Programme Director, Health Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka, Aotearoa New Zealand

 

As a qualitative methodologist, I am always fascinated by the exploration of new and evolving methodologies for how we can study health, wellbeing, and illness. I first discovered body mapping in the early 2000s in South Africa, being used as a consciousness-raising tool for LGBTQI student rights on a university campus. Each Pride festival, as a LGBTQI student society, we would use it to share the embodied experiences of being queer, making visible identities that often felt erased in a historically conservative country. In 2017, I had the opportunity to run a body mapping study with Dr Sally Nathan and Prof Katherine Boydell in an alochol and other drug residential treatment centre for young people in Sydney, Australia. We witnessed the empowering and illustrative benefit that body mapping had for young people who struggled to share their experiences with researchers in more traditional interviews. In the future, I am interested in applying this arts-based method to explore people’s experiences of living with cancer, in terms of how they experience the impact of living with the illness and coping with the effects of treatment on their bodies and their lives. I welcome future conversations and collaborations through the Consortium.