The paper describes the ways body mapping elicited cognitive, affective, and un-surfaced reflections of the body as it engaged with political acts of caring in bodies of difference. Body mapping turns the body into a political and activist art piece. As articulated by Huss (2012), “in community art and art as social change, art can be used as an indirect form of resistance to the cultural context in which it is embedded” (p. 1444). Being art is disruptive. Art renders a subject, not previously represented/heard/seen, present/heard/visible. Acknowledging being through art, and simply sensitizing self to one’s being ‘speaks’ loudly to break silences that accompany invisibilities of minoritization and reclaims space through artistic occupation. For instance, following artistic re-creation of the body through body mapping, Nicola, a PSW, reflects, “It’s not easy and then we are not born to do this, we have different knowledge and we are smart too!” Complete with accounts of failing, flailing, and flourishing in processes of knowing-through-narrative, this paper will contextualise the emergence of restorative space and antenarrative through embodied methods (body work) and appreciative reflection with PSWs who labour on aging bodies (on-body work).
This presentation starts from 3 mins 13 secs to 16 mins 17 secs.
Presenter
Kimberly J. Lopez works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo on the Haldimand Tract land promised to the Haudenosaunee of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and is the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples in Ontario, Canada. As a community-engaged qualitative researcher, Kim is interested in critically examining structures that (re)produce oppressions affecting experiences of racialisation, aging, long-term care, care labour, leisure, and well-being. She values working collaboratively to amplify individuals who identify with justice-deserving groups. To do this, Kim looks to influencers of anti-racist feminisms, anti-colonial and restorative practices, and corporally informed literature/art to hear knowings held in bodies that labour to care. She was recently recognised as the 2020 Canadian Association of Leisure Studies Emerging Scholar and in 2021 as the Faculty of Health Emerging Scholar Mentorship Award holder.
