This workshop is conceived as a space for experimentation, exchange, and collective thinking around a central question: Why—and how—do we use arts-based, creative, and multimodal methods in feminist research that seeks to engage with embodied, emotional and intimate lived experiences?

Rather than a traditional academic workshop, we aim to co-create a supportive and generative environment where researchers, students, and practitioners can share work in progress, unfinished ideas, and experimental approaches. We hope to open up space to reflect on the messiness, challenges, and ethical tensions of feminist research, and to explore how creative practices can enable different ways of knowing, feeling, and communicating.

Workshop Programme · 23–24 September 2025

Wednesday, 23 September

09:30–10:00 · Arrival and welcome coffee

10:00–12:00 · Introduction and tour through the exhibition
Organising Team · University of Bern, Institute of Geography

12:00–13:30 · Lunch

13:30–15:00 · Work-in-progress presentations

• Stitching Otherworlds: Textile-Based Feminist Methods with Migrant Garment Workers in Delhi
  Nitin Bathla · University of Zurich, Department of Geography
• (Body) Mapping Resistance: Approaches to Analysing Climate Activists’ Embodied Struggles
  Vivien Breinbauer · University of Graz (AT), Department of Geography and Regional Science
• Feminist Perspectives on Epistemic (In)Justice in Transdisciplinary Art and Climate Science Collaborations
  Johanna Paschen · University of Bern, Institute of Geography

15:00–15:30 · Coffee break

15:30–18:00 · Hands-on method sessions

• Antirassistische Stadt: Ein interaktiver Workshop über Rassismus und Anti-Rassismus in der Stadt (auf Deutsch)
  Christin Glauser & Claudia Wilopo · University of Bern, IZFG
  This session runs until 18:30.
  Read abstract

  Die globale Schwarze Widerstandsbewegung Black Lives Matter (BLM) und die Ermordung von George Floyd haben auch in der Schweiz dazu beigetragen, dass mehr über Rassismus und Dekolonialisierung gesprochen wird. Die Rassismus- und Kolonialkritik, die durch diese Bewegungen politisch aufgegriffen wurde, fokussiert sich aber vor allem auf die Anerkennung und Aufarbeitung der kolonialen Vergangenheit und weniger auf die institutionelle Gegenwart, in der vergeschlechtlichte, migrantisierte und rassialisierte Körper durch die Kontinuität von kolonialen Strukturen, Gewalt, Ausgrenzung und Diskriminierung erleben.

  Gleichzeitig ist das Sprechen über Rassismus und Kolonialität eine herausfordernde Realität, die durch spezifische historische, institutionelle und affektive Mechanismen (re)produziert wird. Das «koloniale Unbewusste» (Kilomba 2008) produziert ein Unbehagen, wenn Rassismus benannt wird und strukturelle Veränderungen gefordert werden. Dieses Unbehagen wird als Bedrohung gesehen, die das gegenwärtige liberal-demokratische, humanitäre und internationale Selbstbild der Schweiz destabilisiert.

  Der Workshop verknüpft künstlerische, theaterpädagogische, antirassistische und feministische Methoden, um spielerisch zu erproben, wie die Bereitschaft, Unbehagen im Kontext von Rassismus und Kolonialität auszuhalten, gestärkt und als konstitutiver Bestandteil antirassistischer Praxis verstanden werden kann. Der sich derzeit in der Konzeptionsphase befindende Workshop ist von der Kunstintervention «Vereinslokal Utopia» von Christin Glauser inspiriert.

  Die Teilnehmenden sind eingeladen, die Idee des Projekts «Antirassistische Stadt» ausgehend von den folgenden Fragen kritisch zu erkunden: Welche antirassistischen Unsicherheiten, Erfahrungen und antirassistischen Praktiken werden sicht- und spürbar, wenn ein Raum eröffnet wird, in dem Menschen zusammenkommen und spielerisch eine antirassistische und dekoloniale Stadt bauen? Welche Möglichkeiten des Sprechens und Handelns im Kontext von Rassismus lassen sich im städtischen Raum erproben?

  Der Workshop ist in vier Teile gegliedert. Der erste Teil besteht aus einer spielerischen Übung, die die Teilnehmenden zusammenbringt, inhaltlich an das Thema heranführt und eine Basis schafft, um ins Gespräch zu kommen. Der zweite Teil ist eine Diskussionsrunde mit dem Ziel, konkrete, gewünschte Sichtbarmachungen, Veränderungen und Möglichkeiten im städtischen Raum zu sammeln. Diese Ideen und Gedanken dienen als Ausgangslage, um im dritten Teil spielerisch eine antirassistische Zukunftsstadt zu entwickeln und auf einem Spielbrett mit Bauklötzen als abstraktes Modell zu bauen. Der vierte Teil besteht aus einer Feedback- und Diskussionsrunde zu konzeptionellen, methodischen, ethischen und gesellschaftspolitischen Aspekten des interdisziplinären Projekts.

• Listening as a Method: Deep Listening and Feminist Approaches to Non-Human Relationality
  Thea Josepha Konatsu · HGK Basel, Art and Design Education
  Read abstract

  This workshop introduces Deep Listening, a compositional and perceptual practice developed by composer Pauline Oliveros, as a feminist arts-based research method for establishing embodied, affective relationships with non-human entities and places.

  Drawing on recent practice-based research conducted along the rivers Birs and Rhine in Basel, the workshop examines how attentive, somatic listening can serve as a methodological entry point into ecological and more-than-human inquiry. Deep Listening moves beyond passive auditory reception toward full-body, multidimensional attentiveness that encompasses sound, silence, duration, and environment. Within feminist research methodologies, this practice resonates with frameworks that privilege situated knowledge and relational epistemologies. Listening to a river, a landscape, a non-human other becomes an ethical act: a refusal of extractive knowledge production and an invitation to interdependence.

  Participants will be guided through structured listening exercises in indoor and outdoor settings, engaging with the sonic environment of Bern as a relational field. Through collective reflection we will explore how Deep Listening can function as a feminist research tool, making perceptible what is often rendered invisible or inaudible within dominant knowledge systems.

  The workshop contributes to current debates in feminist new materialism and arts-based research by proposing listening not merely as an object of study, but as a mode of knowing, relating, and being with the more-than-human world.

  The workshop will take 2 hours and includes both deep listening exercises and writing exercises. Participants will receive a little self-made zine to take home with them.

18:00 · Apéro

Thursday, 24 September

09:00–10:30 · Work-in-progress presentations

• Invisible Transitions? How to Study the Everyday Experience of Menopause
  Jenny Appel · Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg
• Architectures of Ambivalent Pregnancy
  Lisa Maillard · ETH Zürich, Department of Architecture
• Put(a)rxiva: Towards a Puta Materialism in Archival Art Practice
  Juls Edo · Universidad Miguel Hernandez, Arts

10:30–11:00 · Coffee break

11:00–13:00 · Hands-on method sessions

• Embodied Epistemologies: Exploring the Body as a Site of Knowledge Production
  Andrea Mathez
  Full-day workshop, 11:00–17:00, lunch included.
  Read abstract

  This proposal addresses a question that has emerged from my research and pedagogical practice: How can we recognise bodies as generators of ideas, relationships, and knowledge useful for analysis? Despite the growing attention paid to the politics of bodies and their centrality in research, particularly in fields engaged in resistance to systems of oppression (feminist studies, gender studies, decolonial studies, subaltern studies), the researcher’s body is, at best, denied and, at worst, sacrificed in the name of objectivity or efficiency. Yet emerging approaches invite us to take seriously the body’s sensations, emotions, limits, and epistemic potential.

  If the body’s heuristic potential is not simply a matter of individual sensitivity but belongs to an epistemology that can only be carried collectively, how might we create spaces to explore what this means in practice? Developed in collaboration with Soufiane Guerraoui (theatre actor, director, and performer), this immersive workshop builds on several residential PhD workshops on embodied epistemologies. Rather than approaching the body once again on a purely intellectual level, participants engage in a series of improvisation and body-theatre exercises that explore movement, sensory perception, emotions, speech and silence, play, and interaction. Through individual and collective experimentation, participants are invited to experience how embodied attention can contribute to the formulation of thought, the emergence of ideas, and transformed ways of relating to others and to research questions.

• From Body to Writing to the Collective Imagination — A Worldbuilding Game of Commoning
  Maria Vogt & Ruth Schmidt · Ruhr-University Bochum (Ruth) & freelance theater maker (Maria)
  Read abstract

  Game designer Carina Erdmann asks: «Even if we can theorize a form of commons, how would we emotionally ready ourselves for it?» Her response is a collective practice she calls prefigurative play: a way of finding embodied, emotional ways of engaging with social questions by anticipating them within an artistically framed space. We adapt this practice by taking the body itself as its starting point: as a tool for emotionally preparing for processes of commoning. In doing so, it takes seriously a demand emerging from diverse feminist practices for a form of knowledge grounded not in distance and supposed neutrality, but in lived experience—knowledge that is situated, embodied, and generated through one’s own body.

  This is where our workshop comes in: embodied knowledge is translated into language and forms the foundation for collectively building a world. To this end, everyone is invited to write down a brief experience of their own body and bring it with them (a detailed writing prompt for all workshop participants will be provided in advance). Using a set of game and narrative rules, we’ll create a landscape from these texts during the workshop – a communal body of a protagonist generated from embodied experience – through which we’ll then collectively dive into a process of worlding. The workshop concludes with reflection and a shared exchange of experiences that contextualizes questions and offers a (critical) examination of the possibilities of such game-based arrangements.

  Participation: You should be willing to write a short, personal text in advance and share it during the workshop. An enthusiasm for storytelling and collective imagination is helpful.

• Designing Recursive Living Labs
  Merle Müller-Hansen · Center for Climate Resilience, University of Augsburg
  Read abstract

  How can intimate, embodied and emotional forms of knowledge be embedded in research infrastructures rather than remaining isolated moments of data collection? This workshop explores how feminist mixed-methods can inform the design of Recursive Living Labs. Recursive Living Labs are university-embedded infrastructures for participation, stakeholder engagement and collective learning that extend beyond the focus of many living labs: technical testing, linear innovation cycles and one-off citizen science activities. They offer opportunities to connect diverse forms of knowledge through iterative processes of reflection, adaptation and co-production, while supporting long-term relationships between researchers, students, communities and other stakeholders.

  The two-hour workshop addresses a central challenge for feminist and arts-based research: how to sustain and integrate situated, affective and relational forms of knowledge within ongoing research processes. Participants will begin with a mapping exercise focused on their own research projects, identifying emotional, embodied and relational dimensions that often disappear when knowledge is translated into research outputs, digital systems or governance structures. Building on these reflections, participants will work with a simplified Recursive Living Lab canvas to explore how such knowledges might be embedded within longer-term research infrastructures.

  Through guided discussion and collaborative critique, participants will explore how recursive processes of participation, learning and governance might be embedded within their projects, while identifying critical safeguards related to ethics, care, power, and accountability. Particular attention will be given to ethics-by-design approaches, including questions of ongoing consent, transparency, stewardship and human digital oversight.

13:00–14:30 · Lunch (self-organised)

14:30–17:00 · Hands-on method sessions

• Embodied Epistemologies: Exploring the Body as a Site of Knowledge Production (continued)
  Andrea Mathez
  Full-day workshop, 11:00–17:00, lunch included.
• Thinking through Textiles: Storytelling in Participatory Research
  Amanda Schmid-Scott · University of Bern, Institute of Geography
  Read abstract

  Textile practices have long been spaces for storytelling, care, resistance and community-building. This workshop explores how these practices might also function as qualitative research methods. Through collective making, discussion and methodological reflection, participants will experiment with textile storyboarding and consider how textiles can support ethical, participant-led research with communities who have experienced displacement and trauma. Feedback from the workshop will inform the design of an EU-funded research project at the University of Bern.

• Informal space for exchange

17:00–17:30 · Closing Remarks
University of Bern, Institute of Geography

from 17:30 · Get Together and dinner (optional)

Supported by

This workshop is made possible through the generous support of the following institutions. We warmly thank them for their contribution.