S14a Documenting Injustice: Photovoice for Teaching Students to See
Unseen Faces, Hear Muted Voices, Understand Lived Experiences

Presenters

Dr. James Forte, School of Social Work

Abstract

Photovoice is an innovative method of inquiry combining photos with narratives of lived experiences to increase injustice awareness and guide change. Photovoice advances the tradition of documentary photographers such as Wallace Kirkland, a Hull-House (H-H) social worker and Lewis Hine, a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee.

I have incorporated photographs into my human behavior class in three ways.

1) I will show my use of the H-H photos with quotes from Jane Addams to increase critical awareness and knowledge of topics: at-risk populations, ecological hazards, misrecognition and discrimination, resource denial, inadequate representation, vulnerability, and exclusionary processes. I will use the 1903 H-H photovoice study “Newsboys Conditions in Chicago” to demonstrate how to teach citizens/students to profile patterned injustices and advocate for participatory parity, privilege and power sharing, and preferred life paths.

2) I will share details of my assignment. Students profile a problem of inequity including the perspectives and voices of suffering members with portraits; the details of system-specific risks and penalties experienced by the members with illustrative scenes; the identification of solutions summarized in text and visualized by portraits of justice realized; and a synthesizing digital poster incorporating “best” photos with captions and quotes. We will look at samples.

3) I will report on the use of images for deepening student self-understanding and share photos from my slideshow, White Privilege Lost, a critical life history review. I will explain how to involve students in writing “stories of struggles with injustice,” enhanced with personal photos and how to facilitate discussions of these photo novellas to generate sympathetic knowledge of at-risk populations, problems of inequity, root causes, and well-being disparities.

I will share my photovoice course objectives, references, and list of lessons. We will brainstorm ways to adapt photovoice across disciplines and meet ethical and practical challenges.

Session Recording