Body Mapping Research with Kate Phelps and Delaney Dvorak

Join Delaney Dvorak and Dr. Kate Phelps, Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UW-Madison for a body mapping workshop in two sessions.

A body surrounded by a night sky on one side and thunderclouds on the other.Body mapping is an arts-based method used for a variety of purposes including as a research method, for therapeutic intervention, in community development, as an educational tool, for psychological trauma and healing, and for social justice. The body mapping process is intended to be therapeutic and seeks to create a space to explore issues that may be difficult to discuss or categorize, and to bear witness to experiences that may be obscured or hidden, such as experiences of gender euphoria and the embodiedness of experiences of being transgender or gender non-conforming.

In this workshop, we will explore embodied experiences and tell our body narratives through the process of body mapping and reflection on that process. You are invited to think about how you move through your social world and express how your body takes in experiences via your own unique body map.

We are scheduling several of these workshops. Each workshop will take place across two sessions:

Session One: Introductions, body mapping background, building community, establishing guidelines for safe space (approximately 2 hours, will be held virtually via Zoom on a designated Tuesday evening)

Two Week Break: You are encouraged to work on your body map as much or as little as feels right for you. You can elect to share your body map with the group at the end of the two-week break between sessions.

Session Two: Focus group style discussion, sharing of body maps, and debrief on the body mapping processDrawing of a body at the center of multi-colored tree rings, black background. (approximately 2 hours, will be held in person on a designated Saturday morning in the School of Human Ecology on the UW campus)

All transgender and gender non-conforming identifying students who are 18 years or older, and who attend classes at UW-Madison, are eligible to participate. Participants are required to attend both sessions of the workshop. Workshop sessions will be led by a peer facilitator who identifies as non-binary, under the supervision of Dr. Katherine Phelps, who runs the UW Mapping Embodiment project at UW-Madison.

This research is funded by the UW-Madison 4W Initiative.

To indicate your interest in attending a workshop, or for further information or questions about the workshops, please email uwmappingembodiment@gmail.com

Sincerely,
Delaney Dvorak
(they/them)

Under the supervision of Katherine Phelps, Ph.D.
Lecturer, Gender and Women’s Studies, UW-Madison
Doctorate, Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Boston