My current question is: How can I manifest the stories of migrated women in the UK who experienced hardship using sensory mediated interactive quilt?
A hardship occurs to me a year ago, while living in London for only one year. My world collapsed, I was shocked and overwhelmed. I was in the process of making me a home, and my past home seems distanced and unfamiliar. Caught between these two worlds, luckily for me, I have a friend here who helped me stand back on my feet for the first couple of days, but I had to figure out everything else by myself. I gradually pull myself together and began a self-exploration journey, using mindfulness, support from my new community and therapy I decided to research how other women such as myself experience their hardship, cope with it and share their stories. I wanted to develop a way or method to help women cope with hardship, hoping to learn from their stories and experiences, that will help me overcome my hardship and help other women to do so as well, the power of support and community.
I decided to create a quilt (physical and metaphorical) to manifest my project because:
I was not able to produce a group meeting with the Israeli women I interviewed. I consulted Paul about it and he offered me the idea of a quilt to communicate the voices and the shared stories of the women I interviewed. I loved this idea - I research the quilt history, anthropology wise it consider to be a creative outlet for women to share their stories, create a supportive community, manifest a cause, group together and initiate the path to equality.
The quilt is a connecting my creative voicing of these women sensory memories from their childhood, hardship, home in Israel and other milestones in their life.
I’m focusing on women with the same profile as me: Israeli women who moved to the UK, who didn’t escape from slavery or fled from oppressive leaders. We are all, independent, educated women, coming from a stable background, who decided to move to the UK to improve our career, enhance our children’s education, upgrade our cultural life or even for an adventure. Unfortunately in one point, our world tears apart, as it may happen everywhere, how do we cope with it - are we looking for our base? For our home? Our meaning? Would we behave the same if it happened to us while we were in Israel? Is it any different? Do we feel secure?
In my perspective, the idea of experiencing hardship as part of your everyday life by disposition your home to a new country, new city, new environment, and the way that we interact with our new surroundings questioning our ability to balance ourself and grow.
I approached dozens of women who agreed to share their story, and allow me to recreate significant parts of it using my creative ideas and sensory mediation, free from judgemental or critic, just view their stories as seen from my eyes.
I decided to change my research and explore how Israeli women cope with hardship during migration/relocation to the UK, since it was part of my experience, I felt that I have to use my personal journey as my project since it became everything I was thinking about and everything that was going on in my world so I couldn’t just ignore it and research something else. I also hoped I might find it beneficial for me and for other women to find more women who experience hardship and share their stories, to receive support from the community and mutual help.
I believe that sharing stories can help other women understand and empathize with what women might experience when having hardship as immigrant/relocated women, even without being migrated or without experiencing hardship.
In Israel, there is an idealization of the relocating or immigration to other countries, especially countries like the UK and the US, that the life there would be easy, enjoying good work/life balance and spending long weekends travelling with the family, and if things are falling apart, there were women who felt guilty, couldn’t share their failure with friends and family from Israel.
How:
Since I was looking for stories and experiences, I used qualitative research. I was focusing on women and I tend it to feministic research as well.
Interviews:
My initial focus group was very wide and covered women from all over the world, after few interviews, I narrowed it down to Israeli women (who migrated/relocated all over the world) and finally narrowed it down again to Israeli women who relocated/migrated to the UK (mostly London).
I approached several Israeli women facebook groups and asked for participants and received a lot of responses. At least half of them lost interest after the first talk but with the ones who were interested, I scheduled an interview.
My interventions informed by my secondary research - I followed ideas and methods from Ortal Slobodin book - Hidden passenger, after interviewing her and studying some of her methods. I was very inspired by her research, and I thought using some of her methods will allow me to create a better intimacy with the women I interviewed, hoping to receive a profound answers, higher engagement and more immersive experience throughout the interventions. I followed some of her resources as well (like Zeller, W.J, Mosier, R (1993) Culture Shock and The First‐Year Experience or Shaffer, MA, Harrison, DA (2001) Forgotten partners of international assignments: development and test of a model of spouse adjustment. Journal of Applied Psychology, USA.) and used these publications as secondary research as well. I was also inspired by the concept and the research in the field as come out in the book Strange material (Prain, L. (2014). Strange Material: Storytelling through Textiles. Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press) to explore the storytelling methods and interesting techniques.
We talked about their hardship story, how they cope with it and focused on sensory memories that they had as part of their life in the UK, their childhood in Israel or their hardship in correlation with sound, smell, sight, touch and taste. I interviewed them by meeting them, emails, WhatsApp - writing and talking messenger, facebook messenger, calls or any other media they felt comfortable to share with me. I felt most women, after passing the stage of getting back to me or responding to my call, very open and wanted to share their story and talk about themselves in a therapeutic way, looking for someone to listen, maybe looking for a friend.
I documented their stories in my blog. Most of them were in Hebrew and I translated them, using my own language most of the time.
Interventions - same way that I found the women that I interviewed, I found women who agreed to take place in my interventions and opened it up for other aspects such as men, non-Israeli, and more to locate the sustainability of my research and search for my stakeholders and reference group.
Intervention phase I: I took objects from my interviews: photos and songs that were selected as being meaningful and sent to me by the women I interviewed, artefact and smells that I created from the stories that became meaningful, and display them to the person I interviewed, asked them to interact with the object and to share their feelings towards the object.
After 5-6 interventions, I reflect on my process, my questions/answers and my idea, and updated the following interview in reference to the one before it.
I was able to identify the following:
I noticed specific images and objects that created more empathy with the people I did the intervention with, and they were more engaged with. This valuable information is being used for the following interventions as part of my learning curves on what generate empathy and more emotion with Israeli women.
I have to focus my questions and stop getting carried away to different subjects.
I have to find a better way to document the intervention - so I started to record them, using my recording app on my phone.
I need to have a lateral intervention with one sense at the time, so I can disconnect the background from the core of the sense. Engage with one sense at the time and the specific emotions that it produce.
Intervention phase II - After consulting with my course leader, I started conducting a different intervention - focus on one sense at a time - Smell, sight, sound, touch and taste.
So far I did the smell and the touch (which I was very happy since I felt it’s the most difficult ones to do). I was able to identify the following:
I came with questions I prepared in advance: I felt I covered everything I wanted to talk about and I noticed most of my questions came up during the conversation so it seemed to be natural and not forced.
I recorded both of them which allow me to feel more engaged with the conversation and have detailed notes when I translate the conversation later at home.
I was able to find profound evidence for the connection between the senses and the feeling, between good and bad emotions connected to the senses and between tangible and intangible (e.g. an object that generate emotions).
I have some new ideas to create artefacts on my quilt and I want to be able to create some intervention to see if I can create empathy with my artefact.
In the next interventions:
I intend to cover the rest of the senses.
I will test my artefact and the stories connected with different stakeholders and see if they will generate an emotional reaction with them such as empathy, understanding, compassion, support etc.
Conclusions:
Positive implications - I felt that during my research so far I was able to approach women in all sorts of stages of hardship and allow them to talk and share their experience. All women were happy to open up, talk about their emotions and experiences, learning new things and ideas on how to cope with hardship from other women’s experience.
One of my intervention felt very meaningful to me when I introduced F, a woman I interviewed with my artefact that was created from her sensory memory and it generated an emotional reaction on her and brought her to tears. This was the first one I did and it made me feel pleased to be able to reach someone in such a profound way.
I learned as a result of the process of how to better approach research, how to conduct a better interview, document them, focus, How to ask the right questions, stand up for myself, be empowered and get empowered, manage time better and more.
I try to vary my stakeholders to expand my research and my impact on a larger group. I try to find people that feel engage, sincere and allow themselves emerge in the intervention and providing me with extensive, genuine answers, in one case during the intervention, the woman didn’t understand my idea, her answers were not deep enough and she felt confused by the display. This input was very helpful to me since I realised I need to shift my intervention to one sense to one person method.
Since I gain more confidence in my research, I talk about my project, my research, my question with most people I know, so I can expand my knowledge, and I have been receiving fantastic feedback, new aspects to look into, new stakeholders to talk to, new expert to contact, research to check and it helped me in my research and my perspective. A woman I randomly met recently, whom I told about my project, became one of my experts and advised me how to shift my question to allow me to feel more authentic with my research and helped me engage better with the women I interview.
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