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Embodied Everyday

Click here to view 'Filled to the Brim', a booklet and outcome of the above project, led by Dr Wren Radford.

Filled to the Brim (2022)

Jump to: Overview | Videos | Excerpts




Overview

The Embodied Everyday has been a collaborative research project between Dr Wren Radford and members of Poverty Truth groups in Glasgow and Greater Manchester. Over this period, participants have reflected on their everyday experiences of inequality and of addressing inequality through keeping creative journals and meeting in small reflection workshops over Zoom, facilitated by Wren. Filled to the Brim is a collection of text and images drawn from these journals and workshops, with the intention of sharing these different perspectives on the everyday nature of inequality and also the ordinary ways that people survive, care for one another, and seek to create change.

You can read through this digital resource above. Once you have agreed to cookies, you can make the book bigger by increasing the size of the browser window, and by clicking on the drop-down menu (the lines on the black background) and selecting ‘full screen mode’.

Please note that the resource contains a number of reflections on difficult experiences, particularly around: the stigma associated with poverty; racism, including medical racism; ableism and negative attitudes toward disability; mental health; cancer and cancer treatment; specific symptoms of chronic illness; police brutality and psychiatric restraint. Participants and researcher have thought carefully about whether and how to share these experiences, and how they are held alongside various different experiences in the book.

A PDF download with image descriptions will be available shortly.


Videos

Listen to participants talking about their experience of the collaborative research project in the videos below.

In this first video, participants discuss what taking part in the project was like for them and what surprised them about the project.

In this next video, participants talk about what they are taking away from the project and what’s important to them about how Filled to the Brim is presented.

In this final video, participants reflect on the pages, images, and phrases of the Filled to the Brim book that stood out to them, and what they hope other people might take away from engaging in the Filled to the Brim book.


Excerpts

Below is a small taster of some of the pages in the Filled to the Brim book. (Please click images to enlarge them.) (Images are provided with image descriptions; to download an index of these, click here.)

Double page spread with faded light pink and purple shapes in the background: large circles and a cluster of abstract hexagons and five-sided shapes that look a little like houses. There are pencil lines curving and scratching across the page, and tiny dried petals of a flower look like they are sitting on top of the paper in the top of the left right-hand page and the bottom of the left hand page. Midway down the left had side of the page is a scrap of newspaper that has been painted over with white paint and had the words ‘embodied everyday’ stamped on them in black ink in a typewriter lettering. Across both pages there is text that reads: The pages in this book are part of The Embodied Everyday project which has explored how the impacts of inequality and poverty are felt and experienced in everyday life but a so. no It Is In dai acns of creativity of care of standing up for ourselves and one another that we find ways of navigating surviving scraping by resisting and maybe flourishing even in the smallest of ways and in these actions, we start to shape alternative meanings different ways of living and seeing a way of knowing something's worth quite apart from what has been decided about us by the 'powers that be' this isn't a romantic notion we don't look through rose-tinted glasses we understand and live the harms and heartbreaks we keep these firmly in view (how could we not, when we live with them daily) but we also know our lives are many, multiple, tangled, true full of contrasts and contradictions difficulty, but beauty in between we can't be boiled down reduced to an essence an Issue a budget a headline a talking point an agenda we peeked under the surface of what is ordinary even mundane reflected on what might pass you by and we found it filled to the brim A double page spread with a dark grey textured background. Across both pages are abstract shapes of grass seed heads and blades of grass, cut out from different kinds of paper in white and seafoam green. There are some that are newspaper with unreadable print, there are some with small, neat handwriting, and there are some with printed text with words that can only just be picked out: ‘ethical’, ‘inequality’, ‘participation’. There is a shadow of these shapes to the left of the page. There are some scratches and textures across the page. On the upper left hand side there is text that reads: These journals partly reflect that there's more to our lives than what people think of as 'poverty'. We still live, we still have our lives. The poverty is always there, like a backdrop, to the daily goings on we have as human beings. Life is not a static thing. Double page spread on a white background. On the left hand page there is a series of stacked boxes in dark grey and black, they roughly form a grid, but are not neat, they sit at slightly off angles to each other. On some of the boxes there are words, which form the phrase: ‘today I feel as if I will never get out of the bleak box of poverty, always trapped, no escape.’ The boxes in the bottom line start to fall out of the grid, leading to a larger box escaping from the grid that reads ‘but on good days…’ This forms the bottom of a random stack of brightly coloured boxes set at playful angles to each other on the right-hand page. A red box reads: book club on zoom’. A purple box has the word ‘hope’. It overlaps with the pink box that has the text on it: ‘phoning friends I’ve made through these groups to chat and laugh and cheer each other up’. A green box in the centre of the page reads ‘challenging’. A turquoise box has the text: ‘being involved in food justice movements’. It overlaps with and orange box that reads ‘uplifting’. A large pink box reads: consultation on disability benefits – disabled people know what’s best for them’. A dark green box has the text: ‘reply from my MSPs, hope in future’. A red box has the text: ‘women’s drop in and support service’. The same squares as the bleak box page, spread across two pages. They are in bright colours of orange, pink, green, with some squares being cut from bright drawings of trees and flowers in green, pink, and orange. Toward the middle of the pages, there starts to be more black and grey squares, and by the bottom two rows, they are predominantly black and grey, with only one bright orange square on the bottom row. Over the top of these squares on the right hand page is a newspaper scrap that has been painted over with white paint. On top of this there are the words written in black typed font: I look out of my window onto trees and the river Clyde. It's uplifting to have green space to look at in the city. I spend hours looking out of the window, listening to the birds. It's calming and de-stressing. I love when there is snow, and everything looks clean, fresh, and bright. It takes away the stress of worrying if my electric will last until my next payment. 6 days left to go, only £8 left, use £2.50 a day. No chance. Will have to borrow again. Only robbing Peter to pay Paul. Double page spread on a white background. Five and six sided shapes of slightly different rotations and sizes are stamped across the page in black and grey. Handwritten words in a curly font are placed next to each of the shapes, spaced across the page. In the centre of the page are the typed words ‘A list of things my body feels everyday’. The handwritten words read, from the top corner to the bottom corner: sore, tingles, numb, stiff, delicate, ringing, burning, buzzing, empty, upset, nausea, particular, flat, weak, tight, fidgety, restless, useless, foggy, cold, exhausted. Double page spread on a white background. There are leaf shapes from different kinds of trees stamped across the page, falling from the top to the middle of the page in different shades of green, with stamps from different ferns, grasses, and thistles stamped across the page from the bottom up, in different shades of green. The stamps all overlap to create a chaotic randomness, but also a sense of beauty. There are two gaps in the middle of the right and left hand pages, with black typed text that reads: I wanted to include a picture of nature because I see how the chaos builds the beauty. All those different plant shapes, colours, growing patterns, all layered together, make a calm. serene. and beautiful scene. This is how I feel every day; like the chaos of my health enforced lifestyle can still actually build up to have moments of true beauty, calm, and peacefulness