Personal history - Francesca
In Abruzzo, a region in the middle of Italy, community support and spaces like squares and streets are shared by all age groups. While spaces and practices usually change over time and people shape the use of the spaces more and less freely, usually children, young people or elderly do not participate in the decision making around those spaces. After 9 years as an architect in Italy, I moved to the Netherlands to conduct research on sense of community and belonging through participatory practices and spaces. This topic entangles my personal history and the crack I found in research and policies, especially in newly developed and redeveloped neighbourhoods, in Dutch peripheries and peri-urban. Within this topic, I was also able to adopt my skills in design, creative and art-based methods to help participants from different age groups, genders, social classes and lifestyles engage in participatory planning in their own way of communication and imagining their surroundings.
In general, I believe that warrants and personal history are entwined and shape the way we conduct research, choose our pathways and in my case also aim to contribute to society through research outputs.
My focus on intergenerational communities through creative methods and participatory practices also led me to a gendered perspective of care and carelessness. Belonging to a supportive community is associated with wellbeing and mental health with adults as well as with children and young people. From this perspective, a gendered approach through different life stages can empower groups that are more often marginalised. For women, changing moments in their life cycles, such as birth, menarche, abortion, miscarriages, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, are often aside on the mainstream discourses of space production, social infrastructures, community support and reproductive governance. While social reproduction tended in the past to focus on fertility, birth and childcare, social movements and studies started focusing on abortion rights, sterilization abuse, pregnancy loss, infertility and abortion.
From my personal experience as well as from literature, creative methods can act as research methods as well as interventions to support groups that are more often marginalised, such as children, young people and women, especially in deprived neighbourhoods or contexts of displacement.
To conclude, my trajectory from practice to research and then in connecting research and practice follows a red thread that connect my personal history and cracks/gaps that I found in literature and societal practices. The lens through which we look at our topic might also reflect our ways to look of society and interpret research meanings.
Francesca Ranalli
