Findings

• In Event: Academic Upgrading Students Remember their Pasts and Dream for their Futures through Photovoice

Abstract

Findings
In addition to engaging with Satrapi’s text, in preparation for creating their photovoice projects, we partnered with teaching artists at a local art museum to experience the trapunto paintings by Filipina-American artist Pacita Abad. Abad invented trapunto, a technique that involves quilting and stitching canvases that she decorated with paint and brick-a-brac. As Sung (2023) notes
Trapunto, for Abad, was more than an aesthetic decision. It constituted a theoretical modality—one that incorporated feminist, decolonial, and transcultural strategies—in her insistence on fabric as painting and stitching as creative labor, and opacity a form of resistance. (p. 18).

Abad’s trapunto paintings express her experiences as a woman of color and her subaltern politics. Participating students noted how her work combines criticality and joy (Christensen, 2017). They wrote ekphrastic poems in response to Abad’s artworks, exploring visual tropes and insights that informed their photovoice projects. One group wrote of Abad’s paintings in their collective poem: “The whispers, stares, and hands that roam,/Is it the echo of joy or whisper of grief?”

Students’ resulting photovoice projects were not just an academic exercise, but emotional journeys that explored everyday moments alongside memories of significant life changes. For instance, one student structured her photovoice project using her I Remember poem, highlighting her early relationships with her parents and grandparents and how these experiences informed her relationship with her son. Reflecting on the support she received from her mother, she recalls being a young mother-to-be herself who: “remember[s] hearing my son’s heartbeat the very first time after I went to the doctor...The feeling of disbelief, but also thrill at the same time....” Later, she writes, “I remember caring and being responsible for another life and having unconditional love. You will always be my first love.” Her spoken poem runs alongside images of her and her son. As this example illustrates, each student used photovoice to craft poetic and visually compelling narratives that document critical aspects of their lives in deeply personal ways.

Authors

• Jessica Taylor Charland, Brock University

• Samara Rosenbaum, University of Toronto - OISE