Sonja MARZI, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
Rachel PAIN, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
This paper focuses on displaced women’s resistance to multiple, intersecting, and ongoing urban traumas through different forms of private and public activism in Colombia. We report from participatory audio-visual research with two groups of displaced women, who are re-making their urban futures in Bogotá and Medellín while experiencing endemic disaster and trauma. Here urban trauma describes the chronic effects of various forms of structural violence that the women have experienced before and since moving to the city. Initial discussions showing that women struggle with making a living while participating in shaping and building their urban imaginaries, came into even sharper focus as Covid-19 hit. During the pandemic and its harsh economic impacts, the women draw on networks of solidarity developing individual and collective empowerment and activism. Rather than understanding activism as a form of public protest, they describe different forms of activism that transcend the sites and scales of their individual crises. These kinds of activism start from becoming more independent within their own household, resisting patriarchal gender norms, up to resourceful women community leaders leading feminist discourses to resist chronic trauma and structural violence at different scales within their urban environments. Using online discussion groups and participatory film-making, the research has charted the ways that women work across private and public spheres to engage in domestic, private and public activism. Claiming spaces of the city inside and outside their homes, they imagine different feminist urban futures and modes of recovery.
Mots clés : activism|trauma|gender|right to the city|film-making
A104230RP