Pulling Together Asian Women's Group

This week we completed the collection of postcards for the Our Place project. Members have enjoyed using Canva to make their designs and decide on the finished images. Look out for all four of the postcards in local libraries.

This week at Pulling Together we continued with our Health Is Wealth Comic book. Through the comic strip various scenarios were created by the young women to help raise and resolve some of the issues and dilemmas that affect Old Trafford and South Asian communities that impact on their health and wellbeing. Some of the young women were discussing the fact that they will be moving on to University in September and were beginning to feel a little nervous about their first time living away from home and family.

This week at Pulling Together we have been looking at some of the words we wanted to go into our A-Z of Britishness books. So many suggestions have been given that all deserve a page in our book that perhaps multiple books will be developed for us to display at our end of project event. Using these images we can help the women understand and comprehend the history and customs of Britain and how they impact on South Asians especially the Commonwealth countries. 

This week at Pulling Together we began our latest project “A-Z of Britishness”. In this project we will use creative arts to compile A-Z of Britishness books that will look at what makes us British. In our ever changing society we will discuss what we see as “being British” and what South Asians have taken from Britain during the past 70 years and what we have adopted to create a unique British Asian.

This week at Pulling Together we have been looking at the photos that members have taken on their phones and tablets of the local area. Thank you to everyone that has taken the time over the past few weeks to take the photographs.

This Week at Pulling Together we have been using Canva to produce the Our Place postcards with some of the images that have been taken over the past few weeks and using the conversations we had around Our Place/Old Trafford some of the members managed to create a word cloud describing their home.

This week at Pulling Together members of the group shared videos and images they captured on the equipment purchased through the Digital Grants Scheme. Timelapse videos have captured the local area.

This week we have resumed posting on our website after a short break due to illness. Luckily we have continued to meet up online and in person. We have been fortunate enough to secure funding from Trafford VCFSE Digital Grant Scheme for an online project named Our Place. The Our Place project has used digital photography and laptops & tablets and mobile phones to capture and create
images that reflect our culture & heritage as well as portraying Old Trafford & Gorse Hill as a
culturally diverse and vibrant place in which to live. Using the phones and tablets the group have met up in groups and taken photographs and recorded videos that will be manipulated to create postcards that can be distributed to local libraries to increase awareness of our group.

This week we looked at images of some of the body art/ body images and discussed the image displayed and perhaps the reasons behind sometimes drastic changes. We hoped by the end of the session we could see how we judge people on appearances.We questioned the pros and cons of judging people acknowledging that whilst at times it is inappropriate to judge people on solely their appearance, there are situations where this is important i.e in a job interview.That although people look a certain way i.e a woman with hundreds of piercings or tattoos may look “scary”, once we talk to people our perceptions of the individual may change.We discussed who we thought looked healthy and all girls agreed that the catwalk model looked very unhealthy and unattractive. An initial response was that plastic surgery was for fashion and media purposes. However when discussing this, the women started to also acknowledge plastic surgery as a medical need i.e. breast reconstruction after breast cancer surgery.

We also discussed sensitive issues including female circumcision exploring how we feel about these practices being shocking in western cultures yet acceptable in the cultures which practice these.

This week at Pulling Together we looked at last week’s work sheet and discussed “What my body image/art says about me.” Taking mehndi as an example we decided that it was an artistic display of our culture and South Asian heritage as well as some women wearing it to follow the hadith of the Islamic faith. A wedding ring is a western tradition that members of the group have adopted to show their marital status but it could also be seen as a symbol of conformity. Wearing a Mangal Sutra or Sindoor are also outward symbols of marriage and often seen as a very personal and emotional way to adorn ourselves.