Mending a Frayed and Fraught Photovoice: Moving From a Metaphysics of Individualism Toward Relational Ways-of-Knowing-in-Being

• In Event: 75.052 - Research De/sign: Theory as a Thimble for Tailoring Methodological Excess

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores the methodological mending of photovoice as and for decolonizing educational research.

Theoretical Framework
Theoretically, photovoice draws from praxis and feminist theory, bodies of work that strive towards democracy, empowerment, autonomy, and equity. (Wang & Burris, 1994). These goals are enacted through documentary photography, which recognizes that a photographer’s perspective may fail to recognize and represent the perspective of the photographed subject (Wang & Burris, 1994, 1997).

However, the “snag” is that these goals are often premised on ethnocentric, anthropocentric, and metaphysical individualism that are often at loggerheads with decolonial goals which are premised upon an Indigenous ecology of relationships (see Battiste, 2013; Cajete, 1994) [Thread 2]. As such, with the aim of mending a frayed and fraught photovoice, this paper “puts to work” (Lather, 2007) and produces a thimble from Indigenous relational ways-of-knowing-in-being (Cajete, 1994, 1999; Deloria, 1999; Kawagley & Barnhardt, 2005, 2008), Western relational ontologies (Barad, 2007, 2011, 2012; Hekman, 2010; Lenz-Taguchi, 2010), as well as the work of scholars working between these bodies (Appfel-Marglin, 2011; Peat, 2002). [Thread 1]

Modes of Inquiry
Employing this relational thimble, photovoice’s possibility-rich and problematic constructs (e.g., voice, empowerment) are mended to differently produce a photovoice that attends to an ecology of relationships. This is achieved by: 1) considering other-than-human actors (e.g., plants, architectures) within an ecology of relationships curriculum (e.g., Cajete, 1994); 2) utilizing sensory pedagogy to explore how we are “being embodied by and simultaneously embodying” (Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 1) our natural-cultural surroundings; and 3) employing the visual and textual juxtaposition of the graphic novel medium to enact relational narrativity which resists singularizing and potentially problematic representations (McCloud, 1993). [Thread 3]

Data Sources
This relationally mended photovoice was used within a Canadian urban West coast middle school with youth participants (n = 14) and their collaborating teacher (n = 1) during a month long decolonizing pedagogical project. Participant audio data includes: 30-minute individual semi-structured interviews with participants (n = 6), as well as classroom group discussions (n = 6). Participant visual data includes: 400 participant-driven photographs, as well as relationally juxtaposed photographs which took the shape of a 52 page collective digital comic book. Researcher generated data includes 100 photographs as well as 50 pages of ethnographic field notes.

Results
Analysis focused on the ways in which youth differentially enacted relationality through resisting the self-centering Western modern metaphysics of individualism. Key examples include ways in which youth participants consider relationality at school to include: other-than-human bodies as agents, other than linear conceptions of time and rectilinear conceptions of space, as well as complex ways in which natural and cultural forms of inclusion/exclusion occur. [Thread 4]

Scholarly Significance
Given that educational institutions, materials, pedagogies, and curricula are shaped by a “Eurocentric curriculum is hidden in plain view” (Battiste, Bell, Findlay, Findlay, & Henderson, 2005, p. 8), visual methods and methodologies provide prime and productive sites from which to examine and resist the complex ethical, ontological, and epistemological systems under which these inequalities become possible.

Author

• Marc Roderick Higgins, The University of British Columbia