5.30 - 7.00pm UTC / UK time
To attend, please email melissa@theinterpersonal.com for the zoom link. You don't need to be a member to attend Open Space sessions.
With Mandy Lee
This Open Space session presents my experiments with creative artful methodologies to my own research project exploring trauma, resilience and resistance of Hongkongers since 2019, having been inspired by Sharon Smith's wonderful presentation of her use of poetic transcription in a previous Open Space session last year.
I will present some interim findings from a narrative inquiry research project I am conducting that explores the trauma, resilience and resistance of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement since the 2019 mass protests. The narratives for this paper came from an anonymous online writing project that captured the self-writing exercises of self-reported Hongkongers on their experiences post 2019 which were generated through a series of writing prompts.
My goal in presenting these narrative findings is three-fold:
1) to explore creative ways by which these narratives of Hongkongers could be presented that amplify their narrative power while retaining the integrity of their individual stories, and to contrast poetic transcription as a poetic method with other standard qualitative research methodologies;
2) to consider the ethics of representation in “re-telling” these anonymous stories, where member-checking is not possible nor desirable in the context of a repressed community;
3) to showcase some of these stories themselves as told by Hongkongers through anonymous writing, to compare and contrast with other narratives that are present in the public domain where Hongkongers use a range of narrative strategies to relate their experiences in an environment where they know their words would likely be monitored by the regime.
The creative analysis method I will focus on for this presentation is poetic transcription (Glesne, 1997; Yi and Mackey, 2023; Smith, 2023). In contrasting this creative method with other qualitative analytical methods, I would like to highlight the concept of "resonance" and how it could form the basis for both resilience and resistance for communities under repression.
---
Mandy Lee is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Health Policy and Management, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin. A sociologist of health and illness, her research interests include narrative medicine, trauma studies, and research ethics, with an increasing focus on creative/arts-based research methodologies and resilience/resistance studies. She is also a PhD Candidate (part-time) at the Sociology Department of Trinity College Dublin, pursuing a narrative inquiry project exploring the trauma, resilience, and resistance of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement since 2019. Mandy is a co-representative of the Trinity Medical and Health Humanities (MHH) working group at the Irish Humanities Alliance (IHA). She is also on the advisory board of the Trinity Inclusive Curriculum and a member of the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies. A Hongkonger by ethnic background, she is an Executive Board member of Art and Culture Hong Kong (ACHK), a solidarity group of artists, scholars and activists that focuses on the intricate interplay between art, culture, and politics pertaining to Hong Kong. Mandy also co-founded and co-convenes the Research Ethics Conversation Series that is held jointly across Trinity College Dublin and University of Galway.