Transformative potential of print-making as embodied experience with migrants and asylum seeker women

Abstract

This paper sets out an ethnographic research project that aimed to document a Cork Migrant Centre (CMC) women’s group engagement in a 12-week print-making psychosocial intervention. In recent years arts-based programmes where migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women participate have grown popular for their valuable therapeutic and healing capacities. However, the embodied realities of these groups of women remains an under-researched topic. The ethnography conducted encompassed the researcher’s participation and observation during the 12 weeks of print-making. The data set was pluralistically analysed; thematic analysis (TA) was conducted on both sets of data: field notes and interviews; and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was further employed to analyse the interview transcripts. The managing meanings of embodied experience theory (Field-Springer & Margavio Striley, 2018) offered a framework that guided the IPA analysis and discussion of women’s sense of being, doing and directed becoming. We outline that creative arts practices and spaces allowed participants to express themselves in new ways where they acted as agents challenging the sociocultural constraints placed on their bodies, achieving a sense of liberation and transformation possibility. Although the paper only provides a snapshot of the IPA analysis and findings, we conclude that participants’ accounts illustrate the social community atmosphere that was created in the print-making sessions, indicating a gained sense of psychosocial wellbeing.