“It’s a mixture of emotions”: Nail technicians’ visual storytelling of work and health

Nail technicians are artists and storytellers. Adapting the arts-based health research (ABHR) methodology of body-map storytelling (Gastaldo et al., 2018) and in partnership with the Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre, 19 Toronto-based nail technicians of varying levels of expertise visualized their reflections on their work and health on life-sized body-maps. Rather than a harm-centered narrative common to some occupational health work, their embodied and experiential knowledges center joys, strengths, pains, stressors, supports, and hopes. Participants’ narratives highlight multiple layers of emotion—in the framing of their work experiences, in their labor as beauty service workers, and in their body-map creation processes. In addition, body-maps have the potential to evoke empathy in audiences and observers. Nail technicians’ stories extend narratives of health and wellbeing beyond the worksite, as their work conditions and experiences are consequential to other aspects of their lives, such as their social health. As a counter-hegemonic, justice-oriented, and community-generated approach, body-map storytelling and related ABHR approaches can upend knowledge hierarchies, centering the perspectives—and, particularly, emotional knowledges—of nail technicians from racialized, newcomer, and immigrant communities.