participatory territory-mapping exercise, subsequently adding this to an existing GIS base map (Elwood, 2006). A series of stakeholders working for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Maré were consulted about where they thought the most potent sites for women were located within Maré, in terms of where they felt liberated and where they felt was most dangerous for them (see Figure 0.1). They also developed a map of where the strongest networks of support for women survivors were located in Maré. The aim here was to highlight the importance of mapping in marginalised urban spaces, especially of situating gender-based violence, which is notoriously difficult to measure and estimate. It also reflects the need to register women’s resistance to such violence through preventative measures like support networks, which are often overlooked in traditional mapping efforts (McIlwaine et al., 2023b).

Another major initiative as part of the second stage of the research was digital storytelling using social memory technology developed by the Museu da Pessoa (Worcman and Garde-Hansen, 2016).⁷ This collaboration entailed methodological transference, capacity-building and co-creation of research design. The creative outcome was a digital archive of summary videos of oral histories with ten women artists from Maré, displayed in the Museu da Pessoa’s virtual exhibition focusing on women’s lives.⁸ The aim of the project was to evidence how women artists have become protagonists in many of the territory’s historical struggles for better living conditions and how their engagements with the arts have effectively combatted long-standing dynamics of gendered urban violence. It included design and facilitation of four initial training workshops with ten female researchers. These researchers then co-designed and participated in the entire curatorial process. Ten female artists were then interviewed in July and August 2021 during ten recording sessions. These women were variously involved in sewing, samba, rhyme and slam poetry and diverse styles of dance, theatre and music. The interviews focused on women’s life histories in relation to their art and the dynamics of resistance to gendered urban violence. We then reviewed transcripts and edited the final videos as part of a collaborative curatorial process between the researchers and the women artists (who approved the final versions of their videos prior to the launch in February 2022). The women artists were also featured in the Dignity and Resistance exhibition in London in May 2022 (McIlwaine et al., 2022b; see Figure 2.7) and as part of the permanent exhibition at Casa das Mulheres. Following this launch, an additional short film was made by PPP to highlight some key issues discussed by the women.⁹

Figure 2.7Priscila Monteiro de Andrade, actress and psychologist, speaking about her life in Maré as part of the Female Lives Exhibition by the Museum of the Person (credit: Paula Santos; adapted from McIlwaine et al., 2022b)

The researchers reflected on their experiences in a dedicated evaluation workshop. These were largely positive although with hindsight, it was suggested it would have been enriching for the women artists to have been more involved in the editing. The researchers were keen to use and adapt the methodology in their other projects, as Fernanda Vieira stated: ‘What is most powerful about this is that we value these stories which seem common, which seem ordinary, but the extraordinary can be found in the centre of them all. … We will be able to replicate them, but in our own way, based on our learning’. The women artists were invited to provide an evaluation of the process based on a short interview which the women answered in writing, through WhatsApp audios and in person. This elicited a range of responses, many revolving around the importance of constructing memories and ensuring that their and their ancestor’s histories were told. For them it was important to be able to narrate their stories themselves in their own words rather than someone else interpreting them, connecting what is often not talked about. Priscila Monteiro, featured in Figure 2.7, recalled the idea of [painful] ‘truths’ that permeates many aspects of this book, reflecting on the catharsis of the process that engendered self-knowledge: ‘When we revisited places of memory … I realised what my truths are and which truths somehow ended up impregnating me … To speak from my place … of someone who has lived through everything that constitutes me … to have a better perception of myself’ (McIlwaine et al., 2022a for further details).

Resisting gendered urban violence through co-produced arts-based methods in London

The second stage of the research in London did not gather more data on resistance practices using social science methodologies. Instead, it focused on reinterpreting the original research through a new collaboration with MinA and PPP and adapting the title of the original report We Can’t Fight in the Dark to We Still Fight in the Dark. This co-produced work explored resistance, community-healing and increasing the visibility of violence experienced by Brazilian migrant women survivors between 2021 and 2023. We worked with fourteen Brazilian migrant women survivors, together with Cathy McIlwaine and Niall Sreenan from King’s College London, Renata Peppl from PPP and Isabela Miranda Gomes from the LAWRS. The project entailed ten applied theatre workshops that included poetry, storytelling, music, body-percussion, drawing and film, working with a range of artists (visual artist Nina Franco, musician Alba Cabral and filmmaker Louise Carpenedo). These workshops culminated in the creation of an audiovisual installation with an accompanying performance (McIlwaine et al., 2022d).

The creative workshops were participatory and co-produced with a therapeutic aim in terms of improving the participants’ wellbeing, drawing on Audre Lorde’s ideas of self-care (Lorde, 1988) and Augusto Boal’s (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed methods. The idea of claiming rights was central, especially as many of the migrant women had to negotiate their immigration status (see also Erel et al., 2018; Kaptani et al., 2021). The workshops were recorded through observation notes, photography, poetry and scriptwriting, together with pre- and post-evaluations with the women participants. These all fed into the final (bilingual, subtitled) film, which was scripted collectively by the women and included data from the research, spoken in English and Portuguese.¹⁰ The installation was created by Nina Franco and used tangled red thread to symbolise the complications of emotional experiences (see Figure 2.8). Indeed, a participant reflected on the red thread: ‘The red yarn and what it represents made me reflect, look back and realise all I went through. But it also helped me to recognise where I am today and to feel proud of it’.

Figure 2.8Making We Still Fight in the Dark with MinA, London, with artwork by Nina Franco (credit: Renata Peppl)

The workshops, and indeed the entire process, became an opportunity for collective reflection and healing as well as a collective effort to raise awareness of Brazilians in London and to challenge stereotypes about them (O’Neill et al., 2019). As one woman stated: ‘I don’t feel like telling my own personal story but our [collective] stories, and because of that I feel safe. This is powerful because by telling our stories, as a group, it feels like we are shouting and making our struggles louder and visible’.

However, the discussions were also conflictive in relation to race. The women argued that race had not been given enough emphasis in the original report, such that Black Brazilian women felt invisible. While ultimately resolved, the discussion was useful for thinking through unconscious bias and representation. Disagreement also emerged in relation to showing the film. The film was screened initially in twelve (and ongoing) dissemination events around the UK and in Rio de Janeiro (including the Festival of Latin American Women in Arts (FLAWA) in London, the Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield, at academic conferences in Reading, Leicester and Oxford and at the Casa Rio Arts Centre and the Casa das Mulheres da Maré, both in Rio de Janeiro). At first, the film was shown as an installation, with discussions of it usually accompanied by a Q&A session with the respective audiences. However, it soon emerged that the women from MinA needed to be more actively involved. As a result, the team developed a short performance to accompany the screenings. One participant reported:

As with many of the arts-based methods, the participants noticed benefits from being involved, including enhancing their self-esteem, developing inner strength and reclaiming their histories, as one woman noted:

Several spoke of feeling exposed and uncomfortable at the beginning of the process but then gradually felt stronger. One stated: ‘From being subjects of study, we were then “humanised” and then I felt at the same level as the audience – from strangeness to recognition’. This was also felt by the audience, as reflected in their responses to the film installation at the Dignity and Resistance exhibition: ‘So interesting, so powerful, to see the world as others see it, to remember others’ strength and suffering’.

Listening to women resisting gendered urban violence in Maré and London

One of our final creative engagements was the Women Resisting Violence (WRV) podcast series which included a combination of curatorial, participatory and co-produced creative approaches. This was a collaboration between King’s College London and the UK-based LAB, broadly self-defining as the Women Resisting Violence Collective (2022a), together with narrator Renata Peppl, dubbing artists, editors, sound engineers, translators and other contributors.¹¹ The podcast was developed collaboratively among researchers, interviewees, engineers and producer Louise Morris. Three episodes were released, dubbed by Latin American migrant women in the UK and narrated by Renata Peppl in English, Spanish and Portuguese (for the two episodes produced without one of the languages, a transcript was provided in that language). Two episodes focus on the research included in this book: ‘Rio’s Trailblazing Women’s House’ with Casa das Mulheres da Maré and ‘Step Up Migrant Women’ with the LAWRS, SUMW and MinA. The podcast aimed to reveal how Latin American grassroots and advocacy women’s organisations develop initiatives to address gendered violence through a focus on women’s everyday realities of violence. It aimed to reveal ‘painful truths’ through using the podcast series as ‘a tool of resistance as it amplifies women’s political and social agency’. It is used as lobbying material, as a campaigning and communications tool and as a teaching resource for community groups, NGOs and students (Women Resisting Violence Collective, 2022b: 3). In addition to the spoken word, music was included from Guatemalan feminist hip-hop artist Rebeca Lane and WARA, a London-based band creating music about being a Latin American migrant, as well as musicians from Maré.

The series was launched in November 2021 over the international 16 Days of Activism against GBV. By early 2024, there were 2,780 downloads in sixty-five countries, and the podcast was shortlisted for Best Documentary in the Amnesty International Media Awards 2022. We also developed a bonus episode based on an online roundtable on the power of podcasting for social transformation (Figure 2.9). This showed that podcasts can be a tool for developing empathy through ‘the intimacy of listening’ (Women Resisting Violence Collective, 2022b: 6). As with many of the methods already discussed, the podcast can give voice to those affected by violence, providing a way to denounce it and also constructing a collective memory for the future. Its translocational nature was key to its success, given that it speaks through three languages. Indeed, one of the dubbing artists, Ana Rojas, noted: ‘This podcast internationalises the fight of women’. Gilmara from SUMW stated that contributing to the podcast marked ‘a breakthrough from being a survivor to being a voice for the community’. The podcast also provided the foundation for a subsequent book (Women Resisting Violence Collective, 2022a). Like many of the outputs discussed in the book, the podcast has longevity and sustainability into the future as a digital memory. It has served to encourage healing among survivors, to enhance their wellbeing, to raise awareness, to be a source of activism and to influence policymakers.

Figure 2.9Producing the multilingual Women Resisting Violence podcast with the LAB (credit: Louise Morris)

The creative work outlined in this chapter is constantly evolving, as evidenced by the most recent work using Photovoice in London and Rio de Janeiro (see Table 2.1).¹²