We’re here, we’re queer, we’re framed: Navigating ethical tensions in a photovoice project with LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers living in Athens, Greece

ABSTRACT

Informed by our personal stories of diaspora as first-generation Greek-Americans and as queer artists-activists, we intimately connect to social justice issues surrounding the intersections of migration and sexuality. In this article, we present various ethical tensions and dilemmas we encountered in a community-based, arts-informed research project with fourteen LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers living in Athens, Greece. In partnership with a grassroots collective known for its advocacy for and with LGBTQ+ refugees, we implemented photovoice methodology to explore the themes of identity, belonging, physical and mental health challenges of displacement, and hopes for a future without borders. The purpose of this article is to use an anti-oppressive approach to unpack the complex layers of power dynamics, positionality and privilege, relational interactions, and ownership of the data throughout the research process. Specifically, we discuss these concepts through the following stages: building trust within the community, capturing visual narratives with the help of interpreters, sharing the artwork with the broader community, negotiating the politics of representation, navigating ownership of the data, and maintaining relationships beyond the project. As we critically reflect on our research process and product, we conclude with lessons learned and advocate re-envisioning arts-based research to include an anti-oppressive approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Photovoice
• ethics
• LGBTQ+
• refugees
• asylum seekers
• arts-based research
• anti-oppressive research

Since 2015, Greece has been the main entry point into Europe for refugees and migrants fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and beyond. A report on homophobia in Greece submitted by i-RED (Institute for Rights, Equality and Diversity) found that discrimination, exclusion and verbal violence are frequently met and spread widely throughout the country. At the same time, dated law provisions create a highly negative and hostile landscape that deprives LGBTQ+ undocumented and displaced people of accessing needed resources and creates a discriminatory and violent public space (Pavlou, 2009). This photovoice research study aimed to understand and highlight the lived experiences of undocumented and displaced LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers living in Athens, Greece, from their perspective through photovoice methodology. This activist-informed, community-based project also sought to take scholarship beyond the academic community to the public through photographic art exhibits that raise awareness and understanding of social justice issues affecting this marginalised and resilient community. In this article, we do not present the research findings, but rather we highlight our methodological challenges, ethical dilemmas and lessons learned from implementing photovoice, a public health research methodology.

Locating the landscape of our project

In Athens, both formal and informal organisations currently serve refugee and asylum seekers’ needs. The European Union funds most of the official non-governmental organisations (NGOs). In contrast, the unofficial organisations have no formal sources of funding and operate primarily through anarchists, activists, ‘solidarians,’¹ volunteers, and charities. These informal organisations are often grassroots and attempt to be self-sustainable and assist refugees and asylum seekers living in squats. In mid-2017, it was estimated that between 2,500 and 3,000 migrants were housed in Athens’ six refugee squats. These squats focused on promoting autonomy and political agency among the displaced people. They operated on anti-authoritarian principles and refused to co-operate with NGOs that they viewed as corrupt, not transparent nor accountable to refugees, and inefficient in providing immediate crisis intervention services.

Initially, we reached out to NGOs in Athens that worked with LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers and requested a meeting to explore collaboration and the ways our research could benefit their organisation and the communities it serves. However, these organisations were not interested in collaborating with us. We had hopes of building relationships and connections with NGOs but quickly realised that most formal organisations, although well-established and well-funded in the professional realm, had not gained the community’s respect for which it was attempting to serve. For this reason, we sought to build relationships with fellow activists at the refugee squats, who were informally organising to meet the diverse needs of refugees and asylum seekers.

Positioning ourselves

Our lived experiences and simultaneous desire to highlight the marginalised voices of LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers inspired us to pursue this photovoice research project in Athens, Greece. Specifically, we were motivated by our personal diaspora stories, continuous exploration of identity and belonging and nostalgic longing for home and a world without borders. We are two cisgender, queer-identified women living in the U.S. who were born of immigrant parents and embody a Greek ethnic identity. Beyond our immigrant backgrounds and ties to Greece, our personal and professional experiences and artist-activist identities have also nurtured a commitment to arts-based social justice with undocumented and displaced people, both within our communities and abroad. We have the privilege (through our work and dual citizenship status) of spending a few months out of the year in Greece, where we have built strong relationships with various communities engaged in social justice work.

My (Moshoula) undergraduate studies in visual arts (photography), the creation of my own darkroom, and five years of social work practice with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in southern California inform my commitment to highlighting their visual voices. My (Milia) fifteen years as a flight attendant, global citizen, human rights activist and decade-long engagement with the refugee community in Clarkston, Georgia inform my commitment to supporting the audibility of marginalised voices. As a person who transcends borders through work, I value arts-based storytelling and perspective sharing. Our personal engagement with the arts and commitment to the artistic process is also inspired by the photographic images and creativity of others who are the experts of their own lives. This is why we selected photovoice methodology for this project. While our parents’ journeys differ in terms of legal documentation status, they share a common thread about negotiating identity, hoping for a better life, accessing needed resources, and grappling with physical, emotional, and symbolic notions of home. As we explore the inherent complexity of our social and spatial locations, we are inspired by the stories of LGBTQ+ refugees, asylum seekers and migrants; they resonate with us.

Presenting our photovoice methodology

Photovoice methodology, originating in the field of public health, involves giving cameras to people who might not have access to resources and social spaces and allowing them to represent their lived experiences and realities instead of being passive subjects of other people’s intentions and images. As outlined by Wang and Burris (1997) as a participatory health promotion strategy, photovoice has three primary goals, ‘(1) to enable people to record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns, (2) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important community issues through large and small group discussion of photographs, and (3) to reach policymakers’ (p. 370). Researchers act as facilitators during every stage of the research process and collaborate with community members to define the project’s goals, provide workshops in the technical aspects of camera use, and disseminate findings (Wang, 1999; Wang et al., 1998). The strength of photovoice methodology lies in its potential to initiate awareness of and develop strategies to address the complex community health and social issues that are informed by the visual voices, perspectives and lived experiences of the participants themselves (Nykiforuk et al., 2011). While many researchers claim that photovoice is a methodology that ‘gives voice’ to participants, others argue that photovoice projects are sites for negotiating rather than ‘giving voice’ (Fairey, 2017; Lenette, 2019). Rather than focusing on ‘giving voice’ or ‘having voice,’ Lenette (2019) advocates for the act of listening with intent and engaging in ‘political listening’ (Dreher, 2012). Limitations of photovoice include the dynamics that result from the negotiations of voice and the politics of representation based on who is making decisions about the image-making process and the co-construction of knowledge (Fairey, 2017). In this article, we explore some of these complex power dynamics that embody the limitations and challenges of photovoice methodology.

Using photovoice methodology, we invited our participants to take photographs of how the following themes related to their lives: their concept of identity, notions of home, challenges and needs, hopes and dreams, and the refugee crisis in Athens, Greece from their perspective.² The participants were between 20–42 years old and from various countries (Syria, Cameroon, Uganda, Cuba, Iraq, and Pakistan). They embodied diverse sexual orientations. Nine participants identified as cis men, four identified as trans women, and one identified as a cis woman. A commonality among them was their shared experience of identifying as LGBTQ+ individuals and refugees and asylum seekers. Aside from their displaced status in Greece, they all shared similar experiences of oppression based on their gender identity and sexuality in their home countries and in Greece. The participants who identified as trans had a more difficult time hiding their gender identity and sexuality; as a result, they experienced higher rates of violence. At the time of this research study, all the participants were members of the LBGTQ+ refugee collective, a grassroots collective known for its advocacy for and with LGBTQ+ refugees. The small number of participants in this project is in-line with traditional photovoice studies that typically have a sample size ranging from 6 to 10 participants (Shumba & Moodley, 2018), given the participatory nature of the methodology and the time commitment it requires. These fourteen artist-activists took photographs that represented their experiences in their country of origin and in their host country, highlighting the discrimination and oppression they faced and currently struggled to navigate. The collection of photographs was extremely personal while being unavoidably common. While some stories were unsettling, visible in the body of work is the mutual thread that weaves our collective needs, hopes, and dreams for love, safety, acceptance, and belonging.

This photovoice research process involved a two-hour interview and an individual discussion with each participant about the meaning behind their photographs. We invited all participants (who were also members of the LGBTQ+ refugee collective) to engage in a group dialogue session where everyone had the opportunity to share their photographs and plan a public art exhibit. All 14 participants attended this group dialogue session and shared their photographs with one another. The community-based exhibit served to engage the broader community by illuminating the stories of their journeys, the impact of leaving family and loved ones behind, and the challenges they faced as displaced LGBTQ+ individuals. The artwork encouraged audience members to reflect on their own lives and assumptions about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, particularly those who embody a stigmatised sexual orientation or gender identity. These photographs invited us to imagine a world without physically and socially constructed borders and inspired us to participate in finding alternatives to approaches, programmes, and policies that divide and discriminate. The exhibit also gave the participants of the study an opportunity to reclaim control over artistic representation and knowledge creation. We believe that photographs taken by diverse LGBTQ+ migrants, refugees and asylum seekers have the power to inspire critical consciousness, empowerment and collective action. Similar to Johnson’s & Martínez Guzmán’s (2013) research with LGBT communities and trans collectives, our research project highlights how participatory action research in the form of photovoice can challenge dominant forms of representation of LGBTQ+ individuals that are historically rooted in psychological and medical pathology. Instead, photovoice moves toward alternative forms of representation rooted in the visually constructed knowledge produced by LGBTQ+ individuals with the potential for transformative action. We also acknowledge that participation in this process is messy, beautiful, complicated, and multilayered while laden with inherent power dynamics that we constantly negotiated throughout the research process.

Navigating ethical tensions throughout various stages of the research process

An anti-oppressive approach to research involves a personal and professional commitment to the people with whom one engages in research to mutually foster conditions for social justice and ethical research (Potts & Brown, 2005). Through an anti-oppressive practice approach (AOP), we unpack the layers of complexity involved in the various stages of the research process and how we grappled with the concepts of anti-oppressive approach, including attention to power dynamics, positionality and privilege, relational interactions, and ownership of the data. Specifically, we discuss these concepts through the following stages: building trust within the community, capturing visual narratives with the help of interpreters, sharing the artwork with the broader community, negotiating the politics of representation, navigating ownership of the data, and maintaining relationships beyond the project.

Building trust within the community

Since the inception of our project, we found that formal organisations were reluctant to meet or collaborate with us on our photovoice project. We found Greek NGOs that provided refugees with housing and social workers were reluctant to collaborate with us because they feared the refugees they served might portray them in a negative light. During our interviews and casual conversations with several of our study participants, we also learned that the formal NGOs had strict rules forbidding their clients from discussing details about the services rendered or sharing images of accommodations with the media or outside entities. As researchers affiliated with a university, we understood that we held a vast amount of power that could impact these organisations’ funding sources if our research revealed gaps in service delivery. We concluded that it would be more fruitful to explore the informal organising efforts of volunteers at the squats. After immersing ourselves in the community of anarchists, activists, ‘solidarians,’ and volunteers who frequented the squats where we also volunteered, we connected with a woman who was one of the key organisers of the LGBTQ+ refugee collective. This individual also served as our gatekeeper, who introduced us to other members of the collective. The LGBTQ+ refugee collective comprised both refugees (undocumented and displaced) and individuals who held E.U. or U.S. citizenship and identified as allies and activists for the rights of refugees; the common thread among its members was their LGBTQ+ identity. As researchers who also identified as LGBTQ+, we were welcomed into the group and invited to attend various community events. Our participation in these events helped us create and build trust before recruiting participants for the photovoice project.

We quickly identified power inequities within the collective itself, including the group's key organisers (gatekeepers and translators), who maintained a strong influence over the collective’s funds. Although the key organisers of the collective were instrumental as our gatekeepers to various participants in our study, they also stymied our efforts to expand our pool of participants. The collective wanted to keep this project exclusive to its membership. With unofficial groups, such as this LGBTQ+ refugee collective, the reason for their initial resistance to our research project primarily stemmed from a general distrust of outside entities, especially researchers looking to extract information from the community without giving anything meaningful in exchange. This distrust made us highly mindful of the power we held as outsiders and academic researchers and our obligation to members of the collective to collaborate in an ethical, equitable and conscientious way.

As outsiders to various communities, we needed to consider the ways in which our intersecting identities created opportunities for connection and barriers to access. The diverse communities with which we were engaging simultaneously viewed us as insiders (as part of the LGBTQ+ community) and outsiders (as documented U.S. and Greek citizens without the experience of being displaced). In an anti-oppressive practice approach to research, it is essential to consider the power dimensions inherent in the participatory process. These dynamics affect whose voices are privileged and whose may be silenced (Gubrium et al., 2014). We are aware of the differences in power and privilege and continue to reflect on those power relations between ourselves and the participants who held intersecting marginalised identities based on their race/ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, age, citizenship, and socioeconomic status.

Capturing visual narratives with the help of interpreters

One of our most significant ethical issues had to do with our choice of translators. We wanted to support members of the collective in every way. The collective also saw our willingness to support its members as an incentive to partner with us. The gatekeepers felt the translators should be individuals with whom participants could feel safe to share their stories. As such, we decided to use the collective’s translators for our participant interviews. Since several of the collective's members did not speak English or any other common language, communication during the collective’s meetings took place in an open forum where people would sit next to others who would serve as translators. Each non-English speaker depended exclusively on the translator's ability to impart accurate, unbiased information. The translators were already established within the group, and our gatekeeper based the translation fee of 30 Euro per hour on the amount other organisations pay translators. We also offered to pay each participant 50 Euro to participate in the project (which entailed engaging in an interview and the photovoice portion of the project). The collective agreed by unanimous vote to these amounts of compensation.

At one point, we had scheduled two interviews back-to-back with two participants from Cameroon and paid our French translator for her time and service. However, one of the participants saw that the amount of money we paid to the translator for both interviews was substantially more than what we paid her for sharing her story. Months later, when we were catching up with this participant over drinks and some food, she told us how unfair she felt the rendering of payments was. She explained that a person who shares their story should never receive less compensation than the person who translates those lived experiences. We agreed that this was unfair and explained that we did not decide on the translator fees. Privileged members of the collective who held the negotiating power determined the fees, and the collective voted to approve them. Head (2009) notes how, historically, payments to participants in qualitative research have been characterised in different ways, including as a recruitment tool, a thank you for participants’ time, or a way to overcome the power imbalance between researcher and researched. In the case of photovoice, participants are collaborators (rather than subjects) and are contributing their time and labour. However, the complexity emerges when the participants feel as if their story is more valuable than their compensation or the labour of their story’s interpreter. Researchers engaged in photovoice methodology need to reflect on these issues and find ways to democratise the research and compensation process. In hindsight, we could have avoided these tensions by paying each individual separately and out of view of the other while also using an envelope to deliver payment. This situation exposed the powerful role of the intersecting identities among members of the collective (along the lines of race, social class and citizenship status). Power and privilege played out unintentionally, even in spaces informed by horizontal power dynamics like the collective. We also were confronted with the privilege we held as researchers who were compensating members of the collective for their stories and translation services.

Using members of the collective as translators stymied our efforts to recruit participants outside of the collective. Our Arabic translator, who was also a participant in the project, recommended several of their friends to the study because they knew they would collect translator fees. Later, at the art exhibit, we met several other members of the collective who were not invited to participate in our study. We discovered this was either because they spoke English well enough not to need a translator or because they had a contentious relationship with the Arabic translator. At one point, the Arabic translator kept discouraging one participant from answering our questions directly during an interview because they wanted to make sure they were needed to translate. We felt we lost an opportunity to connect with more participants because of this limitation placed on our recruitment efforts. These limitations revealed how having one individual assume dual roles as both an Arabic interpreter and a participant in the project posed challenges. The interpreter’s need to generate income by translating interviews also magnified the economic inequality between ourselves and the community with whom we were engaging in research. In hindsight, we would have benefited significantly from using third-party translators that were not affiliated at all with the collective. The challenging part would have been finding an LGBTQ+ friendly translator that the participants trusted. Upon further reflection, we question whether or not the collective would have agreed to participate in our project if there was not such a significant monetary incentive for influential members of the group, such as the translators.

The Arabic interpreter also proved problematic in their translation of the participant stories shared during the interviews. Since he knew members of the collective personally, they did not always feel comfortable sharing their stories with us because that meant they were also sharing their stories with him. We also found that he was telling the participants to hide certain things from us (such as the participants’ involvement in survival sex work), ultimately choosing which parts of the story to share with us to protect the ways in which his community would be portrayed. We are unsure of the dynamics between each participant and the Arabic translator, but we know that several of the participants were from the same village in Syria, so they shared a past. We distinctly remember one participant sharing with us that he felt uncomfortable disclosing his entire story because of the Arabic translator. In this way, the translator acted as a self-imposed gatekeeper for their community. Westermeyer (1990) discusses how interpreters may withhold information shared by participants to protect their community from being portrayed in a negative light. Chiumento et al. (2017) highlight the importance of interpreter positionality and matching as a way to create a safe space for storytelling, particularly when discussing sensitive topics. Other researchers highlight the possibility of imaging circumstances where differences, as well as similarities between interpreters and participants, might be advantageous within the research process. For example, participants drawn from ethnic minority groups, whom members of another ethnic group interview, may feel less inhibited by the social and cultural mores implicated in being interviewed by a member of the same ethnic group (Murray & Wynne, 2001). In retrospect, we would have explored the participant’s discomfort around the Arabic interpreter and tried to find alternative options for interpretation. Suppose there were no other immediate options available, given the sensitive nature of finding an interpreter who understands the challenges of navigating the intersections of sexuality and displaced status. In this case, Murray and Wynne (2001) suggest engaging in serial interviewing where participants are interviewed several times over a prolonged period. Over time, this method could build rapport and trust between the participants, researchers and interpreters. If a researcher does not have the luxury of meeting with participants over a prolonged period, they can cultivate a relationship with the interpreter based on listening (Ratnam, 2019). Listening involves not only verbal dialogue but, as Ratnam (2019) argues in her work with refugees, it also involves being attentive to nonverbal cues of listening and how the stories feel in one’s body. As an engaged listener, the non-verbal cues of storytelling (such as laughter, tears, and fidgeting) can reveal a lot about the participant’s story by reading their embodied responses to questions posed. Integrating the audible and non-verbal acts of listening can serve as a way to communicate and ‘read’ participants’ embodied responses (Ratnam, 2019).

Sharing the artwork with the broader community

We brought the participants and other members of the collective together to determine the best way to disseminate the photovoice data with the broader community and plan for a community art exhibit. During this meeting, we discussed visions for the exhibit and the collective’s desire to gain visibility while also securing funding for future community-based activist endeavours. However, we experienced several tensions with the privileged members of the collective while organising the community art exhibit. There was also friction among the members of the collective and those who participated in the photovoice project. Our first glimpse of these strains was during the discussion about selling postcard-sized prints of the participants’ photos at the exhibit. While everyone agreed to sell postcards, there were lively disagreements on how to distribute the profits. The study's participants advocated that they should receive a higher percentage of the money raised. At the same time, some of the more privileged members aggressively negotiated for a higher percentage of the money to go directly to the collective. Ultimately, the agreed-upon ratio resulted in a negligible amount for each participant once they divided their share of the proceeds. We noticed a similar struggle over distributing funds from the art exhibit's food and alcohol proceeds. We struggled with determining whose needs should be prioritised when the participants and the collective's gatekeepers were vying for a more significant share of the profits. On the one hand, we believed we should champion the participants’ desires, some of whom were the most marginalised members of the collective. On the other hand, we believed we should honour the collective's desires as a whole, even if the privileged members dominated the group with a stronger voice due to their citizenship status and positioning within the broader landscape of LGBTQ+ communities in Athens.

As part of our commitment to supporting the LGBTQ+ community in Athens through our project, we agreed to host the art exhibit at AMOQA, the Athens Museum of Queer Arts. However, power struggles between the collective's privileged members (the gatekeepers and translators within the group) and us as researchers were evident when we were discussing whom to invite to the art exhibit. The gatekeepers and translators filtered all of our invitations for active collaboration and engagement with formal NGOs. A missed opportunity at the art exhibit was the collective’s reluctance to invite NGOs and the media. We compiled a list of 19 NGOs we could invite to the art exhibit and recommended the collective compile a list of ways they would like the NGOs to support and advocate for their community that they could distribute to those who decided to attend. Some privileged members of the collective expressed concern over several organisations on our list, conveying distrust and relating past conflicts or broken alliances. The participants distrusted NGOs because they felt these organisations did not consider their voices, experiences and self-identified needs. We realised that the collective navigated within a more extensive, fragmented network of organisations. We also had a connection at a major news outlet that was willing to do a media piece on the art exhibit which would have brought greater visibility to the group's needs, hopes, aspirations and resilience. Our gatekeeper expressed no desire to invite the media and declined to bring the opportunity to the collective for consideration. One of the goals of photovoice methodology is to reach policymakers and influence policy changes. We quickly realised that the collective's key decision makers did not share our vision of leveraging the art exhibit to affect social change at the structural level. Other researchers have discussed the importance of photovoice research to attend to expectations of the project goals for creating social change (Weber, 2018). In this instance, as researchers, we expected to utilise the public art exhibit to bring together various formal and informal key players in Athens who engaged with diverse refugee communities to facilitate dialogue and generate ideas for policy changes. While Rosemberg and Evans-Agnew (2020) discuss the importance of researcher intentionality when considering the digital image as a driver of social change, Molloy (2007) describes how the process can cause disillusionment as a result of unmet expectations about what the research can achieve in transforming the problems identified. Cultivating relationships involves sharing expectations and compromise (Stahlke, 2018). We wanted to have healthy, balanced relationships with members of the collective and respond to the needs of the participants. However, competing stakeholder interests can lead to value conflicts and differing expectations (Stahlke, 2018). These dynamics created anxiety and stress for us as we tried to negotiate and balance everyone’s needs. Reflecting on this, we wonder if the cultural landscape of anarchist spaces in Athens informed the collective’s dissident stance toward all official organisations and their reluctance to legitimize them by inviting them to the exhibit. We continue to question how we could have approached this situation differently to balance the wishes of the collective with the goals of photovoice research. Perhaps we could have done more to convince the participants on the importance of using photovoice as a means to change policy and improve social services. While this was a priority for us, as well as for the collective as a whole, some members of the collective had competing priorities, so using the project to engage in systemic change became secondary.

Negotiating the politics of representation

An unexpected consequence of limiting project participation exclusively to members of the collective was how the personal relationships and power dynamics shaped attendance at the art exhibit. Some members did not attend because other members would be there, and some of the photographs paid tribute to love affairs, pain over break-ups and experiences with other participants in their home countries and in Athens. Navigating these tensions with compassion and neutrality was awkward and uncomfortable at times, especially since we had established close ties with several participants. The participants invited us to their homes for gatherings and parties with their communities, so we wanted to honour their privacy while also honouring how they wanted to share their stories. Like us, a growing number of scholars are responding to participants’ requests to be seen and have their experiences known. Jenkins and Boudewijn (2020) note the unique ethical dilemmas specific to visual methods where ‘anonymity is entangled with authorship’ (p. 6). As Gubrium et al. (2014) discuss, we wanted to be mindful of ethical tensions that may arise when using participatory visual methods related to confidentiality and anonymity, legal issues, and the safety and wellbeing of participants. Researchers must consider representation and harm in these circumstances, as storytellers hold representation power when choosing how to tell their stories. Ethical issues can arise when a storyteller publicly identifies people, experiences or events that others prefer to remain private. This issue arose in our research project when one participant did not attend the exhibit because he chose to display photos of his ex-lover, who was also a participant in the photovoice project. In our photovoice project, we wanted to acknowledge that participants had their own relationship dynamics that played out through their participation in this research. We wanted to balance the tenets of agency and empowerment in photovoice research (Kia-Keating et al., 2017) by inviting the participants to vote on which photos they wanted to display in the exhibit, thus prioritising the majority of voices, even if this meant that one participant did not attend the exhibit due to his strenuous relationship with another participant. Gubrium et al. (2014) highlight how challenges arise from the tension over the potential for both emancipatory and oppressive outcomes. When dealing with ethical dilemmas related to the representation and dissemination of participant photos, we drew heavily on anti-oppressive approaches and participatory action research principles to guide our collaboration with participants. Cross et al. (2005) argue that ‘communities are de-objectified when they are treated as co-equal players in an inclusive research process’ (p. 1022). We made sure to engage in a dialogue with the participants to negotiate culturally appropriate standards for representing their photos.

Navigating ownership of the data

Our partnership with the collective also yielded ethical tensions during the data dissemination stage of our project. When we initially pitched the project to the LGBTQ+ refugee collective, we explained we would have shared ownership of the data, meaning the collective could use the photographs and other data collected in any way they saw fit after the project was complete. After the exhibit, we planned to disseminate the data (photographic prints and all of the photos and interview data on a UBS stick) to each participant, who was then free to share it with the collective. In this way, we hoped to inspire and empower the participants to use their images for future activism events in their communities. Our Arabic translator advocated that we hand all the data and printed photographs directly to the collective instead. We informed them that each participant had signed consent forms approved by our institutions’ human subjects ethics review board (IRB). Although we did reach out to the IRB to inquire formally, we already knew the most ethical action would be to give each participant agency over their images and stories. Our decision resulted in a strained reunion with members of the collective a month after the photo exhibit. We met the participants at a place designated by the collective to hand over the photos to each participant. There, we noticed how our Arabic translator would pressure each participant to hand over their USB stick (comprising their photographs and transcribed interview data) immediately. We wondered if there was any coercion in the way members of the collective conveyed our expressed commitment to each participant. This situation raised a recurring question throughout the stages of the research: To whom were we accountable? Should we prioritise the individuals who participated in the photovoice project or the collective as a whole? We recognise that the privileged members of the collective (our gatekeeper and our French and Arabic translators) carved out space for us to be welcomed into the community. However, prioritising the collective as a whole would have reinforced the hierarchical power dynamics already in place.

This negotiation process occurs within the context of power relations between and among various stakeholder groups. Researchers engaged in anti-oppressive research have drawn on Foucault’s (1980) work to understand how power can be both oppressive, wielded by dominant institutions to marginalise community perspectives, as well as emancipatory, built through equitable partnerships and deliberative democratic engagement (Guta et al., 2013; Walerstein et al., 2019). The idea is to shift power to individuals and communities most impacted by oppressive racial/ethnic, economic, gendered, and sexual hierarchies (Dean-Coffey, 2018; Walerstein et al., 2019). The marginalised identities of the participants in the project and their individual ownership of their visual narratives informed our desire to prioritise the individual needs of the LGBTQ+ refugees over those of the collective (which consisted of LGBTQ+ individuals who had E.U. or U.S. citizenship, as well those who were undocumented and displaced). An anti-oppressive practice lens is in line with relational ethics. Ponic and Jategaonkar (2012) argue for a relational ethics approach which acknowledges the interdependent nature of human relationships and places embodied knowledge, vulnerability, and mutual respect at the centre of ethical decision making. Similarly, Gubrium et al. (2014) also advocate for the establishment of meaningful relationships with participants in order to: (1) to address the impact of power differentials on methods, knowledge production and outcomes; (2) build rapport, reciprocity and trust; (3) ensure transparency about potential risks and benefits of visual storytelling; and (4) acknowledge the complex politics of representation surrounding visual images (pp. 1608-1609). We used these guiding principles to navigate tensions around ownership of the data and how it would be shared with the broader community.

Maintaining relationships beyond the project

One key indicator of our success in creating meaningful relationships and cultivating trust with our participants has been their willingness to keep in touch long after our project had concluded. We continue to keep in contact with most of the participants in the study through text messages and social media. We also continue to meet with the participants in Athens and hear about the changes in their lives. While several participants were thriving two years after the research study, others were not doing as well financially and emotionally. These participants occasionally reached out to us with links to GoFundMe drives and fundraisers, hoping we might assist them financially. We consider our ethical obligations to continue supporting them as researchers, fellow activists and friends. While we were able to continue cultivating a relationship with the majority of the participants, we have been unable to maintain a relationship with the non-migrant members of the collective who held privileged identities, including the gatekeeper with whom we established initial contact. These relationships were severed without a known reason. We surmise that we could not establish meaningful and lasting connections with the privileged members of the collective around our shared goal of advocating for and with LGBTQ+ refugees.

The photovoice project is a snapshot depicting a moment in the evolution of the participants’ sense of identity relative to both their environment and the historical context of their lived experiences at home and throughout their migrant journeys. What happens when, after the project is over, the sexual identity of a participant has shifted? What about the circumstances in their life? What is our ethical responsibility regarding images that no longer represent the LGBTQ+ refugee’s reality or identity? We encountered this situation with our Arabic translator. When we informed them that we were planning to host the art exhibit in Los Angeles, they expressed that their biographical information was no longer valid that they now identify as gender fluid. This participant mentioned that their body of work captured a time in their lives with which they no longer identify. In this instance, if we were to host a future exhibit of this work, we could provide a disclaimer indicating this shift in this participant’s identity. Alternatively, we could acknowledge more generally when displaying the photographs that this body of work captures how the participants felt in that moment in time but may no longer be valid. In response to the changing contexts, intersecting identities, and fluid nature of human lives, Gubrium et al. (2014) recommend a negotiation of ongoing consent to release photographs taken by participants. Special considerations should be made for sharing the research data, especially when displaying the images in a community-based art show or sharing them on a website or via social media (Teti et al., 2012). Specifically, Delgado (2015) recommends structuring the consent as a one-year renewable agreement to acknowledge that the views and circumstances of the participants may change in the future. A renewable agreement would also allow participants to withdraw their work from being shared publicly if they so wished. However, while ongoing consent may be best practice, the transient nature of some of our participants’ lives can make applying ongoing consent incredibly challenging.

Also, after maintaining contact with the participants in the study long after the community art exhibit, we discovered that many participants were no longer affiliated with the LGBTQ+ refugee collective. We learned that the nature of the organisation had shifted. An official legal entity with a different name has assumed all the legal and financial qualities of the collective. The LGBTQ+ refugee collective now served as a grassroots and autonomous initiative focused solely on self-awareness and empowerment through critical discussions and social activities. Later, several participants shared with us that they perceived this shift as one member’s power grab for autonomous control over resources, so they left the group. It is unclear whether or not the privileged members of the collective also left. As we reflect on the changed purpose and nature of the collective, we wonder whether or not the power was ever distributed horizontally and equitably among the members it sought to serve. While we are grateful that certain privileged members of the collective served as our gatekeepers into the LGBTQ+ refugee community, we feel our priority will continue to be the individual participants of our study and the friendships we have nurtured with them. As we nurture ongoing relationships with our participants, we continue to grapple with these questions: What happens when participants feel betrayed by the collective after the study has concluded? What is our role as researchers? Who do we align with – the participants or the collective? How do we navigate conversations about these conflicts when we have incomplete information about shifts in membership and power dynamics within the collective?

Reflecting on these lessons learned

In a context where the local and global challenges we face are becoming more layered and complex, we must incorporate creative and decolonising approaches to public health research as a means of challenging the relations of power and oppression that are infused into the framework of neoliberal globalisation. This is especially important in countries of the global North where research is typically rooted in medical science from a positivist approach and whereby research questions and the ways in which data are collected and analyzed have been determined by researchers as the ‘experts’ (Cook et al., 2019). We reflect on our lessons learned from an anti-oppressive practice approach to research as it intersects with arts-based research (ABR) methods (such as photovoice). Together, anti-oppressive approach and arts-based research serve to honour the lived experiences of the participants as the experts and co-creators of knowledge. The intersection of arts-based research with anti-oppressive practice in global public health research has the potential to revitalise and re-envision social justice work and to reaffirm creative responses to challenging and changing social contexts (Capous-Desyllas & Morgaine, 2017). Indigenous scholar and researcher Tuhiwai Smith (2012) discusses how unequal power dynamics between the participants and researcher can emerge when the researcher ‘speaks for’ the participants, thus risking the research process becoming a form of exploitation. In this article, we reflected on our presence and positionality as researchers and the ways in which our intersecting identities influenced the research process. Arts-based, participatory visual research offers a way to democratise public health research and address the power imbalances between researcher and participants (Weber, 2018). The power of representation is placed in the hands of participants themselves when doing research with participants rather than on them (Capous-Desyllas, 2013). Arts-based research methods can lead to a tangible research product that is co-created and owned by the research participants, making the research less ‘exploitative’ (Pink, 2007). Participatory, arts-based methods in public health research, such as photovoice, can effect change through creating spaces for sharing learning and connected knowing (Cook et al., 2019; Ledwith & Springett, 2010). This radical engagement involves the ‘need to disrupt’ as a central element for addressing traditional power imbalances in research to build pathways for democratic change (Cook et al., 2019, p. 393).

An anti-oppressive practice approach to public health research centres on respecting people and valuing relationships with participants (Potts & Brown, 2005). In all of the decisions we made throughout our research process, we centred our relationship with each participant, which demonstrates our commitment to anti-oppressive practice approach. Several of our project’s participants told us they benefited greatly from their engagement with this project and experienced personal transformation through their participation. While we believe this to be the case, not all participants experienced profound changes to the material condition of their lives. This project created new job opportunities for some participants, while circumstances for others remained relatively unchanged. They still struggle to gain access to basic health needs. They also struggle to gain legal legitimacy through documentation and citizenship status, which comes with access to health needs. Our legitimacy regarding our dual citizenship status poses a stark inequity between us and our participants (and other members of the collective). We also recognise that we continue to live lives of relative privilege and abundance compared to the LGBTQ+ refugees who continue to face hardship due to their intersecting identities and displaced status. Being an anti-oppressive researcher entails making a personal and professional commitment to the people we are working with to mutually foster conditions for social justice (Potts & Brown, 2005) in the realm of global public health. There must be political purpose and action associated with our research. Due to competing agendas, we were unable to fully actualise the central tenet of anti-oppressive practice, which advocates for utilising the art exhibit as a means to initiate systemic changes.

Ethical engagement with the photovoice process from an anti-oppressive practice lens is an ongoing, iterative, complex, multilayered process requiring continual self-reflection. Critical consciousness is a process that involves self-reflection, self-awareness, and critically questioning one’s consciousness to open one’s mind (Aluwihare-Samaranayake, 2012). The goal of critical consciousness in research is when both the researcher and participants reflect and participate in meaning-making and emancipation (Freire, 1993). As Aluwihare-Samaranayake (2012) articulates, ‘it prompts us to find ways to foster critical questions and reflect about how and what we are doing, what is happening, what we are, see and hear’ (p. 74). While this article engages with some of the ethical issues that photovoice researchers have discussed, our testimony also centres on how it can be challenging to carry out anti-oppressive practices within the context of complicated power relations within grassroots collectives that are diffuse and complex.

Concluding thoughts

Expressing the various ethical tensions throughout our photovoice research process is necessary to cultivate transparency, build methodological and ethical rigour, and maintain an awareness of the impact and consequences of arts-based, anti-oppressive research on the people whose stories we seek. We agree with Boxall and Raph (2009) and Teti (2019), who warn that as qualitative visual researchers, we need to continue to grapple with challenging ethical scenarios; otherwise, the use of creative visual methods could diminish. Our research is deeply personal, as much as it is political, and we cherish the relationships we have created and maintained. While the anarchists and collective movements we engaged with worked from an ideological stance of horizontal power sharing, we witnessed this being far from the truth. We question whether true equality in power can exist when the greater structural framework creates a system fuelled by intersecting inequalities. Thus, we need to constantly reflect on the power dynamics and adjust the research process accordingly. We learned that research outcomes are not as important as relationships and process. Our interactions with the research participants were messy, complicated, beautiful and transformative. We feel a deep honour and privilege to have bear witness to their visual stories while centreing their agency, voices and lived experiences. Despite the methodological tensions we experienced, we plan to continue to engage in photovoice research that holds liberatory potential for all who are involved. Upon reflecting on our research process, questions were generated that we are still seeking to answer. Our understanding of our own photovoice research process and of participatory, arts-based, and anti-oppressive research processes, in general, is that we strive to renegotiate the power differentials inherent in research and conclude that it is incredibly challenging, if not impossible, to outrun the stark imbalances of power between academy-based researchers and marginalised research participants, even when they are integrated as stakeholders (like the LGBTQ+ refugee collective) in the research process and engaged with as co-researchers. As a result, we would like to end with a call to continue to find ways to transform the photovoice research process, which ultimately can be as complicit in reproducing inequality as it is capable of expanding access.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes

1 In Greek the solidarian refers to the person who stands in solidarity.

2 This research study received ethics approval from California State University Northridge’s Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects (IRB#1718-134), prior to the data collection process.