Heart, mind and body

Most of my work is about helping organisations and individuals to make sense of what they are working on, delivering, thinking about, aspiring to. They want to know what's going on, what the impact is, what’s going wrong, why, and what can be improved. 

Often, they are stuck on an issue and need some external support to untangle it. Traditional methods of sense making; surveys, interviews, desk reviews, quant analysis, are all really important in helping us to see how outcomes are met and mapping what’s already there. 

But the work we do in social change isn’t always a visibly quantifiable experience; inequality is a bodied experience. It’s in the violence and abuse we experience directly to our bodies, but it’s also in the way our bodies navigate social spaces. 

Take this for example; the way your stomach clenches when someone stands too close on the bus, the way your shoulders ache when someone steals your idea, the way your teeth grind when someone annoys you online. The way your heart thumps when someone scares you. This is not an imagined experience, but a real, embodied experience of being a human in the world. These body responses are hugely shaped by the power we have and our prior experiences of violence.The body matters in how we make sense.  

Our feelings matter too. When I was on attempt number two of a PhD, the thought that kept swirling around in my head was an existential one. What is truth?[ 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 ]. I was studying what helps girls feel better after experiencing abuse, and I got stuck on the thought of: who gets to name what counts as abuse? Why? What does this mean for how our institutions respond? How are feelings about harm heard? By who? And why? 

We know that when women and girls share that they have been hurt they are not believed. Our physical and emotional experiences do not matter, they are invisibilised, diminished, dismissed. But how boys feel about it? That is almost always centralised. From the courts to the classroom we see it time and time again. We’ve invisibilised how central boy’s feelings are, to the point where we get tied up in knots in trying not to name what is right in front of us (rape/sexism/toxic masculinity) because we might hurt boys feelings. 

So feelings matter too. 

In my desk review for the project on youth wellbeing in the digital age for the School of Systems Change, I was really struck by the role of storytelling and the role of felt knowledge in shaping policy responses (see for example, the Adolescence effect). Felt knowledge gained from stories has a tangible impact on how decisions are made. 

As a researcher, I’m curious about which stories get told, and what evidence gets traction. But as an activist, this is where I get worried. Whose felt experience matters? I can’t begin to share the amount of middle aged men I’m coming across who feel that they are being neglected by modern society and that the answer lies in protein, or racism, or both. 

We are currently living through a period where trust in institutions is incredibly fragile; where anti-vaxxers can make extreme and false claims because they feel right. Where racists can riot on the street because of how they feel. As anyone interested in positive mental health knows- feelings aren’t facts. The brain is wonky, subjective, biased. But. Feelings do matter. 

For a feminist researcher, where women’s felt and embodied knowledge has been dismissed for as long as Euro-centric academia and research has been about, feelings and bodies are part of how we make sense. They don’t give us the whole whole picture on their own, but they are valuable pieces of that puzzle.

Not because feelings are always right, but because they tell us how we see ourselves in the world.  From a sociological perspective, if enough people share a feeling, then that  can begin to tell us what groups of people feel, and from that, how their shared mindsets are shaping norms, which in turn shapes culture, policies, laws, processes and practices. 

So what does this mean in practice? It means that we can sense make in as many ways as there are people. I’ve made this wee zine to explore how I interpret this. 

Zine on sense making

I saw a meme once that said the core methodology to research was to be a nosy b*tch. I concur. You have to be nosy to be curious, and that is what research and knowledge gathering is all about. I have many ideas knocking around at most times, and the ways that I can make sense of them is by talking it out with my feminist collaborators and friends, (and my husband, who often gets a full stream of consciousness while we’re hanging out in the kitchen), and just letting in percolate around for a bit.

I very much experience the world and my work in a full body way; I feel the heaviness in my heart or the lightness in my stomach depending on the work I’m doing- and so I need to move it around. I like to dance and swim and run and cycle. I then leave it. Just let it wander about for a bit and see how it emerges. 

Then, finally, I’ll find somewhere to put it. A blog, a story, a zine, a playlist, a report or all of the above.  These are multiple forms of knowledge and together, they create a fuller picture of whatever it is I’m trying to make sense of.  And this is what the dots is trying to create; multiple forms of knowing, of making sense of social issues, in ways that can better respond to the aims of what social change is trying to do-co-create better futures for us all.

This is incredibly complex work and we’re going to need to bring our whole selves-our hearts, minds and our bodies- into the conversation if we’re wanting to see change happen.