Step 3 of the Photovoice Path: Discuss photos and reflect on experiences
Photovoice Worldwide
Training and consulting individuals and institutions to use photovoice safely, ethically, and successfully.
by Jesica Siham Fernández
Our guest author this month is Jesica Siham Fernández, Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department and member of the Environmental Justice & the Common Good Initiative at Santa Clara University in California. A trained community-social psychologist, Dr. Fernández utilizes Participatory Action Research (PAR) to guide her process of collaboration and research inquiry in action with youth and communities. During the 2021-2022 academic year Fernández led a Neighborhood Walk Photo-Narrative Activity. Photovoice Worldwide is delighted to have Dr. Fernández share highlights of this project as a means of illustrating Step 3 of the Photovoice Path.
The Youth for Justice Project: Neighborhood Walk Photo-Narrative Activity
The Youth for Justice Project (YJP) is a school-based afterschool program at a middle school in a low-income systems-impacted neighborhood in San José (California, USA). Located in a region that is considered the heart of tech innovation, Silicon Valley is characterized by economic inequities that compromise education outcomes and amplify health disparities. Guided by community-based research principles, the YJP uses PAR to foster the sociopolitical citizenship development of young people between the ages of 10 and 13, many of whom are from Latinx, immigrant, and mixed-status families.
The purpose of the Neighborhood Walk Photo-Narrative action-project was to encourage youth critical thinking and advocacy on issues impacting their surrounding school and neighborhood environments. Specifically, middle school youth were asked to use photographs to document or respond to the following prompts:
The Neighborhood Walk
Over the course of a one-hour afterschool program session, undergraduate student co-facilitators/educators walked with a group of twelve youth around their school’s neighborhood. As we walked and talked about what the youth saw and helped them discern what to capture via their photo-taking, we asked what message they wanted to convey through their photos. In this critically reflexive way, we accompanied and supported youth in their agency to tell their community story through the lens of their photo-taking. Youth took photographs of scenes they wanted to document, or of moments of encounter with what they considered would best represent their hopes and dreams.?
Capturing Strengths and Struggles
The photos captured their neighborhood’s strengths, challenges, and solidarities with social struggles–from Black Lives Matter to immigrant rights. Some of the photographs showed housing and food insecurities, while others the rising costs of gas and groceries. Additionally, youth noted the limited safe recreational spaces available to them and their families, along with the piles of litter in the streets that obstructed water drains, sidewalks, and bike paths.? Juxtaposing some of these photos, youth also documented cultural pride and diversity via art and creative expressions from murals to shoefiti to Méxican flags, neighborhood flyers, and colorful restaurants with picturesque logos.?
Capturing some of this uniqueness, along with the challenges within their neighborhood, encouraged youth to acknowledge and appreciate available community resources, such as the public library and the family shelter, as well as access to rental bikes. Random signs of kindness—from messages on classroom doors to heart-art and flowers on light boxes and street signs—were also photographed.
Step 3 of the Photovoice Path: “Discussing Photos and Reflecting on Experience”
After capturing these neighborhood scenes, youth were provided with printouts and were encouraged to select two photographs apiece. For each photo selected they provided a caption or a narrative description to the original prompts: What is your community like? What are your hopes and dreams for the community? The photo served as a jumping off point to help them articulate the struggles and challenges alongside the possibilities for change. Most importantly, through their photos and narrative descriptions they sought to express themselves, what mattered to them and why, while at the same time challenging some of the deficit and disempowering narratives about the community.?
For example, a photograph of a liquor store was taken to describe the history of the community, as it has been there for a long time, as well as youth access to snacks as they make their way home. Similarly, shoefiti or shoes hanging from electric wires, which one youth noted is how gang affiliated members mark their territory, was described as “hanging street art” during one of our conversations about what caption would accompany the photo.?
In the process of discerning a narrative for each photo, we embraced the diversity and plurality of interpretations, meanings and experiences that each photo elicited. We immersed ourselves in the process with humility and curiosity to learn, listen, and look through the lived experiences youth shared with us as adults/co-facilitators/educators.?
Through these photos and narratives, youth documented their hopes and dreams for their community. The activity encouraged youth to consider the intersections of social issues, and the possibilities for transformation and just change.
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Listening with humility
In my experience, accompaniment with humility means having the will and capacity to be both responsive and responsible, or accountable to the community in their pursuits for justice. In working with young people, accompaniment means observing and learning/unlearning/relearning with them, and being humble to listen to their concerns and make no assumptions about who they are or where they come from, but rather, to listen and learn as the project unfolds to determine our next steps.
Empowering youth?
As a society, we are organized in implicit and explicit hierarchical systems of power, privilege, and oppression. Young people in most societies are often positioned as dependent on adults, as lacking power, control, and agency. However, over the course of my many years of working, collaborating, and learning from youth—often in informal learning spaces, such as after school programs, community organizing, and student activism—I have observed and bore witness to the power of youth. Youth have power; they are powerful and agentic! And when provided with the adequate resources, forms of support, and context to enact and express their power through the voicing of their concerns and dreams, expressing their righteous anger alongside their creative ideas for transformation and justice, as well as their courageous will to challenge the status quo through activism and organizing—youth have power.?
We can support youth agency by creating space where youth are able to step into their power by taking on leadership roles as facilitators, participant conceptualizers of research projects and collaborations, and as co-researchers and co-authors or creators of knowledge. Youth are innovative, creative and radically hopeful! We must make space for young people to be seen, to be heard and to belong, not as tokens, but as active participants in forging the socially just conditions and environments where we can all thrive, flourish, and succeed.?
About the Author
Jesica Siham Fernández is an Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at Santa Clara University, and author of "Growing Up Latinx: Coming of Age in a Time of Contested Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2021). She received her PhD in Social Psychology and Latin American & Latinx Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Grounded in decolonial feminisms, she engages participatory action research (PAR), testimonio and auto-ethnography as well as liberatory research paradigms to support youth, student activists, women of color, and Latinx immigrants in their sociopolitical wellbeing. As a teacher-scholar-activist, Jesica is committed to work toward transformative justice for decolonial liberation and abolition.
In a previous publication Fernández has written extensively about the value and importance of engaging in critical reflexivity, especially when working with youth and communities who are institutionally marginalized, or who are often systemically and structurally disenfranchised on account of the intersections of their identities (Fernández, 2018); for example, as youth from communities of color, or growing up in low-income, mixed status families. It is essential that we be attentive to the privileged identities and positionalities we hold and how these may unintentionally reproduce hierarchies of power within the community settings, contexts or groups with whom we collaborate.?
Recommended Resources for Step 3: “Discuss Photos and Reflect on Experience”?
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Exploring through lenses, we uncover truths and narratives untold. ?? Photovoice is not just about pictures; it's a journey of discovery and understanding. As Socrates once implied - wisdom begins in wonder. Dive into this exploration of worlds within frames. ???? #photovoicepath #discovery