Jessica Whitbread
Jessica Whitbread works in the realm of social practice and community art, often merging art and activism to engage a diversity of audiences in critical dialogue. She prides herself in her ability to make difficult conversations seem fun and effortless. Whitbread often uses her own her own body and experience as a queer woman living with HIV, as the primary site of her work. In her head the entire world is a pantless tea party, full of awkward yet playful interactions that challenge hetero-normative and mainstream assumptions about bodies, sexuality and desire. Her ongoing projects include No Pants No Problem, Tea Time, and PosterVIRUS (AIDS ACTION NOW!).
Whitbread presently is the youngest and first queer woman to be elected as the Global Chair for the International Community of Women Living with HIV, the founder of the first International Chapter of Young Women, Adolescents and Girls living with HIV as well as a Steering Committee member for AIDS ACTION NOW!
Although she might seem like she is a girl about town, she can most often be found in her house, baking food for friends and hanging out with her Pomeranian.
Tea Time as Participatory Research: Building Communities of Women Living with HIV
Tea Time as Participatory Research: Mapping Informal Networks of Women Living with HIV is a community- based research project that brings women living with HIV together using the Tea Time method (Whitbread, 2012) . The project was designed to highlight the health needs of women living with HIV in a North American context as well as to explore the application of the Tea Time method as a community-building tool. The initial research included thirty-seven participants who attended one of eight tea parties in seven cities. After the original research phase was complete, Tea Time continued as a personal project.
Proposed KTE Activities:
1) Design, produce and disseminate a final manual and photo booklet (drafts of which were created as part of my masters final project)
2) Professionally print the Tea Time photos for exhibition purposes
3) Host two additional Tea Time workshops for women living with HIV
4) Present Tea Time at CAHR 2013.
1&2: The network building nature of the research was ensured through an exchange of letters and teacups among the women. At each tea party the women were asked to bring a teacup and a letter, which would later be passed on to another woman at a subsequent tea party. For the documentation of the research, each letter and teacup was photographed. Originally the photos were shared and presented in a small photo exhibit and a booklet was created using basic software. The photos are powerful, but are still in an amateur state. The SRC funding would allow for a designer to use appropriate software to remaster the images and format and design a booklet.
3&4: While there have been a number of Tea Time gatherings during the research phase as well as afterwards, there has yet to be a workshop that has acted as training on how women living with HIV can start Tea Time groups in their areas. These workshops could possibly build the capacity for forty women to facilitate or start social support groups in their area with other women living with HIV. The workshop would draw from the research and using the booklet as a guide, the SRC funding would allow for two workshops to be held targeting women living with HIV in Canada.
Potential Impact:
One of the main findings from this research is that women living with HIV want to and have been using Tea Time as a tool to self organize and build their social support networks. In the future, this could lead to other exciting new research and program possibilities. As an arts-based, participatory method, Tea Time can also lead to innovative advancements on how to meaningfully involve and engage women living with HIV in research and programing. This can happen by exploring different methods of doing community-based research with marginalized groups that also provide both individual and community capacity building and knowledge sharing. If women living with HIV are actively engaged in ways that they feel are meaningful, this can also have long term affects that will enable other initiatives in the HIV response such as health, dignity and prevention initiatives.
[1]The Tea Time is a method that is performative and dialectical using trickster pedagogy masked in colonialist ‘tea party’ traditions. Based in feminist and popular education frameworks, Tea Time shifts the power relations by enabling a collective, communal learning experience as a means to create and explore group knowledge. As a contemporary model of feminist consciousness raising groups, Tea Time brings diverse communities together to deconstruct our understanding of time, place and social relationships, in warm, inclusive, food filled environments.
[2]Whitbread, J. (2012). Tea Time: An Overview of an Emerging Method. (MES final paper) Toronto: York University.
