Mobilizing the Feminist Imaginary: Arts-based Research Approaches and Creative Activism

This course offers a multi-perspectival overview of feminist praxis and its interrelationship with arts-based research approaches. It introduces participants to a variety of investigative approaches that centre women’s and other marginalised knowledges with the aim of creating more gender-just societies and more democratic knowledge-sharing infrastructures across the Global South and Global North. The course draws on an inclusive, expansive notion of gender where a focus on ‘women’ encompasses the lived realities of those who identify as or have been identified or represented as ‘woman’, providing an entry point into understanding cis, trans, queer, and non-binary experiences and the power relations within which they are embedded.

This 7-day course includes a series of sessions, workshops, and participatory events that unfold at the intersections of feminist activist academic research, art-based practices, pedagogy, and public engagement. It provides a grounding in theories of feminist praxis, the radical imagination and representation, in conjunction with innovative, creative research approaches, while it also engages and takes inspiration from various archives and ongoing research-artist-activist work in Budapest.

Course leader

Kerry Harman, Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK Erzsebet Strausz, Department of International Relations, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

Target group

We invite applications from:

advanced BA students, postgraduate students undertaking Master's dissertations or doctoral research in the broad areas of education, culture, global inequality, the study of power, gender, and social change. Familiarity with the transnational feminist literature and arts-based research approaches is not an expectation but will be considered as an asset
post-doctoral researchers, faculty, and academic staff interested in gender justice and developing their arts-based or creative practices
museum/library curators and educators interested in gender justice and arts-based practices
artists/activists/researchers working in communities, universities, and other settings

Course aim

The course introduces participants to a variety of investigative approaches that centre women’s and other marginalised knowledges with the aim of creating more gender-just societies and more democratic knowledge-sharing infrastructures across the Global South and Global North.