The View from the Truck Cab: Using Photovoice to Understand Workers’ Perspectives

• In Event: Methodological Challenges in Community-Engaged Research (Co-sponsored by the Sociology Advisory Network (SAN) and the Community on Community-Engaged Scholarship & Teaching (CEST))

Abstract

Sociologists have long studied workers’ perspectives on technological changes affecting their jobs. We argue that the methods most often used to study workers’ views of technology are missing a crucial aspect of workers’ experience—their conceptualization of the problem. Surveys and interviews are good at gathering workers’ responses to researchers’ conceptualization of technological change, but miss how experienced workers already conceive of these changes outside of research prompts. In this paper we discuss our practice of Photovoice as a qualitative method that allows workers to set the agenda in interactions with researchers, and to illustrate the major themes and concepts relevant to technology on the job currently and in the future of their work. Sociologists have called for engagement in more participatory and less extractive research, and Photovoice is a method aligned with that goal. This paper explains how Photovoice-- photo elicitation and truckers’ narratives about their photos-- constitutes a particularly useful method for understanding and amplifying worker voices in our research. We argue that our novel adaptation of Photovoice for video calling platforms is an appropriate approach for working with populations like truck drivers who are distributed, mobile, and have little spare time. Photovoice also provides us with fresh insights on how the challenges of recruitment and facilitating participatory research with blue collar workers reveal the time and attention economies of embodied labor like trucking. Despite these challenges, the knowledge shared by participants through their photos and narratives is worth the effort. Photovoice is a method that was developed in anthropology and community-engaged public health but has not yet been widely adopted in sociology. We call for more sociologists to consider using this participatory method to learn from insights that come from and can benefit community members.

Authors

• Laurel Smith-Doerr, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Tiamba M. Wilkerson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst