A story of her own: finding a space for women to speak beyond the criminal justice system; AH/W003805/1

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This proposed research network will stimulate new debate across the use of the arts in the criminal justice system and support collaboration for the exchange of ideas to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches to the individual stories that women tell. This project will bring together new networks between arts-based practitioners, criminal justice experienced (CJE) women, and academic researchers to explore the potential of storytelling as a source of personal empowerment and social transformation. Focusing on the transformative power of story we will run a series of workshops to bring together artists, practitioners, CJE women, researchers and stakeholders to better understand the formative effects of narrative discourse on both gender and incarceration. With a unique emphasis on collaboration through shared experience and compassion led practice, each workshop will focus on specific aspects of storytelling practice to map the relationship between language and power at the various stages of sentencing, prison and release.Beginning with a critical focus on the stories women use to position themselves within the world, we will interrogate the language through which women are asked to represent their selves and how and in what ways this has become embedded in pre-existing narratives of shame, restitution, recovery and responsibility. Attending to the ways in which women have been given, rather than chosen, the terms of belonging and exclusion, we will examine how narrative techniques, expectations and discourses govern the spaces of success available to women. Divided into five sessions, each with a unique focus, and group led dynamic, we will bring together multi and cross-discipline expertise in theatre, music, creative writing, criminology, policy making, educational reform, women's rights, and lived experience to explore how we give women a space to speak as they are: free from the discourses of institutional identities and gendered expectations, and to represent themselves through terms that belong to them. The workshops will run under the following format:1) Stories about women in prisonWe will collaboratively identify typical stories about women in prison. We will explore how we receive, and inhabit these stories in lived experience and in art. We consider how such narratives may be useful or restrictive, empowering or oppressive. This workshop will introduce participants to theories of narrative structure, gendered processes of representation and the performance of the written and spoken words.2) Disclosing incarcerationFocusing on 'disclosure narratives', this session will unpack the terms of 'disclosure' through which women are forced to adopt a specific discourse of revelation within and after prison. We consider how the terms of disclosure are embedded in systematic structures of shame and denigration that not only prevent women from moving away from their experiences of criminality but impose identities that are not their own. 3) SilenceListening to critical experiences of silence, this session explores the sounds of silence as they are inhabited and experienced by women. We will explore what silence means as it manifests as oppression, abuse, refuge, truth, resistance, refusal and agency.4) Empowering stories?What does it mean to tell your story, as a woman? and as a woman who has been through the criminal justice system? This session focuses on autobiography and life writing within the gendered discourses of care, motherhood and sexuality.5) Telling our stories Drawing on our previous workshops, the final session focusses on producing individual performance pieces in which all participants can express, explore and reclaim their stories. Using music, creative writing, art, sound and movement to chronicle a new and different narrative process in which the women involved find a story which gives them authority as well as authorship.