Photovoice
What does mapping racial segregation at the scale of the city miss? What doesn’t this macro-scale spatial analysis and geo-visualization show us? For one, it doesn’t tell us much about the embodied, human, affective, experience of living in deeply segregated, deeply unequal neighborhoods in the early twenty-first century, more than half a century after the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Photovoice is a participatory research method where the researcher provides participant-photographers with a camera and specific instructions on what to photograph. In doing so, photovoice shifts the power of representation from the researcher to the research participant, enabling the audience to see the world through the worldview of the participant-photographer.
We provided 35mm disposable cameras to participant-photographers with the instruction to “take pictures of places that are meaningful to you in your life.” We gave participant-photographers with self-addressed stamped envelopes to return the cameras to us when they finished taking pictures. When we received cameras in the mail, we sent the film to be developed, and once we received the photographs from the lab we scheduled interviews with participant-photographers.
