National Mall in Washington D.C. displaying the Monument Quilt in 2019

Internship: Memorialising gender-based violence

The Monument Quilt was an activist memorialisation project focused on gender-based violence, which ran between 2013 and 2019 in the USA and Mexico.

Inspired by the rich histories of activist quilting in the US and beyond - most notably the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Underground Railroad Quilts - the project collected 3,000 individual squares, made by survivors of GBV and their allies, which share narratives of victimisation, survival, and mutual support. While the active phase of the Monument Quilt project, in which the squares were created, ended in 2019, some of its pieces can still be viewed in the various archives in which they are stored and, on occasion, on display in museums and art galleries. In addition, you can view all of the pieces of the Quilt are available to view via its digital archive.

This student research internship, led by Dr Harriet Gray, generated a qualitative content analysis of a sample of the digitally archived Quilt squares. The intern, Debbie Faudoa Rodriguez, coded the squares, identifying their themes as well as taking note of their text and design features, and built this into a database. This enabled Debbie to make informed statements about, for example, which themes and ideas are most dominant across the Quilt as a whole. Harriet Gray provided some initial themes to code for, but others arose during the coding process.

Debbie Faudoa Rodriguez presented her important findings at the Peace Lab launch to an audience of academics, students, practitioners and the general public.

quilt saying strong women taught us to quilt and fight

Debbie says:

I participated in the Peace Lab through the “Memorialising gender-based violence” project which feeds into Dr. Gray’s broader study on the memorialization of gender-based violence in the contemporary United States. I sampled about 10% of the squares (about 300) and coded different elements of the quilt, including the messages, design features, and themes. Throughout my participation in this study, I found that the quilt served not only as an output for various emotions and experiences of survivors of gender-based violence but also as a space for feminist care.

Through this project I grew a lot both academically and personally, as I built more experience in qualitative research, as well as how to critically and ethically approach sensitive topics such as gender-based violence. I also learned the power of art in the process of healing, as participants used the squares of the quilt to communicate complex emotions. This also transformed individual experiences into a collective narrative on a public space.

The highlight of my internship was presenting our findings on the inauguration of the Peace Lab at the University of York, as it was very rewarding and allowed me to see how our work can contribute to a larger understanding of violence and conflict. I am very grateful for the opportunity to be part of the Peace Lab, as it has solidified my commitment on contributing further to the field of peace and conflict studies.

Additionally, PhD student Phoebe Martin and Dr Harriet Gray have worked together on a article that will be published in ajournal shortly. The article is called "You are Not Alone: Feminist memorialisation and the present tense of gender-based violence in the Monument Quilt".

The article examines how in recent years a new tide of memorials dedicated to victim-survivors of gender-based violence has started to rise across the world. In this article, we analyse a significant example of this memorialisation movement: the Monument Quilt, a large-scale, collaborative, textile-based craftivist project based in Baltimore and Mexico City. Unlike permanent installations, like statues or parks, the Monument Quilt is a deliberately temporary project with multiple creators. We argue that because of its form, the Monument Quilt opens space for community building, narrative complexity, and an approach to temporality that foregrounds the chronicity of gender-based violence.