Living Visual-voice as a Community-based Social Justice Research Method in Technical and Professional Communication

ABSTRACT

Image-based methods hold promise for reaching community-based, social justice goals in TPC. As a research example illustrates, however, participants can mold such methods in ways not anticipated by typical protocols that emphasize pre-prepared photos and public activism. By reflexively analyzing how participants shaped an image-based study through an embodied posthumanist lens, I propose a more inclusive “living visual-voice” model useful for TPC projects aiming to affect social change, increase participant/community involvement, and study material-discursive-embodied interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Action research
• research methods
• photovoice
• visual research
• social justice

Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank the participants in this study for opening up their lives and stories to me. Many, many thanks as well to Jennifer Bay, Patricia Sullivan, Thomas Rickert, Richard Johnson-Sheehan, Michael Swacha, and Dylan Dryer for their keen insights on earlier drafts of this piece. Finally, thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their in-depth comments, which made this work so much stronger.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Community-based” and “social justice” research often overlap, although not always. I use “community-based, social justice research” to refer to projects pursuing social change by collaborating with communities. Refer to Walton et al. (2015) for a fuller discussion of variations across social justice, action, and community-based research.

2. I use the umbrella term “posthumanism” to refer to what Rose and Walton (2018) have described as “a collection of theories and intellectual positions which represent contemporary efforts to reconceptualize the human condition” (p. 95). Other scholarship details nuances among theories under this umbrella like new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory (refer to Ferrando, 2013; Moore & Richards, 2018).

3. Because of high miscarriage rates before 12 weeks. There would be other reasons not to share such news in a research context, such as the potential to make participants uncomfortable. I ultimately disclosed my pregnancy as a point of connection to two participants who discussed their experiences as mothers.

4. Because of my research/volunteer involvement at the center, I was a participant-observer. One participant, Eleanor, was familiar with me, as I led the writing class she attended there. The other participants did not know me personally but may have seen me around. Although being a participant-observer can pose challenges, building a sustained relationship with a community before beginning such research can establish trust, distribute power equitably, and ensure reciprocity (e.g. Hacker, 2013; Minkler & Wallerstein, 2011).

5. All participants’ names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Yankura Swacha

Kathryn Yankura Swacha is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine. Her research, which focuses on community-based methodologies and the rhetoric of health and medicine, has appeared in journals such as Technical Communication Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning.