The Colectiva Feeling The Field is an Art & Geography collective interested in a decolonial understanding of emotions and embodiment in the field.
We are:
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Ana Laura Zavalla Guillen, PhD
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Ariana Markowitz, PhD
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Itzel San Roman Piñeda, PhD
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Joyce Treasure, BA and Multidisciplinary Artist
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Micaela G. Signorelli, PhD
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Pietra Cepero Rua-Perez, PhD
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Vevila Dornelles, PhD
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Zubaida Umar, PhD
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The Facilitator:
With ample experience facilitating art programs for groups and individuals, Joyce Treasure is a London-based multi-disciplinary artist who explores marginalisation in contemporary Britain from a Black feminist perspective. She transforms objects and iconic imagery into allegories of experiences to offer commentary on growing up as a mixed-race woman in the UK. Joyce has a first-class degree in Black Studies, Social Science from Birmingham City University and was awarded an arts residency at Grand Union and Bruntwood in 2019, where she is now a trustee. She is a recipient of the WOMXN OF COLOUR Art Award (2022) and currently holds an Arts Council DYCP fund.
Our workshops delved into the connections between bodies and research to explore how researchers navigate the ubiquitous risk of violence in the field. The workshops used an artistic and geographical method known as cuerpo territorio, or body-mapping. This method, based on Latin-American feminist decolonial theory, enabled researchers working across disciplines in field sites worldwide to reflect on the emotions they experienced whilst collecting data.
Cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), is an embodied Latin American ontology and methodology emerging from historical and ongoing Afro-descendant and Indigenous women's struggles against extractive exploitation. This decolonial feminist approach centres on the intrinsic relation between bodies and land. In the context of fieldwork, this translates into an exploration of the relationship between our bodies during data production, the ‘field’ and how violences(s) work on and through both.
Implementing this method in an academic context enables researchers working across disciplines in field sites around the world to reflect on the emotions they experience in or after exiting the field. We will interrogate what the ‘field’ entails: how, when, and where researchers live the field as an emotional space, how this impacts their research practice, and what safety and well-being might look like in fieldwork settings. We also consider the politics of translating this approach and persistent South-North flows of academic knowledge production in the work to translate cuerpo-territorio.
12 and 21 of May, 2022. Cuerpo-Territorio Sessions, Bruntwood Works at Cornwall Buildings, Birmingham (Midlands).
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Feeling the Field, for the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network. 6th and 9th of June, 2023, British Academy, Birmingham (Midlands).
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On 26th and 29th of April 2024, a third Cuerpo Territorio workshop was organised through a collaboration between researchers from Newcastle and Northumbria Universities (Social and Cultural Geography Research Group - Department of Geography), and run by the members of the art and geographical collective, Colectiva Feeling the Field of the Network of Women Doing Fieldwork, Joyce Treasure and Dr Liz Ablett.
