Abstract
In recent years there has been a growing body of scholarship on the use of alternative research methods in Geography, and the social sciences more broadly, as well as ongoing interest in the connections between Geography and art. There has been much less attention, however, given to how drawing might be used practically or productively as a method, and to how it might allow geographers to reach or see places they couldn't otherwise. Although many researchers advocate conducting interviews and research in situ, thinking about the importance of location, there are times when entering a specific space is not possible. This paper details how the practice of drawing enabled me to make spaces that I wasn't able to visit as an ethnographic researcher, spaces that I felt were largely invisible to me, visible. While conducting fieldwork in a shelter for migrant domestic workers who had fled from their employers in Singapore, I used drawing as a way to shed a new light on the homes in which they had been working and to understand their everyday lives and experiences within them. This method made visible the living and working environments of women who had experienced employment abuse, as well as physical and sexual violence, while maintaining their anonymity and confidentiality, from a space of (relative) safety.
Highlights
In Geography, there has been an ongoing dialogue about the potentials of arts‐based methods, as well as considerable discussion about the importance of the visual (Leavy, 2015; Pink, 2009; Rose, 2001)
I used drawing as a tool to enable me to look inside, or enter, a space where I wasn't welcome: the homes of the former employers of migrant domestic workers (DWs) who had fled to a shelter
As Cairns insists, “feminists have long emphasised the significance of location in their scholarship” (2013, p. 324), referencing Haraway's (1988) notion that knowledge is “situated” and Alcoff's statement that “location is epistemologically salient” (1991, p. 7)
Summary
In Geography, there has been an ongoing dialogue about the potentials of arts‐based methods, as well as considerable discussion about the importance of the visual (Leavy, 2015; Pink, 2009; Rose, 2001). ANTONA case from a shelter, and its connection to the memory of other spaces being discussed, became of central importance With this in mind, I turned to drawing as a method that could render particular spaces more visible and to engage in new kinds of dialogue and knowledge production. There are, still some spaces that are of interest to researchers, but that are not accessible to them; spaces that, for a number of reasons, are obscured or hidden In these circumstances, arts‐based methods have been used in diverse areas of research to bring a different kind of visibility and sensing to the experiences of various sites, in ways words alone could not
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