Embodiment in qualitative research: collage making with migrant, refugee and asylum seeking women

This article draws on the creative methods deployed in the course of a research project aimed at mapping community-based mental health service provision and other specific services migrant, refugee and asylum seeking women regularly access in London. Although the study made use of a mixed method research design, only the art-based approach deployed as part of the focus groups is discussed. The article contributes to developing embodied research methods in that it explores the bodily engagement of research participants in making a collage and unpacks the implications of this approach for collecting qualitative data involving experiential activity. The body plays a central role in generating qualitative data through the making of the collage and collage-making represents an embodied experience suggesting that how we feel, how we perceive, how we relate to our own bodies and the place they have in the order of things - is contextual, gendered, relational, historically and culturally situated.