“BEFORE YOU JUDGE ME, KNOW MY STORY!”
ABOUT THE KNOW MY STORY PROJECT
Susann Huschke Postdoctoral Research Fellow, African Centre for Migration & Society and School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand
Inspired by the arts-based participatory projects conducted by the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) in collaboration with sex workers and the Sisonke National Sex Worker Movement, I wanted to develop a project working with sex workers to collect/ tell/share their own stories. The resulting project – KNOW MY STORY – included participatory story-telling sessions prompted by photographs taken by participants with their cell phones, photo portraits taken by a professional photographer, the production of a five-minute film trailer, and a creative arts workshop. The project ran between June 2016 and March 2017 in Soweto.
KNOW MY STORY forms part of a larger ethnographic study on the experiences, health practices, and well-being of sex workers in Soweto, South Africa. The project design grew out of my frustration with the limits of more traditional research approaches. As a white European researcher working with Black women in a township, I felt that the interviews I was conducting reinforced unequal power dynamics between the researcher and the interviewees. Interviews are hierarchical by nature, with the focus, questions, and direction of the conversation largely determined by the interviewer. The arts-based participatory approach of the KNOW MY STORY project was an attempt to challenge these power dynamics and hierarchies and to involve sex workers more directly in the production of knowledge about issues that affect them.
Participants chose the project name – KNOW MY STORY – during a group discussion about the aims of the project. They wanted their audiences to listen to what they had to say about themselves, their lives, their struggles, 15
ABOUT THE KNOW MY STORY PROJECT