Primary Submission Category: Methodological approaches to studying public health
Participatory Action Research and Arts-Based Methods to Explore Intersectional Violence in Buenaventura, Colombia
Authors: Kati Hinman,
Presenting Author: Kati Hinman*
Introduction: Community-led interventions have been shown to sustainably reduce interpersonal and community violence. Participatory Action Research is a useful tool for community members to build and strengthen innovative responses to violence. On Colombia’s Pacific Coast, Buenaventura is a city shaped by a long history of armed conflict and civilian resistance. Working with Afrodescendent and indigenous LGBTQ+ people, who navigate overlapping forms of violence in their daily lives, this research used Participatory Action and arts-based methods to facilitate the identification of systems perpetuating violence, understanding of its impact on their well-being, and their resilience strategies.
Discussion: LGBTQ+ participants began by identifying the most important issues in their lives, including armed conflict, unemployment, discrimination, and poor mental health. The group agreed on discrimination as an overall lens to examine the violence and rejection they’ve experienced in various spaces like school, work, public spaces, and at home with family. They learned methods of photovoice, interviewing, and mapping to document how and where discrimination and violence occur and its impact on mental health and coping practices. They wrote short stories about LGBTQ+ people like them and created art pieces about their resilience and building of inclusive peace.
Conclusion: The methods allowed participants to pull from diverse ways of knowing and generate an analysis of their experiences of violence, rejection and exclusion. It strengthened their collective and led to ideas for solutions, like a Care House for women and LGBTQ+ people. Through a close partnership with a grassroots peacebuilding organization, participants and I used a human rights framework to present results in Buenaventura and to 11 national and international entities in Bogotá. These outcomes reflect the tradition of building collective memory in Colombian social movements to organize for social change.