Thinking Critically About Participatory Visual Research: Part 1
Co-Producing Knowledge to Empower Marginalized Communities and Refine Methodology
A decade ago, as a bright-eyed, naïve undergraduate journalism student, my biography on the university newspaper webpage read: “Angela hopes to bring to light the struggles of marginalized groups who have been historically under- and mis-represented in media.” My objective in bringing “light to the struggles” was not rooted in hoping to change the actual people who were facing these struggles but to change the world and the way marginalized communities are seen, so that people of higher power in the world could take action on behalf of the marginalized.
Though well-intentioned, this belief in some ways reflected my own limited sense of agency at the time. Growing up as a black kid in a mid-size Pacific Northwest farming town, I felt both hyper-seen and overlooked. An anomalistic spectacle—subject to observational gazes of shallow intrigue, not unlike the “privileged Western gaze” stereotypically associated with early anthropologists. Like many teens, my ultimate goal was to be understood. Truly being understood, I knew, would change the way people treated me. Just as I knew telling real stories about disadvantaged communities would change the way people treated them.
I’ve come to learn that, while being understood and telling stories are powerful catalysts for change, praxis is even more powerful. Short-term resources and treatment, though certainly helpful, cannot match the potential of an empowered community or person. True empowerment is not waiting to be seen or helped. Genuine, long-term, sustainable empowerment is a complex social process. It helps people gain control over their own lives and increase their own capacity to act. It requires sharing your story in an intentional way with the critical reflection, emotional engagement and social introspection that can facilitate the erasure of learned helplessness. By simply providing resources based on research findings and participant requests, well-intentioned actors such as researchers, journalists and non-profit organizations may merely perpetuate the status quo, leaving communities with short-term aid and in a passive-adaptive state of consciousness.
Centering participatory visual research methods, this article series attempts to critically explore the ways in which both participants and research designers can be empowered by the social process of co-creating knowledge. Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris, authors of a research study credited with coining the term “photovoice,” explain “empowerment includes at least four kinds of access: access to knowledge, access to decisions, access to networks, and access to resources.”. Through discussions of methodological definitions, theoretical underpinnings and ethical dilemmas, this article series explores how photovoice and other related participatory visual research methods can facilitate or hinder access and empowerment.
Though participatory visual methods are well-past their infancy, there have been calls for the maturation of the methodology. I examine how researchers can enable this maturation through the ways in which they talk about, define, and evaluate their research studies and projects. This article series critically reflects on the co-production of knowledge as the empowering starting ground for both community social action and the scientific progress of this methodology.
