CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Atabekyan, Arpenik |
|---|---|
| Title | Mapping Women???S Exclusions From Many Publics: The Reproduction Of Gendered Spaces In Urban Yerevan |
| Summary | In 2015 I was a participant of “Acting Together” Armenian-Turkish reconciliation project and had a chance to work on mapping post-traumatic memories of the Armenian genocide survivors. While survivors were asked to tell their memories within the scopes of oral history project, they were also given an option to draw a simple map of their villages or towns. Later on those imagined and memory-based maps were compared to the updated maps of those cities and this served as a basis of further analysis for the project participants. Upon seeing the city mapped according to the affective experiences of women, it was the first time that I realized how powerful this form of layered, spatialized geographical tool can be if it is made ‘readable’ for many kinds of audiences. Following the completion of that project, I began to explore similar mapping projects worldwide in order to understand the methods and common tendencies within this developing area within the digital humanities. The idea of ‘mapping’ gendered exclusions in Yerevan came about as the result of a simple need to find a method of layering and pinning down the places where I have encountered aggressive or threatening gaze or verbal harassment. Based on the preliminary research in the field, I realized that map is the most efficient and accessible way for users to visualize and speak up about the issue. For that reason, my project consists of two parts: the map with women’s visualized stories of harassment in Yerevan and the theoretical and methodological part of the work that intends to set a larger frame to understand the topography of violence in public spaces. The theoretical frame of the thesis sets to analyze the dynamics between the traditional education (promoted by mothers) and the spatial projections of that education on the city landscape. The affective interaction between the bodies and the spaces sets a theoretical frame in order to understand the spatial experiences of city-dweller women and the images of places for them shaped through those experiences. Lastly, as initially designed, this project is intended to be an open-access platform and participatory mapping project. In addition to the academic contribution, the map sets up a possibility for women in Yerevan outside of the academic circles to have a safe virtual space and to share their silenced and tabooed spatial experiences. |
| Supervisor | Jones-Gailani, Nadia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/atabekyan_arpenik.pdf |
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