Frameworking: Making Meaning Through One's Own Lens in a Youth Participatory Action Research Photovoice Camp

• In Event: 66.053 - Turning Away From Text in Qualitative Research: Possibilities in Image- and Audio-Based Methods

Abstract

Purpose

This paper presents results from a photovoice research project exploring the role of place and setting in the decision-making of migrant youth aged 13- 21 living in New York state.

Theoretical framework

Photovoice in youth Participatory Action Research (yPAR) is a method that includes participants as co-investigators, co-theorizers, and co-authors. Participatory Action Research (PAR) aims to involve research participants in a deep, active sense; they help shape the research from beginning to end stages (Cammarota and Fine, 2008). Photovoice, a research method where participants produce and theorize their own photos in response to research questions (Wang, & Burris, 1994), is a visual form of PAR that combines words and text to produce research that is thought-provoking and generative for participants. Critical place inquiry (Tuck & Mackenzie, 2005) laid the groundwork for youth to think around how place informs effective policy implementation.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

Notions of the visual and the photographic are everywhere in the language of research: theories are described through lenses; backgrounds, observations and varying viewpoints and perspectives are considered; problems and ideas are “framed” and “exposed.” During a two-week camp, workshops took place in which the visual nature of research was obviated with the aim to deepen participant involvement in studying aspects of their own lives. The participants, all undocumented migrant youth originating from Mexico or countries in Central or South America, explored the importance of place and setting to inform policies and practices around DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a policy meant to protect them from deportation and to promote employment and higher education. Using photography, captions, intervening on photos and creating frames, participants engaged in discussions around the limits and possibilities of research and photographic data.

Data sources

Research participants and workshop facilitators made meaning alongside participants within yPAR, which “engages people from different backgrounds in democratic processes to collaborate in researching and taking action to disrupt social inequities” (Patel, 2012). Other data sources include workshop materials produced by the participants.

Results

Participants’ creation and discussion of “frames” in photography and research led to an exploration of refusal as an important element of frame-making, with several participants changing or removing their frames altogether. Relationships of power were considered as participants reflexively discussed their roles as experts equipped to inform and intervene with the research process.

Significance

When we write about our research topics and subjects, the perspectives presented are too often our own ideas projected upon the subjects of the research. Research methods that prioritize text-based analysis discount the embodied relationship people have with thoughts and ideas, and in doing so may limit analysis, the way results are communicated, and audiences’ conception. Multiple methods of portraying research results that tap into the senses and engage different forms of knowledge work to promote a broadening of perspectives and interpretations. Image-based participatory methods involving youth defy expectations of what youth can contribute to educational policy and deepen possibilities for a reflexive relationship to research, on the part of researcher, participant and reader.

Author

• Nisha Toomey, University of Toronto