four note friday 2.45 | Talking Photovoice at ECQI

In January of the coming year, I will be traveling to Spain for the 10th European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI). While there, I will be giving a talk entitled Has Photovoice Become Postfoundational? Making Sense of Evolving Definitions, Adaptations, and Futures of the Methodology. While I will be mulling over how exactly to give this presentation—and what my key arguments will be—right now I am leaning toward the claim that those who deploy photovoice can no longer simply claim to be deploying photovoice. Too much methodological innovation has occurred since the mid-1990s. We have to be more specific and clearly explain which version of photovoice is being deployed.

Photovoice has long been productively unsettled.

Photovoice has become productively fractured.

Photovoice is in a threshold moment.

The unsettled and fractured nature of photovoice is inherently generative. And because of that, we need more expansive language and more precision of language when and as we consider, make, and write about methodological decisions.

The literature is rich, and becoming ever richer, with new language for the various photovoice adaptations and variants being used to meet the needs of specific projects. I have yet to see a conversation in the literature that brings together these photovoice innovations—a conversation that does the genealogical work of the methodology and maps the current landscape comprehensively such that photovoice project facilitators can see extant options and generate new ones.

Perhaps that is the gap I am aiming to highlight and address through this presentation.

And then I will put all this into the second edition of my photovoice book. Probably.

Here is the abstract I submitted to ECQI.

Since its inception in the mid-1990s, the photovoice methodology has been in a state of evolution. These evolutions have been generative. They have been appropriate. Various contextual applications necessitate culturally relevant and sustaining designs. Considering the scope and scale of the evolutions, however, has photovoice become postfoundational? Has photovoice become so vast and encompassing that we can no longer trace contemporary applications back to the germinal work of its originators? Where, exactly, does photovoice begin and end? 

Within this presentation, I will explain the photovoice methodology as it was originally conceived. Framing photovoice as a form of critical participatory action research, its theoretical underpinnings, aims, and applications will be reviewed. Its original theoretical undergirdings include education for critical consciousness, feminisms, and participatory documentary photography. Its aims include critical consciousness development among participants, making space for participants’ voices, and encouraging participants to take photographs about their lives and communities on their own terms. Photovoice has been used widely in the fields of public health, social work, and education. 

Because photovoice has been extensively adapted over the past 30 years, discerning what is and what is not photovoice has become a challenge. Recent work on the concept of endarkened photovoice alluded to the existence of a photovoice canon, with new forms of the methodology unfurling into methodological borderlands (not canon)—blurring a photovoice/not photovoice distinction. Examples of photovoice adaptations include postervoice, online photovoice, CreativeVoice, art voice, auto-photovoice, AI voice, and compact photovoice.

I will conclude the presentation with a conceptual mapping of the many photovoice adaptations, providing mental models useful in making sense of the current expansive methodological landscape. If photovoice has become postfoundational, these proposed mental models may help us understand why and how, such that we can build intentional and ethical futures of the photovoice methodology.

And in what follows, I further outline thinking I have done (or need to do) in preparation for this conference.

That photovoice is unsettled and fractured is an indicator of its efficacy.

Photovoice has flourished and grown in many directions because it works. And while it was born within the field of public health, it has been applied within A LOT of different disciplines. It has also been used with a broad swath of persons and groups. Canonical photovoice is not going to work optimally in every context or with all groups of people. Unsettling and fracturing were and are inevitable as ideas move across time and context.

Because photovoice is effective in meeting its aims, at least partially, I see its being unsettled and fractured as a proxy for its efficacy. But as the methodology has spread modifications have been necessary along the way to account for new and different temporal and cultural contexts.

It has moved into new fields and domains because it is effective and powerful, and all that movement has created the ideal conditions for generative unsettling and necessary fractures, which have yielded productive modifications.

What is the best way to trace and understand the methodological history of photovoice?

So, how am I going to put all this information together in a way that makes sense? How do I tell the story of a methodology across 30+ years? There will be writing. There will be diagramming. And there will be cognitive strain.

What first comes to mind is a timeline that indicates large social trends and events and maps those events onto methodological changes. And by large social trends I mean things like the advent of the public internet, digital photography, and social media platforms. By large events, I mean things like the global COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to temporal contexts, varying cultural contexts have often been impetuses for modifications to canonical photovoice. How can I overlay the contexts of time and culture? Perhaps I could place the timeline into a cultural context or view the timeline from various cultural lenses.

The answer to this question is yet to be determined, but in writing my way through some ideas, at least I now have, well, some ideas.

We have to be clear about which photovoice we are using.

It is no longer good enough to use the word photovoice to name the methodology. Qualification is now necessary. There are many photovoices (see above). The photovoice of old (i.e., 1997), now needs to be qualified as canonical photovoice (or something similar).

When I first started learning about photovoice, I never imagined arriving to a moment when I would make the above assertion. Yet here we are. Photovoice has grown and expanded so much that the word photovoice is too imprecise.

Wide and deep reading, precision of language, and evidence-based methodological decisions are now more required than ever within this kind of work.

Where do we go from here?

Liked I eluded to above, I am fairly certain all this needs to find its way into the forthcoming second edition of my photovoice book. And that is great. But I am hopeful about some more immediate impacts of this work (i.e., the conference, this post).

I am in a season of my career where I am focusing less on journal articles and more on research outputs with fewer intermediaries. Yet I think this post and the upcoming conference presentation may evolve into a journal article, complete with a handy direct object indicator and easily citable. I may need to give scholars something concrete to point toward. Time will tell.

The conference will give me the chance to test out the ideas, gather feedback, and head back to the drawing board. And in the meantime, if you have any comments on this topic, I would love to hear them.

I think photovoice is in a threshold moment. But am I alone in this thinking? I would love to know what you think!

🥹 Thanks for spending a moment with me this Friday.
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Thanks again for being here.

Warmly,
Mandy
photovoice field notes
https://www.photovoicefieldnotes.com/