Body Mapping
Release of New Guide for Researchers
HOW TO CITE:
Gastaldo, D., Magalhães, L., Carrasco, C., and Davy, C. (2012). Body-Map Storytelling as Research: Methodological considerations for telling the stories of undocumented workers through body mapping. Retrieved from: http://www.migrationhealth.ca/undocumented-workers-ontario/body-mapping.
Download Guide (low quality, 1.7 MB)
Download Guide (high quality, 13.7 MB)
About the Guide
Body-Map Storytelling as Research is a guide for researchers interested in using our one-to-one body mapping approach for research purposes. In our study with undocumented workers in the GTA, a body-map storytelling technique, involving a series of drawing and painting exercises, was used to create life-size body images or “body maps” to help participants to tell their migration stories and visually depict the impact of being undocumented on their health and wellbeing.
Body-Map Exhibition at Toronto City Hall, June 2012
Exhibition Overview
Body-Map Storytelling Presentation
What is Body Mapping?
Body maps can be broadly defined as life-size human body images, while “body mapping” is the process of creating body maps using drawing, painting or other art-based techniques to visually represent aspects of people’s lives, their bodies and the world they live in. Body mapping is a way of telling stories, much like totems that con-tain symbols with different meanings, but whose significance can only be understood in relation to the creator’s overall story and experience.
What is Body-Map Storytelling?
Body-map storytelling is primarily a data generating research method used to tell a story that visually reflects social, political and economic processes, as well as individuals’ embodied experiences and meanings attributed to their life circumstances that shape who they have become. Body-map storytelling has the potential to connect times and spaces in people’s lives that are otherwise seen as separate and distal in more traditional, linear accounts. The final outcome of the body-map storytelling process is a mapped story composed of 3 elements: a testimonio (a brief story narrated in the first person), a life-size body map, and a key to describe each visual element found on the map. This technique can also help stimulate dialogue and share knowledge with general audiences given that the mapped story brings research participants’ stories to life through combined visual and oral media. As a product, mapped stories offer a creative and potentially visually-compelling approach for knowledge translation and exchange.
Presentation on Body-Map Storytelling
Body-map storytelling as research: Documenting physical, emotional and social health as a journey. Denise Gastaldo, Associate Professor, Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing; Associate Director, Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research (CQ), September 26, 2012. Podcast