Why We Gathered Around Stories
We came together around stories not because they are new, but because they continue to matter – and to trouble – feminist research on violence against women and girls (VAWG).
We write from within feminist research and movement-building spaces that are increasingly asked to prove their impact, often through statistics and numbers that erase humanity and complex narratives, neatly packaged outcomes, and emotionally compelling narratives crafted for institutional and donor audiences. In this context, storytelling has become one of the most visible ways feminist work is made legible to institutional power. Yet this visibility comes with tensions.
In research environments shaped by shrinking funding, intensifying backlash against women’s rights, the rise of far-right extremism, and coordinated anti-gender agendas, stories are increasingly asked to perform specific work: to justify programmes, demonstrate value, and withstand political scrutiny. At the same time, dominant evidence frameworks continue to marginalize complexity, silence refusal, and strip stories of their relational and political contexts. When this happens, it deflates women’s reality, hides voices, and reinforces structural violence, they claim that their research intends to bring to light.
For many of us, stories are where harm lives, where care is needed, and where power quietly operates.
This piece emerges from a collective reflection within COFEM’s Feminist Research Working Group, during a global learning conversation that drew 171 registrations and 34 participants from across regions to the informal discussion. Participants included VAWG/GBV researchers and practitioners across diverse contexts and positionalities, who paused to ask:
- What happens when storytelling is treated as evidence?
- Which stories from your feminist research do you carry with you, stories that moved you, shifted something, or continue to stay with you?
Rather than offering guidance on “how to do storytelling well”, we sit with the contradictions that feminist researchers encounter when stories travel across research, advocacy, and funding spaces.
We approach storytelling not as a tool, but as a site of power – one that demands ethical accountability, methodological clarity, and political honesty. Throughout this piece, quotations are drawn directly from participant reflections shared during the session, with care taken to preserve anonymity and collective ownership.
We write from within a global feminist movement-building network working to end VAWG across diverse contexts. From this position, we are accountable to members who produce knowledge from lived experiences, movement spaces, and frontline practice, as well as to the institutional environments in which feminist research circulates.
This location brings responsibility: to hold stories with care, resist extractive uses of feminist knowledge, and to remain attentive to how power shapes whose stories are heard, funded, and legitimized within EVAWG research and advocacy spaces.
Storytelling as Feminist and Decolonial Research Practice
Within EVAWG research, storytelling is often positioned as supplementary, something that “humanizes” findings rather than producing them in its own right. Participants noted that intersecting systems of power shape storytelling in EVAWG research. Race, caste, class, disability, sexuality, migration status, age, and colonial histories influence. These identities determine whose story is invited, whose accounts are considered credible, and which narratives are most likely to be funded or amplified. Feminist researchers have long challenged this hierarchy, arguing that stories are not anecdotes but situated knowledge, shaped by lived experience, social relations, and structural violence.
During the session, participants reflected on a range of feminist storytelling practices, including storytelling circles, body mapping, collective memory mapping, digital storytelling, and story stitching. While varied in form, these practices share a commitment to disrupt extractive research logics. They refuse the idea that stories are resources to be mined, and instead frame storytelling as a relational process that demands consent, care, and accountability.
Within a feminist work to decolonise what counts as knowledge, storytelling has the power to unsettle dominant narratives and notions. It resists linear narratives of harm and recovery, challenges donor-driven demands for simplified “impact stories,” and foregrounds collective, embodied, and historically situated ways of knowing. Feminist storytelling does not merely add voices to existing evidence frameworks; it questions the frameworks themselves.
During the session, one participant reflected, “In my context, the story people want is not the story women want to tell.”
Stories that conform to dominant expectations of victimhood, resilience, or measurable change often travel more easily, while stories that challenge institutional norms or expose structural violence are more likely to be questioned, reshaped, or excluded.
Another participant shared, “Sometimes I could feel a story being reshaped – not violently, but subtly – until it fit what was expected.”
Participants also reflected on how feminist storytelling practices themselves can reproduce exclusion if power is left unexamined. Choices around language, format, accessibility, authorship, and facilitation can unintentionally marginalize those who do not fit normative assumptions about voice, participation, or safety. Without ongoing reflexivity, even feminist approaches risk reinforcing hierarchies of whose knowledge is seen, heard, and valued within EVAWG research.
What Stories Taught Us in EVAWG Research
When stories move into research reports, donor proposals, or advocacy campaigns, they begin to do different work.
Participants reflected on moments when stories were subtly reshaped to fit institutional narratives – resilience foregrounded over refusal, endurance privileged over anger, hope elevated above ambiguity. These moments raised questions about who sets the terms under which stories count as evidence, and what incentives shape which stories circulate, and which remain untold and unheard.
Several learnings emerged, not as conclusions, but as shifts in understanding.
- Survival is defined by the survivor.
Participants spoke of research encounters where women’s choices did not align with external expectations of rescue, empowerment, or visible change. These moments challenged researchers to reconsider whose definitions of safety, resistance, and success shape research narratives, and whose realities are overlooked when they do not fit dominant frameworks.
Participants shared moments that fundamentally shifted how they understood survival and distance in research. As one participant recounted, “She asked to be saved from her husband. And then she chose to stay. That moment taught me that survival is defined by the survivor’s choice – not by what I, or the system, expected.”
Another participant reflected, “My daughter’s experience of violence completely changed how I relate to stories. I can no longer pretend distance is neutral.”
- Silence is also knowledge.
In EVAWG research, pauses, refusals, contradictions, and unfinished narratives often carry as much meaning as spoken testimony. Feminist storytelling practices create space to honour silence without forcing it into coherence or translation, therefore keeping women’s and girls’ voices central rather than filtered through researcher interpretation.
As one participant noted, “Not every silence is a gap in data. Sometimes silence is the most intentional thing someone offers.”
This challenges advocacy-driven research environments that rely on continuous storytelling to sustain visibility and funding. Silence, refusal, and non-narration emerge not as gaps to be filled, but as boundaries that deserve respect.
Another participant cautioned, “There is pressure to keep stories moving, to keep producing them, even when stopping would be more ethical.”
- Care disrupts research timelines.
Participants described moments when storytelling unsettled research timelines, blurred professional boundaries, or activated researchers’ own experiences of violence, or demands of care that sit outside project timelines and budgets.
Participants shared practical examples of care emerging within research spaces.
One participant described, “Solidarity sometimes looked like agreeing on a safe word: a shared, agreed signal that allowed participants to pause, step back, or redirect when emotional limits were reached.”
Another participant asked, “What do we do when someone breaks down while telling their story, and we are expected to keep collecting data?”
These moments raised difficult questions about neutrality, distance, and the emotional labour embedded in feminist research, labour that is rarely acknowledged or resourced.
The burden of ethical care is too often unevenly placed on feminist researchers and communities, while institutions continue to benefit from the circulation of their stories.
Importantly, participants resisted the idea that the solution lies in “better storytelling.” As one participant reflected,
“The problem isn’t that we need better stories. The problem is who is asking for them, what they are expected to do, and whose interests they serve.”
This reflection prompted broader discussion about whose voices remain outside the frame, and how institutional demands shape which stories are told, funded, and amplified.
- Ethics Is Not a Checklist
Across conversations, ethics in feminist storytelling emerged as an ongoing relational practice rather than a checklist.
Participants shared experiences of holding stories that surfaced grief, trauma, and collective memory, often without sufficient institutional support for either participants or researchers. Feminist researchers continue to navigate ethical tensions, such as:
- What does it mean to hold a story when someone breaks down during research?
- How do we respond when funders or institutions demand stories that fit particular narratives of harm or hope?
- Who owns a story once it enters a report, a proposal, or a public space?
- When is refusal-to-tell, to publish, to translate – an ethical act?
Rather than resolving these tensions, participants named them as conditions of feminist research under unequal systems.
As one participant reflected, “Sometimes the most ethical thing we did was not include the story at all.”
Feminist storytelling requires ongoing reflexivity rather than a checklist of ethical safeguards. It asks researchers to remain accountable not only to participants, but to the conditions under which stories are circulated, interpreted, and mobilised.
Holding Stories Without Harm: Practical Invitations
This piece does not offer best practices. Instead, it offers invitations:
Before storytelling
- What expectations are placed on stories, and by whom?
- What forms of consent are meaningful in this context, and how can consent be revisited?
- What emotional, relational, and institutional support is in place for both participants and researchers?
During storytelling
- How do we remain present when stories evoke distress or discomfort?
- What does it mean to listen without steering, translating, or extracting?
- How do we respond when silence enters the space?
After storytelling
- Who decides how a story is used, shared, or archived?
- How are contributors acknowledged beyond the moment of data collection?
- What responsibility do researchers carry once a story leaves the room?
In this sense, feminist storytelling is not only a method of care or knowledge production, but a quiet form of resistance to extractive, outcome-driven research economies.
What Feminist Storytelling Makes Possible
As the session closed, participants shared words they were carrying forward: compassion, strength, sisterhood, care, and solidarity. These words point to what feminist storytelling makes possible, not only as a method of research, but as a practice of collective meaning-making and movement-building.
When practised with accountability, feminist storytelling enables a different relationship to evidence: one that values complexity over coherence, accountability over extraction, and collective sense-making over individualized impact. It does not offer easy answers or resolve tensions, but it creates space to ask better questions together.
This piece is offered in that spirit. It belongs to the collective space from which it emerged, and remains open to revision, dialogue, and disagreement.
Rather than resolving the contradictions of storytelling in EVAWG research, it invites us to stay with them: attentively, ethically, and together.
This piece was written by Pupul Lama, Feminist Research Thematic Lead.
