Imaging Resistance is a collaboration with Migrants in Action (MinA) exploring how migrant women from the Global Majority world resist intersectional gendered violence and develop feminist activism.

This project engaged with women from diverse nationality, generational, and socio-economic backgrounds who had resisted violence and discrimination.

Through workshops spanning three months, 22 women from 11 countries came together to share stories, create art, and reclaim their narratives. These sessions were designed to be safe, joyful and creative spaces for women to fully and authentically engage in meaningful dialogue. Through coming together, they found freedom and strength to share, celebrating their unique stories of resilience and connection. The workshop outputs show how these women have coped with the challenges of being migrants and how they have rebuilt their lives through collective care and activism.

Watch excerpts from filmed interviews that are powerful testimonies, directly from the women themselves, describing the impact this workshop series had on them. – available on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Incubating Imaging Resistance – Podcast & article

Learn how arts-based approaches can be used to understand & explore experiences of gendered violence. In conversation with Migrants in Action explore how arts-based approaches can offer new understandings in research, improve communication of issues and co-creating arts based research methods with organisations and communities from London to Rio de Janeiro.

Articles

From ‘unbelonging’ to ‘radical connection’ among migrant women

Discover how creative engagements using VEM can transform ‘unbelonging’ into ‘radical connection’ as part of a wider process of resisting direct and indirect gendered violence.

This editorial explores upon the findings from our ‘empathy-driven solidarity’ research process based on using a VEM approach with 22 women from 10 different countries of the Global Majority world living in London.

Weaving empathy-driven solidarity through Visual and Embodied Methods (VEM)

Explore how ‘empathy-driven solidarity’ is created among diverse migrant and migrant heritage women from different countries in the Global South living in London.

Through a process of ‘weaving’, different forms of traditional methodologies such as interviews (visualised through film), with participatory applied arts methodologies enable the creation of self and collective care practices. Turning narratives of oppression about experiences of intimate partner, symbolic and structural gendered violence and their resistance to such violence, into a bond of empathetic solidarity.

Working Paper
McIlwaine, C., Peppl, R., Cal Angrisani, C., & Martin, P. (2025). Imaging Resistance among Migrant Women: Building Community and Connection. King’s College London. May

Ahmed, S. (2024). Imaging Resistance among Migrant Women: Integenerational Trauma, Care and Activism. Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network Working Paper: King’s College London. October.