Visual methodologies and participatory action research: Performing women’s community-based health promotion in post-Katrina New Orleans

ABSTRACT

Recovery from disaster and displacement involves multiple challenges including accompanying survivors, documenting effects, and rethreading community. This paper demonstrates how African-American and Latina community health promoters and white university-based researchers engaged visual methodologies and participatory action research (photoPAR) as resources in cross-community praxis in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. Visual techniques, including but not limited to photonarratives, facilitated the health promoters’: (1) care for themselves and each other as survivors of and responders to the post-disaster context; (2) critical interrogation of New Orleans’ entrenched pre- and post-Katrina structural racism as contributing to the racialised effects of and responses to Katrina; and (3) meaning-making and performances of women’s community-based, cross-community health promotion within this post-disaster context. This feminist antiracist participatory action research project demonstrates how visual methodologies contributed to the co-researchers’ cross-community self- and other caring, critical bifocality, and collaborative construction of a contextually and culturally responsive model for women’s community-based health promotion post ‘unnatural disaster’. Selected limitations as well as the potential for future cross-community antiracist feminist photoPAR in post-disaster contexts are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist antiracist participatory action research
• photonarratives
• critical bifocality
• humanitarian disaster
• community health promoters

Acknowledgements

Thanks, first and foremost, to the Latino and African-American communities in New Orleans for sharing their experiences and stories with the community health promoters who serve their neighbourhoods. Thanks also to the health promoters, programme coordinators, and executive directors of the New Orleans collaborating organisations for their confidence in the project – and for sharing its results with their constituencies. Finally, thanks to Verena Niederhoefer, MA, Boston College, who served as a research assistant throughout this process and to the two anonymous reviewers, for their thoughtful reflections and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Health Care for All, Kingsley House, and the Latino Health Access Network of Catholic Charities provided in-kind support for this project and collaborated through the contribution of one day’s labour for each participating health promoter. Institutional support from the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and Media Technology Services at Boston College was critical to the production of the banners while a grant from the K and S Fund of the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham supported project expenses.