Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer “Sensemaking with Scrapbooking: How Victim-Survivors Make Sense(s) of Sexual Violence in their Everyday Lives”

In Former students by jvnf65

I’m interested in the everyday and changing materials, environments, interactions and institutions which inform victim-survivors’ understandings of their experiences. I understand sensemaking as an ongoing, complex and pluralistic process which is both situated and embodied: sensemaking is making sense(s) with the senses. This process is explored in my research through a methodology I call ‘scrapbooking’.
Since 2016 I have been working on and developing the conceptual, methodological, therapeutic and pedagogic possibilities of scrapbooking (autoethnographically, one-on-one, in groups and with organisations) as a means of permitting multiple and inclusive modes of non-linear, non-narrative expression and representation.
My master’s research piloted both hard and digital scrapbooking (appropriating social media platforms to act as digital tools) in order to explore how women experience and define men’s everyday intrusive behaviours.
I am now beginning my second year of doctoral study and undertaking empirical research with sexual violence victim-survivors and the organisations and practitioners charged with aiding them. I’m interested both in accessing the expertise of the latter on the issues which victim-survivors face and also in observing their creation of cultures of knowledge which inform wider debates.