Looking Together: Visual Thinking Strategies as Black Feminist Praxis in Youth Participatory Research

• In Event: Visual Thinking Strategies: An Expansive Method for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities that emerge—analytically, relationally, and ethically—when researchers and participants engage in Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to interpret students’ multimodal stories. It examines how VTS functions both as a tool for visual analysis and a Black Feminist method of co-analysis and care with young people. By embedding VTS into a participatory research project with Black adolescent girls, this study models a collaborative approach to meaning-making that honors youth authorship and interpretive multiplicity.

This work is grounded in Black Feminist epistemologies that center relationality, embodied knowledge, and intellectual care (Collins, 2000; Lorde, 1984; Dillard, 2012). Drawing on Black girlhood studies (Brown, 2013), multimodal literacies (Vasudevan, 2014), and critical visual methodologies (Rose, 2016; Mitchell, 2011), I position VTS as both a research methodology and a relational stance. In this context, looking is theorized as a practice of ethical witnessing (Love, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2014), and analysis as a co-constructed process rooted in care. In the aftermath of anti-Black schooling, gendered racial violence, and extractive research traditions, this study draws on Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the trouble,” which is to remain present with the complexity and contradiction in participants’ multimodal expressions, without rushing to closure. This orientation resists misinterpretation and embraces ambiguity and metaphor in how Black girls story themselves.

This qualitative study engages arts-based and participatory methodologies with Black adolescent girls, who serve as co-researchers and creative producers. Six Black girls created multimodal stories using video, photography, and collage to reflect on their experiences in and beyond school. We take up VTS in collaborative interpretation sessions, engaging our creative work through a guided inquiry protocol we co-created. These sessions function as both co-analysis and dialogic reflection, opening space for emotional resonance and critical noticing.

Data include participant-created digital stories; transcripts of VTS-based interpretation sessions; fieldnotes from workshops; and researcher memos. Visual and linguistic elements were analyzed alongside students’ verbal and affective responses to one another’s work. Particular attention was paid to how the girls read symbolism, emotion, and social critique in each other’s representations, and how those interpretations shift across viewers and contexts.

This study demonstrates that using VTS collaboratively surfaces interpretive possibilities often constrained by researcher-driven analysis and supports analysis that embraces multiplicity and emotionality in data that resists simplification given students' intersectional identities. Moreover, it demonstrates how VTS may shift the dynamics of interpretive authority, positioning Black girls not as data points, but rather as co-theorists of their own visual and narrative production (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016).

This project contributes to methodological conversations around participatory, justice-oriented research with youth from marginalized communities. It positions VTS as a practice of looking with, rather than at, marginalized young people, and as a mode of analysis rooted in Black Feminist traditions of care and sense-making. By articulating a model of visual co-analysis grounded in ethical attunement, the study expands how educational researchers might engage multimodal data in culturally sustaining, non-extractive ways (Paris & Alim, 2017; Pillow, 2003).

Author

• Autumn A. Griffin, University of North Carolina - Charlotte