Visualizing Gender and Revolution – Arts-Based Methods for Research on War and Revolutions

Since the 2021 military coup, Myanmar’s countryside has been rife with violence and off-limits to researchers. Drawing on a participatory research project that employs feminist visual methods to understand gendered experiences of war in revolutionary landscapes, this short talk will present a graphic novel and journal article that offer complementary accounts of violence and resistance in Myanmar’s countryside. This  “Land, Labor, Love, and Revolution” project suggests that using art in research can help with research on war and violence in several ways: it is a form of knowledge that goes beyond language to give insights into people’s emotions and feelings; it disrupts dominant (academic) text-based modes of thinking, doing and presenting research; it takes grounded, everyday, subjective experiences as the starting point for analysis. Art-based methods are accessible to non-academic audiences, and has the potential to reach more people. In this talk, Project leaders Jenny Hedstrom and Hilary Faxon, researcher Zin Mar Phyo and illustrator tamyumkung will reflect on why they chose to work with arts-based methods; how they approached the process; and the challenges that they have faced