Remembering a Day with April: Responding to the Entwined Crises of Mental Health and Domestic Violence
Hazel Buckingham, Mandy Morgan, Leigh Coombes, Ann Rogerson and Geneva Connor
Attuned to a note of peace and dignity, this project joins a chorus formed through the voices of researchers dedicated to transforming the wicked problem of gender-based violence located within the precarious and inequitable material conditions of daily lives that are manifest in and through gendered structural and social power relationships of domination and subordination.
Situated both within a psychology discipline in Aotearoa and a collaborative community response to family violence with Sahaayta and Gandhi Nivas, the project stories a process of narrativity as a research practice of response-ability (Haraway, 2016), responding to a call in the violence sector to tell and hear stories differently to transform possibilities for ethical responses.
As a mode of bearing witness to the pain of living through violence, the project addresses issues of fragmented and siloed knowledges and responses to gendered violence by remembering and re-telling a moment of response to a woman and her partner – a creative re-telling process that demonstrates how stories are sites where power dynamics can be recognised and challenged (Sonn & Baker, 2016), transforming the way we understand and respond to violence and distress.
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