Visualizing Gender-Based Violence in Graphic Awareness Campaigns in Nepal

Working with Dr. Barbara Grossman-Thompson (California State University Long Beach), Charlotta Salmi (Queen Mary University of London) started this British Academy funded Sustainable Development Programme project, “Visualizing Gender-Based Violence in Graphic Awareness Campaigns in Nepal”. It considers how campaigns can best address gender-based violence – including domestic abuse, street harassment, trafficking and menstruation-based discrimination – in Nepal using visual media such as comics and street art.

Gender-based violence is a global problem, and in Nepal, where 25% of women reportedly experience intimate partner physical or sexual violence, eradicating violence against women and girls is a sustainable development priority. By exploring the many local and international programmes that address gender-based violence in Nepal we seek to promote more culturally sensitive and inclusive awareness raising methods. We aim to:

1. improve understanding of how aesthetic representations challenge or create assumptions about GBV.
2. facilitate knowledge exchange between academic researchers, government agencies, arts collectives and NGOs about representational practices (aesthetic strategies, cultural history, heritage).
3. encourage women and girls to participate in the production of anti-GBV materials through creative initiatives.
4. develop strategies for producing inclusive, effective, and culturally sensitive messaging in GBV awareness campaigns.

Among other outputs, we are working with arts collectives and NGOs to run a series of workshops with local schools to improve the use of arts in messaging strategies. The workshops engaged girls in discussions of existing graphic awareness materials and guided them in developing their own campaign messages and art works.

I also hope to learn interdisciplinary methods and approaches to vulnerability and security and to build dialogue with different stakeholders across geographical and social contexts.

In my own research I work across media – thinking in particular about the dialogue between image and text in different forms of visual storytelling. In this more applied, sustainable development project, I work in collaboration with an excellent sociologist from International Studies at California State University Long Beach, Dr Barbara Grossman-Thompson. We combine interdisciplinary research methods, from our respective backgrounds in cultural studies and sociology, using literary and visual analysis and feminist social theory to understand how graphic art forms can be used to empower women. Working both intermedially and interdisciplinarily has really helped me to look at things from new angles and understand elements of texts, speech and contexts that I might otherwise have missed.

Find out more about this project on their website here.