Using visual methods in human rights research

Abstract

How might we use visual images in research on human rights violations? This article describes four approaches and the advantages and difficulties associated with each of them. It illustrates this with examples from research on how women in shantytowns experienced extreme poverty and state violence during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and on these women's coping strategies and human rights activism (Adams, 2012). The first approach, photo analysis, involves the collection and analysis of photographs showing the conditions that people experience. The second, art analysis, involves photographing and analyzing art works, in this case art works by the victims or survivors of human rights violations. The third, art elicitation, involves asking research participants to look at art works and talk about them or about subjects related to them. The final approach, the collection and analysis of ephemera with visual content, involves examining handbills, flyers, bulletins, newsletters, and the like. These visual methods are of value in and of themselves but can also serve to complement textual and other forms of data and enrich research that is primarily based on other methods.

Notes

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my thanks to Victoria Díaz Caro and Roberta Bacic, to the groups of women in Chilean shantytowns who allowed me to conduct ethnographic research with them and interview them, to Martín Sanchez Jankowski, Christine Trost, and Deborah Freedman at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California at Berkeley, to CIMADE (Paris), and to Armando Gajardo Hernandez and Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez of Princeton University.

Notes

1 For literature on the Pinochet period in Chilean history, see Amnesty International (1983), Schneider (1995), Spooner (1999), Paley (2001), Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (2005), Qureshi (2009), and Adams (2012, 2013a).

2 Literature on the resistance is extensive and includes Ochsensius (1991), Boyle (1992), Valdés and Weinstein (1993), Frohmann and Valdés (1995), Schneider (1995), Chuchryk (1993), Fleet and Smith (1997), Mattern (1997), Adams (2000, 2002, 2012, 2013a, 2013b), Paley (2001), Baldez (2002), Aguilar (2004), Agosín, (2008), Foweraker (2009), and Shayne (2009).

3 Preeminent among Chile’s human rights and resistance organizations were the Committee of Cooperation for Peace in Chile (Comité de cooperación para la paz en Chile) and the Vicariate of Solidarity (Vicaría de la Solidaridad). Both helped the poor and persecuted. Meanwhile, outside the country, Chilean refugees and local human rights activists worked energetically to inform the public about events in Chile and to raise money to send back to these and other organizations (Wright and Oñate 1998; Shayne, 2009; Adams, 2013a).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline Adams

Jacqueline Adams, Ph.D. is an award-winning sociologist and the author of the books Surviving Dictatorship: A Work of Visual Sociology and Art against Dictatorship: Producing and Exporting Arpilleras under Pinochet, published by Routledge and the University of Texas Press respectively. These books focus on women living in Chilean shantytowns and on their experiences of poverty, state violence, participation in a human rights movement, and dissident art-making. Jacqueline Adams has also conducted research on refugees, voluntary migration, economic survival strategies, and family formation. She specializes in the use of qualitative methods, including document analysis, participant observation, visual methods, and semi-structured, in-depth, and oral history interviews, and has employed these research tools while using Spanish, French, English. She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and Sociological Perspectives and reviews articles for a number of social science journals. She is a senior researcher at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, where she is working on enforced disappearance and on refugees from Nazism.