Embodied Maps: Critical Considerations for Exploring Identity, Power, and Knowledge Through the Body

There is a dominant biomedical narrative of mental health formed by psychology practitioners of what ‘disorderly’ ways of being looks like (Martinez-Mendia et al., 2024; Masters, 2023; Runswick-Cole et al., 2024). This dominant narrative has seeped into popular culture and influenced lay understanding of mental health, in which more people continue to medicalize their everyday experiences and relationships (Hollon, 2024; Masters, 2023). Medicalized language can hegemonize individual conceptions of psychological experiences, overshadowing the conceptions of marginalized communities (i.e. BIPOC individuals) whose perspectives were largely ignored while the biomedical narrative was developed. Body mapping is an artistic embodied method where one creates a life-sized drawing of their body and creatively adorns it with various images, words, and phrases telling a story of the emotions and feelings they perceive through their body (Jokela-Pansini, 2021). When employed in mental health research, body mapping allows individuals to resist medicalized language by expressing their psychological experiences in visual art modalities, limiting oral communication often over relied upon in qualitative mental health research. Drawing from an arts-based research project that explored the lived experience of Black women managing PPD, this workshop foregrounds body mapping as a critical feminist methodological approach. Through practicing group body mapping, participants will examine how the artistic method can support marginalized communities reclaiming and voicing a new preferred view of their embodied psychological reality thereby disrupting negative assumptions that exist in the dominant biomedical narrative (Jager et al., 2016). Objectives: 1) Join ongoing conversations about the value of using beyond oral artistic methods (e.g., body mapping) to engage marginalized populations in stigmatized topics (2) Identify how critical theories shape the implementation of artistic methods.