Ethics and Photovoice
After all the summer fun, it’s time for students (big and little) to head back to school and for everyone to return to a regular routine. With new classrooms and classmates, back-to-school “season” can be a time for students to look closely at the world around them and set intentions for the year. This presents an ideal opportunity to bring some of the best photovoice elements into many different subjects or a viable option for classroom assignments.
Democracy, at its best, isn’t just about casting a vote every few years. It’s about who gets to shape the conversation - whose experiences count as evidence, and whose stories are treated as data. By putting cameras in the hands of everyday people, it reframes who qualifies as an expert on community life. Photo by Tania Fernandez on Unsplash
The benefits of maintaining a reflexive journal extend well beyond personal growth and ethics. For the research itself, the journal functions as an audit trail — a transparent record that allows peer reviewers and stakeholders to assess the confirmability and dependability of findings.
Using examples from her vast experience, photographer, filmmaker, and participatory visual media practitioner Ingrid Guyon prioritizes placing participants and their community at the centre of the photovoice process.
A researcher studying water insecurity in rural Malawi talks about using photovoice to overcome cultural and language barriers, thus doing justice to the co-researcher perspective when reporting data.
The ethics of photovoice research are nested within universally recognized ethical principles that guide all research.
One way to acknowledge and address the interconnected legacies of colonialism and racism within photovoice health research is to adopt an anticolonial stance in framing our research and throughout its research phases.