Aastha Ahuja
Aastha Ahuja is a PhD researcher at Western Sydney University, specialising in qualitative and arts-based health research, with a background in psychology, counselling, and art therapy. Her doctoral research explores women’s embodied experiences of pregnancy and miscarriage across cultural contexts, using body mapping. Her research interests include embodiment, visual and creative research methods, reproductive experiences, cross-cultural research, and methodological innovation in qualitative inquiry. She also teaches in counselling and psychotherapy and one of her interests is making research methods accessible, reflexive, and responsive to lived experience.
Session
The body is rarely experienced as a single moment in time. Across illness, trauma, reproductive loss and recovery, embodied experiences may persist, be interrupted, or be reconfigured rather than simply replaced by what comes next. This presentation introduces the Overlay Body Mapping Method, a methodological development in arts-based qualitative research designed to explore relationships between embodied states across time.
The method was developed through a cross-cultural qualitative study of women’s embodied experiences of pregnancy and miscarriage. Eight women from India and seven from Australia took part in two body-mapping sessions alongside interviews. The women first chose a bodily posture and position to be mapped that they saw as representing their experience of pregnancy. Then, on the same body map, the women chose a second bodily posture and position from which their experience of miscarriage was mapped. The women were given the agency to determine how their miscarriage body related spatially to their first mapping of their pregnant body. As a result, the configurations of the women’s maps were characterised by adjacency, separation, fusion and partial overlap. Body mapping and interviewing occurred concurrently, allowing visual construction and verbal narration to develop dialogically. The process of body mapping and interviewing was video-recorded to retain the embodied process of creating and positioning the maps, rather than relying solely on the completed maps as static visual artefacts.
The presentation demonstrates how overlay body mapping moves beyond a simple comparison of the bodily experience of miscarriage as a “before” and “after” event. By retaining multiple embodied states within a shared visual field, the overlay method makes the visible the spatial and temporal relationship between and across embodied states. Posture, proximity, distance and overlap become analytically meaningful when interpreted alongside participants’ accounts.
Although developed within miscarriage research, Overlay Body Mapping offers broader methodological possibilities for research concerned with bodily transition, illness trajectories, trauma, recovery and other experiences in which previous embodied states are not simply left behind but remain present in changing ways.