In the course of November 2019, two artistic and expressive workshops using the Body Mapping methodology took place in Mombasa to increase the participatory nature of the project. Prompted by self-reflections and group discussions, women and men from the coastal region of Kenya were able to express and visualize their experiences of violent extremism and resistance in the form of a life-size painting called a Body Map. These workshops became a place to nurture, grow and question the role of everyone in their society in the face of violent extremism enabling each participant to ‘picture’ Kenya in all its complexities – historic, culture, ethnic, economic, social and political. This process and its findings have assisted the researchers to better understand how violent extremism is defined at the community level and what resistance to violent extremism means in the local context.
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