Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Abstract

Photovoice is a visual participatory action research methodology that exemplifies many of the aims of decolonial feminism and community psychology with its attendance to the development of critical consciousness, the situating of participants as experts in their own lives and the aim for the psychological empowerment of participants. However, in most research projects, the participatory dimension of the photovoice process does not extend beyond the stage of public exhibitions. Participants are rarely involved in the academic dissemination of the research findings. In this chapter, we seek to disrupt this, and to provide a reflection on the photovoice process from three varying positions of power within the project: participant, researcher and supervisor. In particular, this chapter examines how decolonial feminist mentorship in community psychology can be enacted and enabled through the lens of a photovoice project based in a psychology department at a university undergoing a contested transformation process. It reflects on how the first author, a young white woman, and the second author, a young black woman, have learned about the process of conducting decolonial feminist work from either side of a photovoice project examining gender and race in higher education, under the supervision and decolonial feminist mentorship of the third author, an established black academic.