Participatory Visual and Digital Methods

Aline Gubrium, Krista Harper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781598744880
• eBook ISBN: 9781315422992
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Gubrium and Harper describe how visual and digital methodologies can contribute to a participatory, public-engaged ethnography. These methods can change the traditional relationship between academic researchers and the community, building one that is more accessible, inclusive, and visually appealing, and one that encourages community members to reflect and engage in issues in their own communities. The authors describe how to use photovoice, film and video, digital storytelling, GIS, digital archives and exhibits in participatory contexts, and include numerous case studies demonstrating their utility around the world.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

WHAT IS PARTICIPATORY DIGITAL AND VISUAL RESEARCH?

Emergent digital and visual methodologies, such as digital storytelling and participatory digital archiving, are changing the ways that social scientists conduct research and are opening up new possibilities for participatory approaches that appeal to diverse audiences and reposition participants as co-producers of knowledge and potentially as co-researchers. Given the shift in the social sciences to more participatory forms of research, participants are increasingly conceptualized as collaborators in the process. In the field of public health and other applied fields, as well as much of contemporary feminist studies, participatory action research (PAR) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) have gained prominence as an approach to scholarship and advocacy. Through digital representations of their experiences in YouTube videos, the taking and sharing of visual material online through interfaces such as Facebook and Flickr, and mapping their own environments in collaborative blogs, such as in “orange: a just and beautiful city 07050” (jbc07050.blogspot.com), research participants are now positioned as producers of veritable social research data that, in turn, can be repurposed as material for community mobilization and advocacy. Participatory digital and visual methodologies produce rich multimodal and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, putting the methods literally in the hands of the participants themselves and allowing for greater access to social research knowledge beyond the academy.

More than 20 years ago, feminist and postmodern anthropologists led a discipline-wide discussion of the ways that we produce and provide access to cultural representations through ethnographic fieldwork and writing (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Fox, 1991; Harrison, 1997; Marcus, 1995; Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Rosaldo, 1989; Tedlock, 1991, 1995). Calling for the reinvention of anthropology, these scholars challenged the disciplinary norm of the detached “lone ethnographer” and invited the “natives” to talk back in scholarly texts. Few of these critics, however, challenged the notion of the written text as the central medium of anthropological knowledge. More recently, we have witnessed calls for a shift in the ways we train social researchers, including revision of the ways we produce text in these fields, and a frank acknowledgment of the ways that “… as fieldwork has become multi-sited and mobile in nature, subjects are more ‘counterpart’ than ‘other’” (Marcus, 2008, p. 7) and that younger practitioners may aspire to conduct more “activist” research, such that their work can have useful applications.

Arjun Appadurai (2006) trenchantly argues for a “de-parochializing” of research, “for opening it up as a genuinely inclusive and universally available capacity” (p. 169). In this manner, research can be positioned as an endeavor with “democratic potential” and as a “right” fundamental to full citizenship that should be available to all human beings as they have the capacity to serve as researchers, “since all human beings make decisions that require them to make systematic forays beyond their current knowledge horizons” (Appadurai, 2006, p. 167). Appadurai’s work with subaltern youth through the organization Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research (PUKAR) emphasizes a “documentation as intervention” approach. In reviewing the approach, Appadurai notes:

[T]hese experiments in documentation have opened a double path for many young people; one is a deepening of skills they desperately need; the other is the recognition that developing the capacity to document, to inquire, to analyze and to communicate results has a powerful effect on their capacity to speak up as active citizens on matters that are shaping their city and their world. (p. 175)

This ‘double path’ is key to our enthusiasm for the potential uses of participatory visual methodologies—uses that derive just as much from the research process as they do from produced outcomes.

In response to the critique of ethnographic representation, visual ethnographers have begun to embrace participatory approaches. While written texts remain a central practice in the discipline, they are increasingly turning to new/digital media for scholarly production (Pink, 2007). By digital, we refer to methods that are often computer-based or “virtual,” whether this relates to the mode of production—such as with the editing of digital stories on laptops—or with how the outcomes of production are disseminated, such as with digital archives. We are quick to point out that digital methods are not always necessarily participatory in nature and have in many ways become online or computer adaptations of traditional qualitative inquiry methods, known as “online/Internet research methods” or “virtual methods” (Fielding, Lee, & Blank, 2008; Hine, 2005; Johns, Chen, & Hall, 2004), such as in the use of online interviewing (James & Busher, 2006; Salmons, 2010) and virtual ethnography (Hine, 2008). That said, “digital ethnography” or “digital anthropology”—in the sense of studying online social life—is not a special focus of this book. For cutting-edge research in this field, see the work of Chris Kelty (2008), Gabriella Coleman (2010, 2012), Tom Boellstorff (2008), Boellstorff et al. (2012), Michael Wesch (2009), Whitehead & Wesch (2009), Amber Case (2012), and Jillian York (2012).

Shifts in the everyday use of digital visual technologies increasingly challenge the centrality of the written text in anthropology. Having grown up with the Internet, laptops, Facebook, and YouTube, today’s undergraduates and graduate students are particularly drawn to the use of digital technologies in conducting social research. Indeed, many of our research participants also use these technologies in their daily lives. The emergence of more “open source” technologies and methodologies has resulted in new venues and networks of knowledge production.

CORE STORIES: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO CASE STUDY CONSTRUCTION

The impetus for this book began when we co-organized two conference panels in 2008: one, “Visualizing Change: Emergent Technologies in Social Justice Inquiry and Action,” at the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Annual Meeting in Memphis; the other, “Emerging Methodologies: Public Anthropology and the Challenge of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)” at the Northeastern Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts. The intent of both panels was to cast new imaginings of the ways that social and applied researchers might include collaborative visual and digital methods in research projects. We subsequently took part in another conference session, “Public Anthropology/Public Culture: Image, Voice, and Participation in Public Visual Culture,” in 2009 at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, where we focused on ethical issues pertaining to participatory visual and digital research methodologies and future possibilities for engaging with them. The warm reception we received at these sessions prompted us to co-edit a special issue of Practicing Anthropology that same year on use of participatory digital research methods in applied anthropology. Our discussions surrounding these events led us to conclude that a book that introduced anthropologists and other social researchers to participatory visual and digital methods would be of interest to many and was increasingly needed in the field.

So what do we mean when we use the term “participatory,” in conjunction with visual and digital methods of qualitative inquiry? By participatory, we refer to methodologies, approaches, or techniques that afford the “subject,” “community member,” and/or “field site” greater narrative latitude when it comes to ethnographic knowledge production and a larger role in determining why and how research outcomes are produced and received by lay and academic audiences alike. There are several terms for research methods that integrate the active participation of community members in the co-construction of knowledge: CBPR (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008), collaborative anthropology (Lassiter, 2005), and PAR. Although each term has its own history of development, we choose to use the term “PAR” throughout this book because it is widely used and places emphasis on “action” as a research goal.

At least in concept, the increasing use of community-based and participatory approaches has led to the assertion that social research is shifting toward a new paradigm premised on achieving equality, not only on the basis of “the distribution of predetermined benefits but also in the status and voice” of historically excluded stakeholders (House, 2002, p. 633; Peterson & Gubrium, 2011, p. 2). In the field of public health, Green and colleagues (1995) describe CBPR as centered on community–researcher collaboration, from developing research questions through the dissemination of findings. In practice, uncertainty remains in relation to conflicts over the perspectives, priorities, assumptions, values, beliefs, and language of “participation” and “research,” as well as over its conceptualization of “community” (Israel et al., 2005). We also recognize inherent discursive and practical challenges of participation. As Cooke and Kothari (2001) note, participation often “remains a way of talking about rather than doing” research (p. 32).

We began writing this book with the idea that we would assemble a simple text to be used both in classroom and field settings. Our intention was that it would be written so that students and social researchers alike, who were interested in using participatory digital/visual methods in their own work, could access the book as a resource in considering the planning, design, implementation, and analysis of a project employing these methodologies. However, as we began writing we realized that for a book about participatory approaches, who else better to inform the story of these approaches than their own practitioners?

Our approach to writing was thus very much aligned with a participatory approach to knowledge construction. When we began to collect material for the specific methodology chapters we realized the “collaborative” wisdom of drawing upon the perspectives of key scholars who have driven the field of participatory visual research, beginning in the early 1970s. Reviewing the work of key visual anthropologist Timothy Asch, Sarah Elder’s (2001–2002) articulation of the concept of “core stories” is very much in line with our modus operandi for considering case studies in this book:

… [A] “core story” [is] the kind of identity story each of us tells about our lives. These stories are as much a part of us as our fingerprints. Our stories give form and meaning to the inchoate details of our experiences, allowing us to make sense out of life’s raw footage. Core stories are signifiers for where we have been and where we might be traveling. They teach our listeners the intricacies and valences of our values, values of which sometimes even we are unconscious. In the various telling[s] of this … story, particularly [under certain circumstances], Tim laid down a framework for our understanding of what was important to him. He gives us a map of where he came from and where he might be heading, a place and space inscribed by his life’s process. (Elder, 2001–2002, p. 91)

Interviews we conducted with prominent practitioners in the field were crafted into case studies: core stories that reflect the methodological sense-making trajectories of these scholars about their own work and the forms of participation and knowledge created and invoked in their work. These stories allow the reader to see the ways in which practitioners’ academic and ethical values infuse their approach to collaboration, such that participation takes on a variety of contexts depending on the type of visual medium used, the multiple applications for the methods, and the pathways drawn by practitioners in terms of developing a program of research surrounding the methodologies.

We began with interviews (many, perhaps ironically so, conducted through a fairly new digital technology, Skype) asking scholar/participants to describe their history of engagement with participatory methodologies. Engagement was framed in terms of participants’ epistemological, ontological, and ethical perspectives on participation and/or collaboration in the field, and then how these perspectives have shaped use of the particular technique in their work. We also asked participants to describe a project (or projects) in which they had used a participatory visual approach and the process and outcomes resulting from this work. Finally, we asked them to describe the benefits and challenges of using these methodologies, with many participants highlighting ethical implications, as well as the affordances of using the approaches to conduct truly engaged research that might serve the needs of communities involved. Participants also relayed how they saw the methodologies adding to the field(s) of social research.

We digitally recorded these interviews and transcribed them, with copies of audiofiles or transcripts emailed to participants for review. Participants were asked to provide any corrections and suggestions that they wished to make. Similar to the approach outlined in a number of the case studies, participants were also given the opportunity to delete or change anything in the transcript that they felt uncomfortable including in the case study or that did not properly capture their story. Finally, upon receipt of the “member-checked” file, we assembled a core story from the interview, and then returned these narratives to participants. Just as with the interview transcript, participants were given the opportunity to review the core story and provide elaboration, comments, and edits to their stories. We have also included our own “core stories” of using a particular methodology. Gubrium’s core story focuses on her use of digital storytelling for reproductive research and justice purposes in her work as a medical anthropologist in the field of public health, while Harper’s story focuses on her work as a cultural anthropologist using Photovoice as a research and advocacy method for environmental justice among the Romani in Hungary. This book, then, is just as much a collaborative (auto)ethnography of participatory digital research as it is an introduction to the methodologies, with the dialogic process of core story construction very much reflecting on our own research projects and the growing interdisciplinary literature on participatory digital and visual research.

Participatory visual methodology case studies featured in this book include Photovoice, digital storytelling, participatory GIS (PGIS), participatory forms of digital archival research, and collaborative and participatory film and videomaking, as well as those focused on the ethical implications of participatory visual research and dialogic/participatory data analysis. While we do try to give an overview of the current state of affairs for each methodological approach, for some areas such as participatory videomaking, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, there are more exhaustive surveys available than what we present here. Other participatory digital methodologies gaining traction in social research fields, but not reviewed in-depth in this book, include collaborative blogging (Downey et al., 2012; Fish et al., 2012; Forte et al., 2012), interactive multimedia (Young & Barrett, 2001), and digital ethnography in its own right (Dicks, Soyinka, & Coffey, 2006; Murthy, 2008; Wesch, 2012).

Although we provide overviews of each methodology “in practice,” we do not provide detailed technical descriptions of how to use specific software programs in the methods chapters. We suggest that interested readers seek out the most current user guides and groups online. Finally, we readily acknowledge that while we have tried to be inclusive in our review of the various approaches, there is much “madness to the method” of trying to write about participatory visual and digital research approaches, as much of the literature on this work appears online, with libraries and information systems straining to keep afloat of how to catalog all that is out there. Indeed, the terminology and practices related to these methodologies are constantly shifting, with “emergent” techniques and areas of research constantly springing to life.

ARE WE GOING TO LET THE TIDE TURN WITHOUT US?

Just as a sea change is occurring in social research to include participatory visual and digital methodologies (Gubrium & Harper, 2009), the relevance and social justice potential of ethnography is also reaching policy and activist settings, with social researchers having a responsibility to respond to new approaches to fieldwork and new conceptualizations of just who or what represents the field, who directs meaning-making in the field, and who sets the agenda for research (Checker, Vince, & Wali, 2010). Participatory visual methodologies are proliferating in the human sciences, as well as in applied fields such as public health, education, nursing, and social work (excitement that we may gauge from the sheer number of graduate student committees we are asked to serve on, often due to our interest in these methodologies).

Digital and visual approaches to pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Theory and Practice
• Chapter 3. Participatory Digital Research Ethics
• Chapter 4. Photovoice Research
• Chapter 5. Participatory Film and Videomaking
• Chapter 6. Digital Storytelling
• Chapter 7. Participatory GIS
• Chapter 8. Participatory Digital Archives and Exhibitions as Research
• Chapter 9. Opening Up Data Analysis, Writing, and Research Products
• Chapter 10. Conclusion
• Appendix: Release of Materials Form
• References
• Index
• About the Authors