About the project

Imagining Resistance is a three-year creative participatory photography project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In this project we are exploring how girls and young women (age 13-25) who have experienced sexual violence and exploitation alongside other forms of harm (e.g. criminal exploitation, gang involvement and serious youth violence) engage in acts of resistance.

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The word ‘resistance’ is ambiguous and polysemous; it has been adopted by activists and consumers and used by researchers in fields such as anthropology and sociology to describe how people ‘fight back’ against oppression and subjugation. However, when safeguarding concerns arise for young people, ‘resistance’ is typically means one thing: it is used to indicate negative or disruptive behaviours rather than evidence of young people’s resilience and strength, or their efforts to self-preserve in oppressive social contexts and relationships. Resistance is used to describe young people when they ‘resist’ help, resist engagement, resist participating in prosocial activities.

 

In embarking on this project, we set out to learn about how creative methods can help make the familiar strange. As both former practitioners and researchers, we have long been familiar with how issues of exploitation are framed in public and policy discourses, and we were intrigued by how creative methods might fight against familiarity for us and help us understand resistance in new ways. We also wanted to learn more about visual methods of data production and how they might enable us to limit the intrusive presence of researchers, extend the sometimes tidier boundaries imposed by eliciting verbal narratives, and allow for a process of defamiliarization (in relation to how problems of exploitation and interpersonal violence are framed) for both ourselves and the young people participating in the project.

 

To do this, we partnered with two photographers and three charities that provide services to young people affected by sexual violence and exploitation (based in London and Nottingham).The project considered everyone, including researchers, artists, youth workers and young people, members with potential to influence creative outputs and a collective understanding of what resistance is, how it manifests in contexts of oppression and subjugation, and its role in facilitating young survivors’ own beliefs regarding their capacity for resilience, self-efficacy, agency, and power.

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The Imagining Resistance Project is lead by Professor Kristi Langhoff (University of Sussex), Dr. Camille Warrington (University of Bedfordshire), the visual artist Becky Warnock, with support from visual artist Natalie Mitchell. 

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