The SAGE Handbook of Action Research

The Artistry of Emancipatory Practice: Photovoice,

Creative Techniques, and Feminist Anti-Racist
Participatory Action Research

Contributors: M. Brinton Lykes & Holly Scheib

Edited by: Hilary Bradbury
Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Action Research
Chapter Title: "The Artistry of Emancipatory Practice: Photovoice, Creative Techniques, and Feminist Anti-
Racist Participatory Action Research"
Pub. Date: 2015
Access Date: August 25, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: 55 City Road
Print ISBN: 9781446294543
Online ISBN: 9781473921290
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473921290.n14
Print pages: 131-142
© 2015 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
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version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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The Artistry of Emancipatory Practice: Photovoice, Creative Techniques, and

Feminist Anti-Racist Participatory Action Research
M. Brinton LykesHolly Scheib

In 1992, Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris launched what many recognize as the first photovoice project
through which local Chinese women documented their experiences of rural production and reproduction,
seeking to influence health and childcare policies and practices (Wang and Burris, 1994, 1997). This innov-
ative strategy, through which non-formally educated women appropriated the technology of photography to
tell their stories and voice their concerns to influence public health policy, contributed importantly not only
to their generating changes towards improving their individual well-being and health policies for hundreds, if
not thousands, of other rural Chinese women, but launched a new area of social science and public health
research. Wang and her colleagues’ embrace of photography also sought to enhance collaborations among
local women, service providers, and regional policymakers, demonstrating a novel approach to applied re-
search and contributing a new set of resources to work at the interface of community-based participatory ac-
tion research (PAR) and the arts.

This chapter explores the emancipatory potential of photovoice when situated at the interface of feminist PAR,
creative techniques, and anti-racist and post-colonial methodologies. The authors position themselves and
briefly discuss their entry into the processes described herein and the contributions of critical reflexivity to
emancipatory praxis. A brief discussion of the use of photography within social science research is followed
by a discussion of the contributions of these practices to eliciting and/or illuminating voices traditionally absent
from nineteenth- and twentieth-century social science knowledge production as well as some of the chal-
lenges generated by the multiplicities of early twenty-first-century photovoice projects. Wang and Burris's ear-
ly delineation of a tripartite goal for photovoice (1994, 1997) and their deployment of Freirean pedagogy, fem-
inism, and PAR are discussed in terms of their contributions to a more participatory applied research praxis.
The authors suggest that their and their colleagues’ photoPAR praxis with women survivors of humanitarian
disasters draws on and extends this earlier work. Based on this work, they argue that photovoice, when sit-
uated at the interface of feminist PAR, creative techniques, and anti-racist and post-colonial methodologies,
facilitates participant protagonism towards emancipatory praxis. Drawing on this praxis, the authors propose
several criteria that facilitate a more critical engagement with photovoice and PAR which is, however, not with-
out challenges.

Researcher reflexivity and feminist anti-racist PAR

As community-based researchers and feminist anti-racist activists the authors have worked in contexts broad-
ly delimited as humanitarian disasters. Both have multiple experiences collaborating with local actors in re-
sponding to racialized and gendered violence. The first author has accompanied Mayan women and children
in feminist anti-racist and critical participatory and action research over nearly three decades of work in rural
Guatemala (Lykes, 1994, 2010; Lykes and Crosby, 2014; Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI and Lykes, 2000). The
second author has worked as a violence and abuse counselor and as a consultant in program development
and evaluation for public health and social work humanitarian interventions. They are both white, privileged,
United statesian researchers who have collaborated with women of color including indigenous women and
children and NGOs within the US and rural Guatemala. These partnerships have been designed to facilitate
processes through which knowledge is generated and transformative actions engaged by local protagonists
(e.g. Mayan survivors of armed conflict and sexual violence; Latina migrants and displaced African Amer-
ican community health promoters) who engage in PAR as participant-co-researchers. This praxis engages
fundamental epistemological and methodological challenges that are present in contexts overshadowed by
ever-present histories of slavery and colonization, including the authors’ power and privilege as white US aca-
demics.

A feminist anti-racist and anticolonial epistemological framework critically engages complex iterations of
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racialized power and its legacies (Mohanty, 2003). It challenges the assumed universalism of first and second
wave feminisms and critically interrogates histories of colonial oppression that constrain the lives of partici-
pant-co-researchers. The authors’ deployed creative techniques, indigenous local beliefs and practices, and
PAR to operationalize feminist anti-racist and post-colonial methodologies and facilitate processes that fos-
tered participants’ developing protagonism. The authors argue below that the latter actively engaged with and
enhanced their capacities to document some of the multiple manifestations of deeply racialized gendered vi-
olence in their everyday lives and critically analyze the causes of such violations. Thus, PAR and creative
techniques facilitated Mayan, African American, and Latina participant-co-researchers’ honing of their critical
reflexive skills through which they reclaimed their language, culture, and indigenous power in the wake of cen-
turies of colonization (Smith, 1999; Tuck, 2009) and performed new subjectivities in dialogue with ‘outsider’
researchers. These ‘particular selves’ were deployed within dialogic and collective co-constructive knowledge
production processes.

As university-based ‘outsider’ researchers, the authors have been challenged to critically examine and decon-
struct their situated subjectivities towards greater collaboration with participant-co-researchers. Critical reflex-
ivity has enabled them to engage their positionality and deconstruct their power, both of which are sometimes
perceived or experienced as consonant with rather than challenging of inequalities that marginalize partici-
pant-co-researchers, that is, as ‘power over’ or ‘othering'. Thus, critical reflexivity fosters problematizing an
essentialized ‘woman-centered’ research focus, one that fails to recognize the particularities of racialized gen-
dered violence and to contribute to an anticolonial social science (Cannella and Manuelito, 2008). Drawing on
these experiences and resources the authors critically explore how their work interfaces with or departs from
photovoice goals and practices articulated by Wang and her colleagues several decades ago.

Situating photovoice
Community-based social science has long recognized the need for local participation in order to generate
knowledge and strengthen project outcomes. PAR practitioners have looked for ‘non-traditional’ ways of gen-
erating local knowledge, creating spaces wherein marginalized voices can be heard, and adding value to
existing systems and practices. With the photographic arts Wang and Burris (1994, 1997) enhanced and
popularized arts-based styles of documentation and communication that aspired to emancipate participants,
strategies that are also characteristic of much participatory and action research. Although their work in rural
China is acknowledged to be the first methodological initiative to combine photography with these participa-
tory strategies, there are multiple antecedents through which social science researchers and journalists have
deployed photography to ‘give voice to’ local actors’ stories. For example, in the early twentieth century, pho-
tojournalists and anthropologists working within humanitarian situations used cameras to document the lives
of groups excluded from access to power and resources in far flung corners of the world, publishing in both
popular media and scholarly journals (see for example, the work of anthropologist John Collier, who is cred-
ited with establishing the field of visual anthropology in a 1967 text). One of the more important initiatives in
this tradition was Sol Worth and John Adair's initiative with Navajo Indians in Arizona (1972). They taught
the latter how to use 16mm film to capture their social realities, arguing that as researchers they could use
the Navajos’ work to analyze the perceptual structure of the Navajo world. Although their work was primarily
researcher driven, it reflects an early initiative that presumes an alternative worldview expressed through the
active engagement of the Navajo as producers of film.

More recently, photographers have looked at other ways to document community stories, including adopting a
participatory photography strategy wherein ‘subjects’ are given cameras to capture their own realities through
photographs. Contemporary photographers (e.g. Julian Germain, Wendy Ewald, and Jim Goldberg) have
conducted notable projects within the photovoice tradition but without an elaborated participatory or action
research focus. Thus, the use of the term has broadened – or, as argued below, been diluted.

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Photovoice and Par

Photovoice as a resource in community-based participatory research, particularly in health-related domains,
has grown exponentially since Wang and Burris coined the term photo novella (1994) and then shifted the
name to photovoice (1997). Significantly, a large and increasingly extensive number of youth workers, com-
munity organizers, human rights advocates, workers in contexts of humanitarian disasters, as well as school
and university-based teachers and researchers, have adapted some form of photography and storytelling
through which local protagonists of multiple generations document their experiences, communicate them to
wider audiences, and seek to make change.

What might be called ‘the practice of photovoice’ has developed rapidly. Although some of the recent pho-
tovoice literature reflects projects with clear foundations in the work of Wang and her colleagues (Catalani and
Minkler, 2010), a majority of projects seem to have adopted the moniker ‘photovoice’ despite significant re-
visions to Wang's methodology. Photovoice projects now seem designed to meet the needs of their initiators
(educators, youth workers, researchers, etc.), the sites in which they are carried out (schools, community or
health centers, etc.), and/or the collaborators, participants, or co-researchers (students, community members,
patients, etc.), rather than Wang's original goals. Wang's original intentions seem more aligned with those
of her predecessors in participatory and action research who argued for the deeply local and culturally em-
bedded praxis characteristic of much participatory and action research (Fals Borda, 1985; Fals Borda and
Rahman, 1991) and the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1970). Similarly, and more recently, Coenen and
Khonraad (2003) emphasize the need for clear links between action research as methodology and its appli-
cations to ensure a focus on examining and challenging existing social structures and systems of power.

The authors argue here that the rapid growth in photovoice's applications to a broad range of contexts has
been accompanied by a commitment to the art of ‘taking pictures’ with less attention to the social justice and
emancipatory praxis underlying much participatory and action research. Photovoice's absence of critical edge
is evidenced in presentations of the work in local exhibits, journal articles, magazines, or websites that are
limited to participants’ or subjects’ photographs accompanied by very brief descriptive comments or stories,
rather than analyses and/or critical commentaries. An example is seen in the deployment of the term pho-
tovoice to describe participatory photography projects where photographers ‘support participants to generate
their own photographic work’ (see http://www.photovoice.org/whatwedo/info/background-to-the-field).

Reviews by Hergenrather et al. (2009) and Catalani and Minkler (2010) contribute to clarifying multiple as-
pects of photovoice's development within public health research and related fields. Together these reviews
included 50 unique photovoice projects published prior to 2008 (April and January, respectively) in health-re-
lated peer review journals. They note that despite limitations in the sampling due to their selection processes,
theirs are the only reports to date that have sought to critically review photovoice processes and outcomes on
a number of dimensions.

Catalani and Minkler (2010) found evidence of significant differences in levels of participatory involvement,
project aims, research questions and methodologies, applied rigor, ethical considerations, outcomes, and/or
transformative or emancipatory outcomes within their sample of 37 articles. Hergenrather et al. (2009) dis-
cussed inconsistency in the application of Wang and Burris's methods among the 31 articles they reviewed.
Both reviews found great variation in how photovoice projects were reported, making comparisons challeng-
ing and calling for more systematic documentation of strategies deployed in photovoice projects to facilitate
comparative reviews of projects’ impacts and future applications. Despite these similarities in findings, in con-
trast to the Catalani and Minkler analysis which found limited reports of participant involvement in data an-
alytic processes, Hergenrather et al. (2009) noted that ‘the majority of the studies reported researchers and
participants collaborated in data analysis. However, the[ir] roles … varied’ (Hergenrather et al., 2009, p. 696).
Finally, they also noted that only ‘several studies reported an action plan to facilitate community change’ (p.
696).

Catalani and Minkler (2010) concluded that their analyses suggest a positive relationship between the em-
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powerment of participants and the level of investment in the processes of ‘partnership and community partic-
ipation, intensive training, and, in particular, the iterative cycle of research, discussion, and action’ (p. 445).
They noted that differences in participation are a result of program design and project processes – and that
participant demographic characteristics had no systematic impact on participation in the projects. Although
they found that Wang and Burris's original goals are not always met in photovoice projects, they argued that
the ‘more participatory projects’ are the ones that speak to all three of the original photovoice goals, that is,
recording and reflecting on community strengths and concerns, promoting critical dialogue and knowledge,
and reaching policymakers.

The authors agree with and extend this conclusion, that is, that many of the differences noted by Catalani
and Minkler may be systematically related to the ways in which those who embrace photovoice engage with,
ignore, or reject some of the basic tenets of participatory and action research. Action research (AR) and PAR
resonate deeply with the participatory, critical engagement, and action aspects of Wang and Burris's early
articulations of photovoice. Those who achieve a more transformative or emancipatory praxis not only incor-
porate the original photovoice goals but also include a range of creative techniques as well as a feminist an-
ti-racist post-colonial critique of gendered and racialized structures of inequality that frame many of the social
issues and/or problems that co-researchers select as the focus for this work. Processes at the interface of
these critical epistemologies and photovoice are more likely to generate emancipatory praxis or what we have
called photoPAR. PhotoPAR draws on the work of a growing number of scholars who have sought to infuse
PAR, photovoice, feminist anti-racist and post-colonial critiques, participatory and art-based strategies, and
local traditions and practice, all of which are embraced to facilitate more enhanced participation, particularly
among non-formally educated women and men and/or across multiple linguistic and educational levels (Lykes
and Crosby, 2015).

Emancipatory potential of creative techniques and feminist anti-racist PAR

As mentioned above, the first author co-facilitated two PAR projects in Guatemala, one of which involved pho-
tovoice and both of which drew on creative techniques and indigenous beliefs and practices with rural Mayan
women during and in the wake of nearly 36 years of armed conflict. Both authors collaborated in a post-Ka-
trina photoPAR process with community-based African American and Latina health promoters initiated two
years after that unnatural disaster (Scheib and Lykes, 2013). The Guatemalan conflict had its roots in gross
economic and political inequalities due to a long history of colonization that resulted in the dispossession
and exclusion of the majority indigenous population from much sociopolitical and economic life. The Catholic
Church's Human Rights Office's Recovery of Historical Memory project (ODHAG/REHMI, 1998) and the Unit-
ed Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH, 1999) documented over 200,000 deaths as
well as the displacement of nearly a million people, and the destruction of over 600 rural Mayan communities
through genocidal violence. Mayan women were the targets of the systematic perpetration of sexual violence.

Although Hurricane Katrina endured less than 24 hours, the storm and its aftermath inundated 80 percent of
the city of New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA), killing over 1,500 people, and displacing the majority of the city's
population of more than 500,000. The widespread destruction disproportionally impacted areas with higher
concentrations of poverty and neighborhoods with predominantly African American families, inequalities root-
ed in previous structural inequalities. Further, recovery priorities were uneven, focused on middle- and upper-
class areas that were predominantly white (Lui and Plyer, 2010).

Although dramatically different, both contexts resulted in what can be called, broadly speaking, humanitarian
disasters. Additionally, both sites are characterized by histories of colonization, institutional and cultural
racism, gendered racialized violence, and deep socio-economic and political inequalities. These continuities
of gendered racialized violence and structures of inequality reflect what one Mayan woman referred to as
an ‘ever-present past’ when talking about the effects of sexual violence in armed conflict (Lykes and Crosby,
2015, p. 162).
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The projects developed within these contexts are not first responder interventions but rather collaborative
processes of accompaniment of relatively small sectors of the local populations, facilitated through local
NGOs. The authors incorporated creative techniques in both Guatemala-based projects (Women of Pho-
toVoice/ADMI and Lykes, 2000; Lykes, 2010; Lykes and Crosby, 2014, 2015) and an adaptation of photovoice
processes (Bunster and Chaney, 1989; Wang and Burris, 1997). The NOLA project deployed photoPAR.

All three projects are arts-based interventions designed to accompany local women in the documentation of
disaster and post-disaster experiences to build on their individual survival and recovery processes towards
strengthening collective responses to individual violations and organizational or community fractures. In Cha-
jul and in New Orleans, the authors elaborated a process with local NGO partners with whom they had pre-
vious relationships and through which they identified potential co-researchers with whom they then formed
a collaborative research team. Each project was initiated and carried out by university-based ‘outsider’ re-
searcher(s) collaborating alongside women survivors, some of whom were NGO staff who engaged in varying
ways in the iterative data collection and analysis stages.

Local participants (community health promoters in NOLA; Maya Ixil and K'iche’ women in Chajul; and Mayan
women from four distinct linguistic groups in three areas of the Guatemalan Highlands, all of whom survived
sexual violence in armed conflict) brought diverse social capital due to their histories, languages, community-
based experiences, formal education, and stories of survival and loss. The creative techniques were critical
to the development of participants’ capabilities as co-researchers wherein they grew into their new roles and
practiced sharing and critically interrogating their own and others’ ideas. Process evaluations confirm that the
participatory and collaborative strategies enhanced participants’ well-being, skill development, and recogni-
tion of and deployment of their personal power, allowing the group to visualize the often unseen or underval-
ued knowledge of women's solidarity and self-help (Lykes and Crosby, 2015).

Significant investment in time, coordination, and training occurred before the formal research processes in
Chajul and NOLA began, that is, participating ‘insiders’ were valued and invested in through training in group
collaboration, communication styles, listening and hearing, and self-awareness. As these processes were in-
troduced and enacted, participants increasingly discussed and then determined the research focus, identify-
ing issues and problems that they sought to better understand – and change. Once an agreement to ‘work
together’ was made, team-building workshops included a diverse range of participatory and creative tech-
niques. Goals included creating a safe space, exploring the methodology, and practicing ‘hearing’ and ‘being
heard'. These processes built participatory styles and skills in participant-co-researchers, established a set
of norms that valued the active involvement of all within the group, and generated ‘just enough trust’ among
all researchers to allow for a foundation of shared inquiry across the chasms generated by the structural in-
equities discussed above.

In all three projects between 10 and 25 women participated in multiple 2–3 day workshops designed to in-
troduce PAR and, in Chajul and NOLA, the photovoice process. For the two projects involving photogra-
phy, these workshops were also an opportunity to learn about cameras and how to use them. Participants
in workshops in Guatemala incorporated their understanding and applications of beliefs and practices from
the Mayan cosmovision (see Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla, 2006). For example, most workshops included
candles, flowers, and a reflection about the meaning of the day from the Mayan calendar. Workshop content
focused on or included: (1) the training needs of the PAR process (e.g. learning about each other's culture to
forge collaborative teams); (2) the problem focus identified by participant-co-researchers (e.g. exploring the
meaning of integrated reparations); (3) the photographs and/or phototexts (photograph + photographer's sto-
ry) developed during the previous weeks; and/or (4) emergent themes identified in field work and/or previous
workshops that required additional engagement, deconstruction, and reconstruction through iterative data an-
alytic processes.

Creative data-generation techniques used in these projects were organized along three dimensions: corporal
expression (e.g. dramatization, image theater, etc.), drawing, including creations outside the body (e.g. map-

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ping, collages, photographs, etc.), and verbal techniques (e.g. creative storytelling, interviews, life stories,
etc.) (Lykes and Crosby, 2014, 2015). In mapping, for example, visual tools were used to represent complex
familial, economic or political relationships of power, including family systems, community maps, and body
mapping. In family mapping, genograms examined physical as well as affective relationships and/or gener-
ational dynamics. Community mapping allowed documentation of ecological and social functions of the en-
vironment. Body mapping techniques facilitated participant-co-researcher's explorations of physical and psy-
chosocial health, including explorations of experiences of gendered racialized violence as they repositioned
themselves as subjects and protagonists. These techniques may be used individually or in combination to
generate and analyze data. They allow for individual and collective analyses while also facilitating the explo-
ration of how sociopolitical and cultural contexts impact the individual and the community.

As facilitators of these iterative processes of data generation and interpretation the ‘outsider’ researchers
rarely created drawings, dramatizations, or creative stories (see Lykes and Crosby, 2015, for an exception).
Their critically reflexive engagement in generating the processes described above contributed to the decon-
structive and reconstructive processes that frequently followed the initial generation of images and interpre-
tations. Facilitators designed these second-level analytic activities through different processes in each of the
projects. In working with photographs, these analyses often took place in smaller groups of 5–6 persons
who were asked to develop a ‘collective story’ based on their group-based critical analyses of one or sev-
eral phototexts. Participants were sometimes asked to clarify the ‘Context, Actors/People, Actions, Feelings,
Thoughts, and Reasons/Causes/Explanations’ in the photographer's phototext and then to generate a new
story or photonarrative (Lykes, 2010). In some instances these processes involved a dramatic multiplication
or image theater technique through which participants imagined a new scene, provoked by the first dramati-
zation and often one that represented long buried fears or silences from the armed conflict or experiences of
pre-Katrina urban violence. These new dramatizations were then submitted to similar analytic processes that
were also documented. The participatory and creative processes facilitated participant-co-researchers’ devel-
opment of ‘critical bifocality’ (Weis and Fine, 2012), that is, a critical stance that included the documentation
of social systems and structures in which they live as well as the multiple ways in which they make meanings
from and resist these systems of marginalization, exclusion, and/or privilege.

Many of the participants’ assessments of the creative techniques and the workshops more broadly have been
documented elsewhere (Lykes and Crosby, 2014, 2015; Scheib and Lykes, 2013). They repeatedly repre-
sented, performed, and verbalized the value they placed on working together in groups. The Mayan women
contrasted these experiences with portrayals of themselves prior to their participation in the creative work-
shops, describing themselves as being alone or lonely, not having permission from their husbands to leave
their homes, not being able to meet together, or say what they thought. Many talked about practical skills that
they had learned including understanding Spanish and learning how to write their names. The NOLA partici-
pant-co-researchers valued learning how to take or improve photographs, how to speak in public about their
pain and about their work as women who responded and transformed disasters’ effects. In addition to these
strengths, the authors observed a developing capacity to critically deconstruct the meanings that had been
generated by others vis-à-vis their lived experiences, and the explicit naming of genocidal violence or Katri-
na's destructive forces and their after-effects as exemplifying racialized gender violence.

These reconstructions of their own understandings of their experiences were enacted through collective pro-
ductions beyond the group, including a book (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI and Lykes, 2000), multiple pho-
toPAR exhibits in NOLA (Scheib and Lykes, 2013), and a range of projects and products generated by the
Mayan survivors of sexual violence including a Tribunal of Conscience, a demand for integral reparations
presented to the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission, and an ongoing court case seeking to prosecute
those responsible for some of these horrific acts of sexual violence during the armed conflict (Lykes and Cros-
by, 2015).

Drawing on the above, the authors summarize a series of participatory processes through which ‘outsider’
researchers might facilitate photoPAR (see Table 13.1). Each process is grounded in or draws on feminist

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anti-racist post-colonial methods and presses towards developing the project's emancipatory potential (see
Lykes and Crosby, 2014, for an earlier iteration of these guidelines).

Table 13.1 Developing photoPAR as emancipatory praxis

1. Creating and sustaining dialogic relationships

a. Who are the co-researchers? (Critically analyzing gendered racial-
ized positions and intersectional structural frameworks of inclusion
and exclusion)
b. Identifying partners, forming relationships, sharing cultural tradi-
tions, developing ‘just enough trust’ to work together on this
process/project
c. Developing a shared question/focus for the collaborative work.
(Negotiating power between ‘outsider’ researchers’ privileges and
those speaking from the ‘margins’ and/or silenced; performing criti-
cal reflexivity)
d. Designing the project. (Embodying and performing collaborative
approaches)
e. Enhancing capabilities through shared praxis
2. Generating and analyzing data. (Integrating a contextualized understanding; utilizing
multi-level, multi-method and iterative approaches that facilitate the deconstructive and
reconstructive generation of knowledge)
a. Creative techniques as participatory resources for data generation
and analysis
b. Iterative capacity building throughout data generation and analysis
3. Interpreting findings within and across differences (reflexive practices; ‘critical bifocali-
ty’ (Weis and Fine, 2012))
a. Creative techniques as resources for interpretations
b. Presentation and integration of wider communities' reflective en-
gagement with preliminary findings, thereby enhancing ‘psychopo-
litical validity’ (Prilleltensky, 2003)
4. Towards emancipatory actions: Personal and social transformation (Documenting per-
sonal transformations, taking an activist orientation and using knowledge for social
change and emancipatory praxis)

Critically analyzing photovoice and photoPAR

Boog (2003) defines emancipation as a process developed ‘to free oneself from restraint, control, or the pow-
er of someone else, especially to free oneself from any kind of slavery’ (Boog, 2003, p. 427). The concept
resonates with photovoice's original constituent elements including feminism, PAR, and Freirian pedagogy.
In contrast, more recent photovoice-inspired projects engage local participants in photographing problems in
their lives, seeking to facilitate people's voicing of their own experiences through photographs and descrip-
tions of them. The latter are often descriptions generated with scant analysis or re-writing by the individual
or group. Stories are either omitted or brief, lacking evidence of meaning making or co-constructive process-
es or of the framework in which the experiences evolved. There is little to no training in critical reflexivity or
structural analysis. Photographs with titles or short abstracts that are publically shared are presented as a
singular view of the reality represented. While such an exhibit may be used to advocate for the individual or
the group they represent, it rarely tells a collective story generated by that group through ongoing or interac-
tive processes. The authors argue that these articulations of photovoice reflect a dilution of its original goals.
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They suggest, in contrast, an extension of the latter through anti-racist post-colonial methodologies and the
incorporation of creative techniques with locally held indigenous beliefs and practices, processes described
and exemplified through photoPAR.

In photoPAR, photographs are points of engagement, contention, and analysis, as are stories about them;
phototexts are resources through which to represent lived experiences and aspirations for change. Pho-
tographs are also one tool in a range of participatory arts-based creative techniques, each of which encour-
ages embodied performance of the creators’ meaning making. These techniques facilitate participation and
communication among participant-co-researchers with varying degrees of literacy and encourage their mobi-
lization of indigenous knowledge systems. Participant-co-researchers deconstruct their positionality through
scaffolded discussions which facilitate analytic storytelling and the explicit naming of a critical frame, e.g. fem-
inist anti-racism, which is then deployed to explore underlying causes and sociohistorical roots of the prob-
lems storied through the phototext. These collective processes contribute to the group's development of a
photonarrative – and subsequent actions. Yet these processes are not without multiple challenges and poten-
tial contradictions, several of which the authors discuss below.

Circulations of power
As argued above, power circulates in all iterations of each of the projects discussed above through processes
of constructing multiple dialogic relationships within and across ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and educational
similarities and differences in the teams of co-researchers, in the diverse meaning making iterations of the
process, and in actions taken. University-based ‘outsider’ white researchers embodied principles of feminist
anti-racist practice and embraced creative techniques and photovoice to facilitate the participatory processes
through which the community and NGO-based women began to imagine themselves as researchers, shifting
speaker roles so that the former increasingly initiated while the ‘outsider’ co-researchers learned to follow. In
this way, the latter instantiated their positions as facilitators and accompaniers, focusing on the dialogic na-
ture of knowledge construction through which they listened and reflected back the participants’ knowledge,
encouraging and modeling exchanges towards facilitating the group's emergence as a site for action and re-
flection.

Despite these processes – and having embraced critical reflexivity as a methodological resource through
which the researcher interrogates her positionality and ideology – the first author has documented several
examples of how her facilitation may have overly structured the co-constructive data gathering and interpreta-
tion processes, thereby prioritizing some participants’ meaning making over that of others and marginalizing
the protagonism of at least some of the local co-researchers (Lykes, 2010).

Prins's (2010) discussion of her photovoice project in El Salvador suggests a second cautionary tale about
the circulation of power in photovoice processes. Her work was facilitated with survivors of the Salvadoran
armed conflict that had polarized that country, killing more than 70,000 people and displacing hundreds of
thousands of others. The intergenerational influences of this conflict are echoed in ongoing gang violence
and narcotrafficking, ranking El Salvador alongside Guatemala as the fifth and sixth most dangerous coun-
tries in the world today. Thus, distrust has continued to be a core element in community life and cameras and
photography – particularly in the hands of an unknown ‘outsider’ – resonated with some of her participant-
co-researchers’ earlier experiences, contributing to perceptions of the photovoice process as a surveillance
strategy. The ubiquitous presence of surveillance cameras throughout the US in the post-9/11 era, and their
racialized gendered deployment within urban communities, also challenge US-based photoPARers to critical-
ly interrogate these realities within their projects.

Thirdly, photoPAR in contexts of humanitarian disasters, wherein ‘outsider’ researchers’ voices overtake
those of participant-co-researchers can, arguably, reflect what Sherene Razack (2007) has described as
‘stealing the pain of others’ through which those who elicit stories of violence and violation consume the oth-
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er's pain rather than engage in outrage and actions to redress the causes of such pain. ‘Outsider’ researcher
power in photovoice and PAR processes, including photoPAR, may also generate a hypervisibility of women
as victims or constitute ‘photo porn', fostering the objectification of women of color and indigenous women,
despite the university-based researcher's commitment to women's protagonism and critical reflexivity.

Fourth, others have commented on researcher power being exercised through the reporting and publication
processes that deeply influence how university-based ‘outsider’ PARers engage photovoice and PAR. Al-
though the first author initially published the Chajul project in a photonarrative in which the women participant-
co-researchers were first authors (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI and Lykes, 2000), she has gone on to present
this work in a variety of contexts and published articles and book chapters drawing on the co-researchers’
photographs, storytelling, and praxis. Similarly, despite multiple successes as co-presenters of the Katrina
work in professional meetings, participant-co-researchers have not engaged in a collaborative print product.

Developing long-term relationships prior to undertaking photoPAR and sustaining them beyond the project's
public presentations are strategies for generating ‘power with', mitigating the effects of experiences in which
benefits continue to accrue disproportionately to ‘outsider’ researchers. These examples suggest that de-
spite the critical positions taken by ‘outsider’ researchers and their embrace of critical reflexivity and feminist
anti-racist post-colonial methodologies, they are sometimes blinded by their own positionality, the demands
of their university-based contexts, and the power the latter engenders as it circulates within these iterative
processes.

Concluding reflections
The authors’ work in post-Katrina NOLA and in Guatemala exemplifies long-term relationship building, data
analytic practices scaffolded though creative techniques accessible to women of multiple educational levels,
lengthier training and research periods, a valuing of local beliefs, and extended investment in these iterative
processes. As such it seeks to perform emancipatory praxis as suggested by Boog (2003) and Roberts and
Dick (2003). The former argues that, ‘emancipation implies that the generated results of action research are
two-sided. On the one hand … improved action competencies of the researched subjects in the local situation
in the specific research project. On the other hand are the general enhanced action competencies in oth-
er comparable problematic situations in the future, sometimes even in broader contexts’ (Roberts and Dick,
2003, p. 428).

Consistent with Roberts and Dick's (2003) argument ‘that emancipation will be increased when the partici-
pants are most involved in decisions and when their content and process knowledge is most privileged and
utilized’ (p. 486), these projects engaged participatory decision-making in each step of the project. Discussing
the state of participatory and action research in 1993, Kemmis advocated for emancipatory or critical action
research, which, he argued, ‘is always connected to social action: it always understands itself as a concrete
and practical expression of the aspiration to change the social (or educational) world for the better through
improving shared social practices, our shared understandings of these social practices, and the shared situ-
ations in which these practices are carried out’ (Kemmis, 1993, p. 3). The authors re-examined the first pho-
tovoice initiatives (Wang and Burris, 1994, 1997) and some of the multiplications of this praxis and argued
that much of its critical edge has been diluted. They have returned to the earlier framework and identified
a number of criteria through which co-researchers deploy creative techniques, including photovoice, and in-
digenous belief systems and practices to generate a feminist anti-racist post-colonial PAR towards realizing
photovoice's emancipatory and liberatory potential.

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• anti-racism
• participatory research
• action research
• racism
• feminism
• praxis
• postcolonialism

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473921290.n14

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