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Talking Back to Whom and What? Visual Methods as an Access to Participants' Dialogues With New Sociocultural Worlds

Mon, April 8, 4:10 to 6:10pm, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Floor: 800 Level, Room 803A

Abstract

Visual methods offer possibilities for generating carefully crafted stories and strategically elicited interview accounts. Such stories could be powerful ways to talk back to toxic narratives on migrants and migration “by instilling compassion and empathy” (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2017, July 25; United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2016, p. 2). To move closer to achieving such impact, however, analysis and thought in visual methods should go beyond merely capturing stories, engaging participants in “creative” ways or subscribing to the fad these methods possibly connote (Buckingham, 2009).

Drawing on experiences in a collaborative and my own research on cultural identities of ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, I contend that visual methods should attend to multimodal and verbal accounts in ways that afford researchers to examine closely how participants experience their new and shifting sociocultural realities. Specifically, I show how participants position themselves culturally in relation to others in school settings. In doing so, I consider producing data as a meaning-making process of participants in which they enact personal accounts resulting from their interconnectedness and tensions being with others and traversal across institutions that inhabit their thinking about a society.

Visual methods could then be appreciated not just as a means of resistance against oppression, but also as a reflexive moment that provides evidence to a complex way of being in the here-and-now of data production. As part of the broader agenda in reshaping migration narratives, visual methods help reveal interstices in sociocultural transitions, positive contribution of and what matters in the lives of participants.

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