School is a Place I Carry: Body mapping as a living archival practice

In this presentation Vivian Látìnwọ̀-Ọlájídé and Alice Willatt will focus on the body mapping method developed as part of the living archival practice on the Reparative Futures of Education (Repair-Ed) project. Repair-Ed is a research project that examines past and present conditions of racial and class injustices in the primary school system in Bristol, England. It asks what collective responsibility for such injustices might look like and explores ideas for reparative redress. Central to the project is the development of a People’s History of Schooling. This is a ‘living archive’ (Hall, 2001) that is open-ended and multi-modal, drawing on creative methods and embodied participation to bring memories of schooling into conversation with the present and futures.

The seminar will discuss how we brought young people and adults into a body mapping process to explore how school was lived and felt in the everyday worlds of their childhoods. We explore the potential of body mapping to create space for participants to reclaim and reframe their everyday experiences of school, especially those performative experiences that are often left out of official histories (Taylor, 2003). We consider the transformative possibilities of body mapping as a practice of care (Luckett and Bagelman, 2023), reflecting on its power and possibility as a living archival practice. Finally, we share some of the ethical tensions and challenges we encountered along the way.

Hall, S. (2001) Constituting an archive. Third Text, 15(54), 89–92.

Luckett, T. and Bagelman, J. (2023) Body mapping: Feminist-activist geographies in practice. cultural geographies, 30(4), pp.621-627.

Taylor, D. (2025) From the archive and the repertoire. In The Performance Studies Reader (pp. 33-42). Routledge.

Speaker Biographies

Vivian Látìnwọ̀-Ọlájídé is a Research Fellow in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her praxis spans many disciplines to explore the complexities of human relationships. She engages with the felt, social, and structural dynamics that shape interpersonal entanglements where care, intimacy, and love exist alongside conflict, harm, and violence.

Alice Willatt is a Research Fellow in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her interdisciplinary research draws on feminist theory-praxis to explore the transformative possibilities of informal learning in public, community and activist settings for challenging the material-discursive structures that perpetuate social injustices.