Adjusting Photovoice for Marginalized Indigenous Women: Eliciting Ch'orti' Maya Women's Perspectives on Health in Guatemala

Abstract

Photovoice is a Community-based Participatory Research method in which cameras are distributed to marginalized members of a community to document their own perspectives as well as balance power between researcher, researched, and dominant members of their society. Photovoice has been used in many contexts and been subject to constant renovation and refinement, to which the authors intend to contribute here. At the start of an Engineers Without Borders (EWB) project in a Ch'orti' Maya community of eastern Guatemala, the authors—an environmental engineer/MPH student and an anthropologist working in the region for over two decades—introduced the Photovoice technique among impoverished indigenous women to heighten their, the authors' own, EWB members, and potential funders' awareness about health problems. The authors feel that the adjustments were partially successful, as seen in the elicited Ch'orti' women's perspectives reported below. Their application of the technique was nonetheless problematic, leading...