Embracing new paths in visual research facilitation: opportunities, tensions & ethical considerations

Abstract

This introduction to the special section establishes facilitation as an important yet underreported component of visual sociological research. Although institutional and regulatory ethics have been ingrained in university research settings, scholars such as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014) have asked us to consider the ways in which participants’ and communities’ refuse research influence our ethical frameworks. We take up Tuck and Yang’s call to ask: What does ethical research facilitation look like beyond institutional guidelines in visual research? What might deep, ethical, meaningful or useful facilitation look like in visual studies? Putting social justice concerns about power within research processes at the fore, the editorial argues that thinking through research facilitation must go beyond researcher reflexivity, and move towards action within the research settings in which we work.

Positionality, reflexivity, and power relations between visual researchers and participants have been long documented in the literature on participatory visual research (Gubrium, Harper, and Otañez 2016; Milne, Mitchell, and De Lange 2012; Mitchell, De Lange, and Moletsane 2017) and visual sociology (Hauber-Özer and Call-Cummings 2020; Luttrell 2019; Pauwels 2010; Phelan and Kinsella 2013; Wagner 2014; Zuev and Bratchford 2020). These same methodological literatures also give weight to participation and non-participation as important components for rich analysis. Although researcher reflexivity has been well documented (Råheim et al. 2016; Switzer 2020), as well as the need for researchers to ‘suspend damage’ (Tuck 2009) to participants and communities, we consider the incremental and complex negotiations made during moments of uncertainty in planning and undertaking the research process. Here we consider the unplanned decisions made by visual researchers in response to unexpected moments during fieldwork and research. What does anti-racist visual research facilitation actually look like? What might it look like to queer visual research facilitation? What does community-specific visual research facilitation look like? How can community protocols be best incorporated into visual research practices and facilitation? What co-created strategies might visual researchers engage with in order to ‘do most good’? Or do the limitations of academic research always mitigate the potential to ‘do good’?

We come to these questions about facilitation from particular subjectivities and lived experiences. Casey is a White cis bisexual settler professor who lives and works on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastokiyik people (Fredericton, New Brunswick). Casey uses cellphilm method and DIY art production (collage, zines, sewing, stencil and sticker making, among others) in a research for social change framework (Nygreen 2009; Wheeler, Shahrokh, and Derakhshani 2020) to confront and disrupt school-based norms around gender, sexuality, sex education, and social studies education. Funké is a Black cis heterosexual professor whose research and work centre on Black Canadian history. Her research and work seek to bridge the gap between academic and community knowledges and prioritises the work of African descended peoples in Canada. She also reviews the intersections of race and gender within Canadian educational institutions largely through oral history. Josh is a mixed race Indigenous Binnizá-Austrian scholar activist born outside his ancestral community on the traditional and unneeded territory of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver). His work seeks to explore how best to combine mobile technology, specifically cellphilms, into Indigenous practice (Urrieta 2015; Cajete 1993) and land-based education (Simpson 2016) as means of fostering intergenerational knowledge transmission and language reclamation. Josh also uses the cellphilm method as a means to unpack and examine the emotional work involved in the journey of language reclamation.

Together, we wondered, what do we know about the incremental decisions that researchers make when they facilitate visual research? What do facilitators of visual sociological research do? What are the consequences of these decisions? How do these moments shape the research space? How are researchers using the visual to make change or to confront systemic oppression? To what extent does facilitating visual research disrupt and in what was does it reaffirm systemic oppression long associated with research with over-researched, deficit represented, and underserved populations: black, Indigenous, people of Colour, disabled, queer, trans, and other marginalised identities? In this special section, we seek to shine a spotlight on some of the ways in which visual sociological research is facilitated. In doing this work, we are indebted to the scholarship of Dr. Sarah Switzer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, who notes:

In my many roles (graduate student, facilitator, community artist, project coordinator, front-line worker and researcher), I have learned as much about what not to do when working with the visual from the communities I’ve worked with, as what I ought to do. It has been through these interactions, and the generosity of participants, fellow artists and facilitators, that I have learned about the myriad of ways in which systems of oppression, institutional power and structural forms of violence impact the way in which visual methods get applied, understood, adapted and transformed in different contexts. (2018, 190).

By exploring facilitation practices as the topic of inquiry, we seek to make visible the implicit and taken for granted interactions that happen within research spaces. We do this work within research for social change framework (Greenwood and Levin 2006; Harris and Sinclair 2014; Mitchell, DeLange and Molestane 2017), where we seek to engage in more ethical research relations and challenge the existing status quo (Wemigwase and Tuck 2019). While we realise that in doing this work within academic institutions, we may risk edifying the very structures that we seek to disrupt and change, we seek to understand more about facilitation within visual sociological research. What can we learn from each other? How might we build new strategies and solidarities across institutions and geographies in order to disrupt systems of oppression? How are visual sociologists and artists working with the visual facilitating their research? What decisions are being made and why? What happens when facilitation fails (Bratchford, Giotaki, and Wewiora 2018)? Instead, we situate these complex questions not as assumed and unnamed elements of research processes, but rather important areas by which researchers and participants can reflect upon and prioritise as part of ethical research practice.

This special section explicitly centres facilitation of visual sociological research across a variety of visual methods including cellphilm method (Tomaselli and Dockney 2018; MacEntee, Burkholder, and Schwab-Cartas 2016, 2019), photovoice (Wang 1999), collage (Culshaw 2019), sewing (Sklar and Donahue 2018), drama and poetry (Richardson 2002) assemblage (Taylor 2013) and performance. The special section also takes up important issues relating to the screening of participant-produced visual works (see also Burkholder and Rogers 2020a; 2020b) as well as the ways that facilitators position themselves when sharing participant produced visual texts in academic contexts. We seek to call attention to the ways in which facilitation has been undertheorized in visual sociological research and disrupt this lack of attention by shining a critical light on facilitation in visual sociology.

Organisation of the SPECIAL SECTION

The special section begins with Alicia Noreiga’s article, ‘Facilitating Black Identity and Advocacy: Creating Cellphilms for Reflection on Issues Affecting Black Students.’ Noreiga’s piece explores cellphilm production with Black students on a majority White campus in Eastern Canada. In her important autoethnographic reflection on facilitating in an explicitly affirming way, she found herself embarking on a journey of critical self-reflection while she created a space for Black participants to express their feelings through discussion and media production.

The second article, in the special section, ‘Facilitating a “Virtual Space” for Social Change During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Working with High-risk Populations Using Arts-based Methods’ by Zehra Melike Polat, explores the systemic barriers and other post-migration experiences of young adult Turkish and Kurdish asylum seekers arriving from Turkey to Canada through photovoice. Polat’s chapter highlights the experiences of adapting photovoice research design for Pandemic safety measures. As a result of closures and social distancing measures, the research had to be carried out over a virtual platform which raised legal, social, and psychological complexities associated with vulnerability level, privacy of participants, language barriers, and power struggles among the participants in the virtual discussions.

The third article in the special section, by Casey Burkholder, Amelia Thorpe and the Pride/Swell research group is called ‘Facilitating Gender-Affirming Participatory Visual Research in Embodied and Online Spaces.’ Together, they describe the opportunities and challenges to facilitating two projects with 2SLGBTQ+ youth. The first project, Where Are Our Histories (2018–2020) – was a face-to-face participatory visual research project addressing the erasure of 2SLGBTQ+ people, experiences, and histories from New Brunswick, Canada’s Social Studies curricula and classrooms and co-creating media to interrupt these erasures with youth (Burkholder and Thorpe 2019). The article also describes the ways in which the experiences of facilitating Where Are Our Histories has shaped the co-facilitation strategies employed in a distance-based participatory visual research project, amidst COVID-19. Pride/Swell is a mail-based art and activism project facilitated at a distance with 50 2SLGBTQ+ youth (aged 15–25) from the Atlantic Canadian provinces as co-researchers to design, organise and implement a youth-focused archive of youth-produced activist art. Together they highlight strategies and productive failures in their attempts to facilitate visual research in explicitly gender-affirming ways.

This special section seeks to discuss how thinking about facilitation in a more critical and nuanced manner, as well as thinking through the kinds of relations, problems and local changes that happen within a project, can help visual sociologists move towards more equitable research practices. We ask readers to think through their own facilitation practices in working with the visual, and ask how we might centre facilitation practices to disrupt power relations within and beyond research spaces.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation [2019-005]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [2019-153005,430-2018-00264].

Notes on contributors

Casey Burkholder

Casey Burkholder is an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Education. Her research program centers on exploring participatory visual research approaches with youth to explore their ways of knowing and experiencing school and social structures. This work seeks to work with youth activists to agitate for social change through participatory visual research approaches.

Funké Aladejebi

Funké Aladejebi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Dr. Aladejebi researches African Canadian history and holds a PhD in Canadian History from York University. Her articles on Black Canadian history and feminist pedagogies have appeared in Education Matters, Ontario History, and the Southern Journal of Canadian Studies.

Josh Schwab-Cartas

Joshua Schwab-Cartas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia. Joshua's research explores Indigenous language revitalization strategies with a community of intergenerational Didxazá speakers.  Combining his familiarity with contemporary oral histories of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico with his background in ancient and colonial Zapotec visual culture, Joshua’s work uses participatory video as an educational tool in the Isthmus Zapotec community of his maternal grandfather, Ranchu Gubiña.