Impact and Engagement
Women of Influence has been conceived as more than a research project. While we are committed to learning deeply about the experiences and contexts of the young women of OMIAASEC with whom we are working, we also seek to support the amplification of their voices through activities that we hope raise awareness of their work with a variety of different groups – other academics but also activists, artists, educators, filmmakers, policymakers – from across the globe.
This page focuses on the range of engagement work we’ve engaged in – with presentations, discussions, workshops that always include the perspective and voices of the young women themselves through their films and their audio recordings that have become creative manifestos and taken on lives of their own. In this way, the core project team has taken on the role of ‘researcher-advocate/ally’ and continues to develop this side of the work, in conjunction with our community partners, through toolkits and educator workshops.
In May 2025, the project was recognized at the annual University of East Anglia Impact and Innovation Awards.
Please contact Project lead Sarah Barrow (sarah.barrow@uea.ac.uk) if you would like to discuss a potential presentation, workshop or collaboration.
ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS
17 July 2025, UEA Norwich: IMSIU Summer Programme
Sarah Barrow presented the project to a group of 19 young women from Saudi Arabia as part of their four-week accredited interdisciplinary programme at UEA on Leadership and Sustainability. After the presentation and screening of several of the films, the women discussed the project in relation to the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals and concluded that the project aligns itself effectively with most of those, especially in relation to Gender Equality (5), Clean Water and Sanitation (6), Reduced Inequalities (10) and Sustainable Communities (11): THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development They affirmed that they found the women of OMIAASEC very inspiring, at the same noticing differences from their own experiences and contexts in relation to concepts of history, culture and indigeneity, as well as lack of resources. We also discussed the value of using creative methods as forms of engagement, and supporting different styles of leadership and participation.
Outcomes include utilizing this feedback in the development of further workshops and project toolkits and to continue the discussion of UNSDGs in relation to this work.
18 June 2025, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, Faculty Research Conference: Dialogues
Sarah Barrow was invited to give the Keynote presentation at the annual research conference of the Faculty of Faculty of Arts, Humanities, Education & Social Sciences.
This was followed by a wide-ranging discussion with colleagues from various disciplines who were interested in exploring further topics such as: the project as an example of Ecofeminism-in-action; decolonized and decentered approaches to collaborative work; the challenges and values of participatory fieldwork; the need for (self)care and developing frameworks to formalize this; the imperative of taking time to build trust including by doing deep research on the socio-political contexts of the community partners.
Outcomes included noting further work to be done on developing a framework for researcher/partner self-care in fieldwork; incorporating the concept of ‘Eco-feminism’ more explicitly into future research, toolkit and engagement work.
6 June 2025, UEA, Norwich: Humanities in Flux
Sarah Barrow was invited to share findings from the project with PhD researchers from the Schools of Politics, Philosophy and Area Studies, and from Media Languages and Communication. Discussion focused on the value and challenges on working in interdisciplinary research and innovation teams and the need to devote time at the inception of a project of this type to learn each other’s approaches, needs, ways of working, strengths and vulnerabilities, and disciplinary insights.
18 February 2025, Arts and Humanities Graduate School at UEA, Norwich, UK: Collaboration and Co-Creation of Knowledge: Experiences of Fieldwork
Sarah Barrow and filmmaker Karoline Pelikan were invited to deliver a presentation to PhD researchers from across the University of East Anglia at an event conceived in collaboration with UEA’s Fieldwork Support Network and the national Network of Women Doing Fieldwork. They outlined the project from the perspective of working in collaboration with potentially vulnerable community groups, focusing on the ethics, emotions, ethos and logistics of remote fieldwork.
Outcomes: Some of the most interesting points of discussion included: the ethics of care and how best to share practices towards formalization of a framework that might work across disciplines engaged in complex fieldwork situations; and striking a balance between the value of in-person fieldwork in order to build trust and the need to consider the environmental damage of transcontinental travel, one solution for which being the engagement of locally-based co-ordinators.
19 July 2024, Memory Studies Association (MSA) Annual Conference, Lima, Peru: Memories in Transit
The project was showcased as part of a UEA-led panel titled: (Trans)national Memory Itineraries: Migrations, Displacements, Diasporas. The presentation explored the dynamics of community, cinema, memory, identity formation (and disruption) and knowledge transfer across generations.
Attention was drawn to the project’s interdisciplinary partnership approach that mobilises audio-visual methods as tools of engagement. Topics discussed included the urgent need to understand more deeply the role of women as (different kinds of) leaders and influencers in their communities, and the issues of most concern to them as women of the Peruvian Amazon (gender discrimination, intergenerational knowledge transfer, climate emergency), as well as generators of local solutions with potentially global impact.
2022 (Bath), 2023 (Belfast), Amsterdam (2024)
We presented the project over 3 consecutive years at the annual conferences of this well-established and highly respected multi and interdisciplinary subject association, stretching across the arts, humanities and social sciences. SLAS members engage in highly innovative work to address that addresses region’s most pressing issues, and the Society provides a strong community to support all scholars working in the field.
Outcomes: Participation in these events enabled us to learn more about the context of our work, to share emerging ideas with others with an interest in Latin America, to prepare the groundwork for research publications relating to the project, and to learn how to develop a framework for future policy work.
1-3 July 2024, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands: In/Justice in Latin America and the Caribbean
The project was showcased as part of a women-led panel with academic colleagues from the University of Portsmouth, Edinburgh and UCL, along with independent Peruvian artist Claudia Martinez Garay. This roundtable discussion explored the intersections between protest, justice, and gender as articulated through art and media. Framed as a discussion of an activist nature, we drew on feminist attitudes towards violence against women of Latin America, inside and outside of academia. Taking an eco-feminist perspective, we paid attention to the ways in which art and media connect acts of violence and contests the spatial practices (controlled movement or re-direction of bodies, mapping of territories) that are associated with them. We discussed the ways in which activist art, including film, reimagines and redesigns space, creating counter-hegemonic spaces and practices which stage or invite the ‘unlearning’ of existing choreographies of power, and which reclaim space for excluded bodies. We invited discussion of how feminist protestors have formed a framework around which to become symbols of anger, hope and the collective, productive energy of protest, along with consideration of the ‘unlearning’ of existing choreographies of power, so as to reclaim space for often-excluded perspectives.
30-31 March 2023, Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland: Narratives and Contexts of Resistance
In 2023 we were invited to join a panel with Dr Itandehui Jansen (University of Edinburgh) and Prof. Deborah Shaw (University of Portsmouth). We focused on the methods developed in the project in the context of a global pandemic with a focus on how our Indigenous partners have helped to rethink issues of sustainability, resilience and alternative strategies to respond to gender dynamics, political ecologies and environmental challenges.
21-22 April, University of Bath: Latin America in times of political mistrust and global pandemic
We presented early findings from the project, including the challenges of working together during Covid-19, as part of a panel convened by Inge Boudewijn (Northumbria University), Katy Jenkins (Northumbria University) and Sofia Zaragocin (Universidad San Francisco de Quito).
A wide range of literature documents how indigenous, afro-descendent and otherwise marginalised groups of people in Latin America are disproportionately affected by climate-change induced environmental degradation, extractivism and associated socio-environmental conflicts, as well as institutional and everyday racism and discrimination. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the increased barriers to healthcare these groups often face. Many of these conditions are rooted in a long history of colonialism.
In recent years, growing calls from critical geography, development studies and Latin American studies, particularly from the global South, have focused on the need to decolonise research and recognise knowledges that have been marginalised in Anglophone academia. This panel brought together papers exploring how decolonial approaches can provide theoretical and methodological tools for understanding and addressing the intersecting inequalities produced, and exacerbated, by natural resource extraction, environmental degradation and environmental crises in Latin America. It also discussed the challenges and discomforts of doing decolonial work on environmental crisis, both for global North scholars, and other members of international research teams, as well as approaches for grappling with different positionalities and privileges within teams and projects. This is particularly pertinent in the context of working together remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, that has made travel to field sites all but impossible for many scholars.
15 June 2024, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Annual Conference, Bogotá, Colombia (online): Reaction and Resistance: Imagining Possible Futures in the Americas
The project was showcased as part of an interdisciplinary panel on Environment, Indigenous Resistance and Feminist territorialities, with a presentation titled ‘Female leadership and Agency in Amazonian Peru’, focusing on the value of the interventions made by women across the generations towards community survival – at the heart of culture, knowledge transfer, and responses to climate change.
10 November 2023, Annual Conference, University of Warwick, UK
SCREENINGS AND SPECIAL EVENTS
10 October 2023, Catholic University of Peru, Lima
Hosted by PUCP’s UNESCO Chair for Gender Equality in Higher Education
Joined by the women of OMIAASEC, we presented the project to a packed gathering of academics, artists, activists and filmmakers. The event included readings of the manifesto for change created by the young women of Junín, along with a discussion led by filmmaker Sofía Velásquez Núñez. The aim of the event was to draw attention to the ambitions, challenges, work, influence and power of the young women – as individuals and as members of the OMIAASEC.
Mujeres que influyen: proyecto colaborativo con jóvenes indígenas -Vicerrectorado de Investigación
29 April 2023, Norwich, UK
We presented screenings of the project films at the Green Film Festival at UEA, a festival that foregrounds powerful movements of environmental resistance, activism and change, particularly as these affect womxn, non-humans, young people and indigenous communities, with events that aim to create spaces of dialogue, information exchange and community support.
11 March 2023, Izmir, Turkey
Official selection at the International Women Filmmakers Festival, Izmir, Turkey
Screenings at the 6th edition of this international festival of women’s filmmaking.
8 March 2023, La Merced, Peru
Screenings and presentations as part of International Women’s Day event at La Merced, with Kely Yesmin Quicha Martínez and Victoria Chicmana.
SPECIAL ENGAGEMENT EVENTS
30 January – 3 February 2023, UK
The events noted below were opportunities to raise awareness with various groups, as listed, as well as for the project team – from UEA, Lima, Junín – to come together for a week in the UK, resulting in numerous ideas for further work. These events followed the Community screenings (in Junín) which took place in August 2022, which are detailed elsewhere on this project website. It was vital for us to share the films with the communities first, in the places and spaces where they had been made, and to learn more about the issues they raise through the discussions the screenings prompted with the friends, families, neighbours and community leaders of the young women of OMIAASEC.
Student Engagement Day, Friday, 3 February 2023, hosted by New Area Studies at UEA:
Project screenings, discussion and workshops (craft and design) convened and delivered by the project team including Karen Pamela and Wenddy Delia from OMIAASEC, for students and staff at UEA. Accompanied by UEA student Journalism teamParliamentary Engagement Event: Wednesday 1 February 2023, House of Lords, Westminster, UK:
Screening and discussion convened and delivered by the project team including Karen Pamela and Wenddy Delia from OMIAASEC, for parliamentarians, press, charity stakeholders.Public Engagement Event: Monday, 30 January 2023, Bloomsbury Studio London, UK:
Screening and discussion convened and delivered by the project team including Karen Pamela and Wenddy Delia from OMIAASEC, for public, friends, colleagues. Hosted by Area Studies at UEA.