Description

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This collection of original articles, a companion to the authors’ Participatory Visual and Digital Methods, illustrates how an innovative visual and digital research techniques are being used in various field projects in health care, environmental policy, urban planning, education and youth development, and heritage management settings. These methodologies produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, key tools for collaborative work. The 16 chapters<br>-include digital storytelling, PhotoVoice, community-based filmmaking, participatory mapping and GIS, and participatory digital archival research;<br>-provide a portfolio of model research projects for researchers who wish to collaborate on community-based studies;<br>-will appeal to an audience across social science, heritage, health, education, and social service fields.<br>An open-access companion website will allow readers to view the research products presented in each contributor's chapter.

About the Author

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Aline Gubrium is an Associate Professor of Public Health (Community Health Education) and a medical anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Gubrium uses participatory, digital, visual, and narrative methods to study the sexual and reproductive health knowledge and decision-making of marginalized women and youth. From early research with African-American women living in a southern rural community, to work with women using Depo-Provera contraception, and more recent projects working with Latino/a youth to address barriers to sexual communication and sexuality education, Gubrium’s research focus has been on how research participants view their sexual and reproductive health experiences, particularly how they make sense of, respond to, and confront the many in?uences that shape their sexuality. For the past six years Gubrium has conducted ethnographic ?eldwork at an alternative school for pregnant and parenting young women to explore students’ embodied perspectives on contraception, mothering, and sexuality. Gubrium is the author of Participatory Visual and Digital Methods (2013, with Krista Harper).

Krista Harper is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As an ethnographer, Harper explores issues related to the cultural politics of the environment, cities, and food systems. She is the author of Participatory Visual and Digital Methods (2013, with Aline Gubrium) and of Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activists and Post-Socialist Political Ecology in Hungary (2006). Harper has led projects using participatory digital research methods such as Photovoice to study environmental issues in a Hungarian Roma (Gypsy) neighborhood, school food programs with youth in western Massachusetts, and urban gardening efforts in Lisbon, Portugal.

Marty Otañez is an Assistant Professor of Political Ecology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver. To reach broader audiences with his research and advocacy, he creates digital stories and social documentaries. Otañez’s research and advocacy focus on digital stories featuring viral hepatitis and other health issues, and on immigrant experiences in the Rocky Mountain region in Colorado. He also directs the University of Colorado initiative, the Coalition for Excellence in Digital Storytelling. Otañez also studies tobacco industry strategies to undermine natural environments, health policies and human rights, as well as the health and socio-ecological costs of tobacco growing in developing countries. He has co-authored several articles on social responsibility in tobacco prevention in top journals, including Tobacco Control (2011) and American Journal of Public Health (2009), and has produced the videos Up in Smoke (2003) about tobacco farmers and global tobacco companies in Malawi that aired on BBC TV, Thangata: Social Bondage and Big Tobacco in Malawi, and 120,000 Lives (2005), co-produced with Stanton Glantz about smoking in youth-rated movies.

Praise For…

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"As I write these words now—after having read this wonderfully thorough book—I realize that I have been conducting visual, digital, and action-oriented participatory research for the last few years, much to my ignorance. My feeling is that this volume will have a similar converting effect on many other readers."
—From the Foreword by Phillip Vannini

Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Action is a text I will turn to again and again in my graduate qualitative research methods course as I encourage students to explore a range of visual methods. This text provides not only powerful examples of participatory visual methods and digital research at work, but also guides the novice researcher in how to go about this work in rigorous, systematic fashion. By demystifying both the possibilities and lure of innovative approaches, the editors and contributors create spaces for rich, complex conversation about method, truth, stories, and the new landscape of inquiry. As an ethnographer and visual artist, this text will have a prominent place in my professional library.
 
—Sally Campbell Galman, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

"What do asylum seekers in Ireland, Somali refugees in Maine and homeless youth in LA all have in common?  In this exciting new collection, Gubrium and Harper show how all of these groups — and a variety of others — have used digital and visual methods in collaboration with anthropologists. These case studies illustrate how new technologies engender new modes of engagement and raise new questions about power and ethics in fieldwork. I consider this book, along with its companion volume, Participatory Visual and Digital Methods, essential reading for anyone committed to the values of public scholarship and interested in exploring not just the how of using cutting edge methodologies in our ethnographic research but also the why."
—Susan Brin Hyatt, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis