Exploring contracepting through poetry: a creative, arts-based methods workshop

Earlier this month, Marie Larsson and Autumn Roesch-Marsh hosted a workshop using poetry to explore contraception – an extension of Marie’s research on young people’s contraceptive negotiations, and Autumn’s work using creativity and the arts to co-create research. In this blog, Kaveri Qureshi sits down with them to discuss their collaboration, and how the workshop went.

Lets start with you, Marie – what gave you the idea that contraception might be good subject matter for creative research methods? How did you and Autumn come together for this workshop?

I began researching young people’s experiences and practices with contraception almost ten years ago. One aspect that has been very important for me has been to highlight how complex and multifaceted, what I refer to as, “the work of contracepting” is, especially for young people. It often involves complicated and ambivalent emotions around responsibility, fairness, risks, and pleasure, and can be hard to articulate. This is why I think creative research methods like poetry writing can be generative – as a way of telling and sharing different stories of what it can mean to contracept and giving space to more the affective aspects of these experiences.

When I first started researching contraception, I was a master’s student here in Edinburgh. That’s when I first met Autumn, as a student in a wonderful course she co-led, “Working with Self and Others in Qualitative Research”. So, I knew of her work and her connection with the Binks Hub. After returning to the University of Edinburgh as a Research Fellow, I saw that she’d organised these guided poetry workshops that sounded brilliant, so I reached out asking if she might be interested in facilitating a similar workshop but on contracepting!

Autumn, what made you want to use poetry as a research method?

I have been working for some time with poetry as a method, both for wellbeing and to support research.  I began to use poetry because it can be more accessible to some readers. Also, the language of poetry does different things.  It can help to clarify meaning, but also to open it out and make meanings more open.  Poetry can also help people to connect emotionally to the topic under consideration, enhancing empathy and embodied understanding.  

Marie, what gave you the most joy, about the workshop?

How generous, engaged, creative, and vulnerable everyone who took part were – with themselves, with others, with me, and with the stories from the young people from my thesis.  It was also a delight to have Cassandra Harrison there as a live scribe, creating a visual record of the event in real time!

Autumn, how about you?

Writing and reading poetry takes courage.  Especially in a room of people who don’t know each other well.  I was impressed by how fully people engaged, but also reminded of how this approach of working with poetry engages people – even people who might not think they can write poetry.  There was much generosity and goodwill in the room and it was a joy to be part of enabling this.  

Marie, do you feel that the use of creative research methods aligns with feminist ethics? If so, how?

My use of creative research methods definitely stems from my feminist ethics – from a desire to challenge what is considered “proper” ways of producing knowledge, to emphasise the subjectivity and emotionality of knowing, and to come together with others to find connection, experience joy and cultivate solidarity.

Biographies:

Marie Larsson is postdoctoral researcher at the Usher Institute in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Her PhD in Sociology, from Lund University, examined "the work of contracepting" and young people's experiences and practices with contraceptives in Sweden.

Autumn Roesch-Marsh is Senior Lecturer in Social Work, and Co-director of the Binks Hub, a University network of academics researchers, community members, practitioners and policy-makers using creativity and the arts to co-create research that makes a difference to people’s lives.

Kaveri Qureshi is one of GENDER.ED’s Associate Directors.