Envisioning the future: participatory visual research and the post-2015 development framework
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Envisioning the future
Contents
Introduction
Introducing the background and methods for the review of participatory visual research and summarises the main findings from this review across five key themes.
1. Difficult trade-offs and impossible choices
This section explores the almost impossible choices and difficult trade-offs people living in poverty are compelled to make in their everyday lives.
2. Social norms create barriers to access
Visual processes reveal that even when rights are legally in place, social norms create barriers and prevent marginalised groups from being able to claim these rights.
3. Strengthening capacity
Visual methods not only enable us to listen better to people, but they are also a means to develop capacity for communication
4: Claiming Rights
Visual processes not only highlight the disjuncture between rights and reality, but they can also serve as a tool for bridging the distance.
5. Crisis, uncertainty and volatility
Multiple shocks, brought about by crises like war and climate change, catalyse innovative responses from affected communities, as we learn in this section.
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Envisioning the future
Introduction Transforming inequality entails transforming the way we listen to and learn from people living in poverty. Specifically, addressing global socio-economic inequalities entails a commitment to change the implicit power imbalances in policy-making by ensuring genuine participation with people who are going to be most affected by the post-2015 development framework. Participate has conducted a global synthesis of participatory research in order to bring the perspectives of people living in poverty into the post-2015 policy-making arena. Envisioning the Future forms part of this global synthesis and is based on a review of 50 participatory visual studies conducted in more than 25 countries with people who, through various media, articulated the key challenges they faced and the strategies they envisioned for creating a more equitable future. In this review, we focus on three main forms of participatory visual research: participatory video (PV); digital storytelling (DST); and photovoice. These studies were included in the review because they were grounded in the ethos of participatory research, namely that individuals and groups identify the key issues they wish to engage with through the research process.
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Envisioning the future
Why does participatory visual research matter? In many cases, the participants in these studies viewed participatory visual research as a vehicle to carry their voice into policy-making spaces that they had previously been unable to access. Participatory visual research has also been a vehicle for amplifying the concerns of marginalised individuals and groups, enabling, for example: members of Christian and Muslim factions in Nigeria to find spaces of commonality rather than difference (Abah et al 2009); children living in rural Nepal to speak to their teachers and community leaders about the impact of climate change on their education (Plush 2009); farmers in India to speak to government officials and multinational corporations about the struggles they encountered in adapting old farming practices to accommodate new seed technologies (Ghose 2007). Envisioning the Future seeks to bring these voices to the foreground as people around the world use these visual vehicles to speak to policy makers, members of civil society organisations, academics and activists, as we come together to envision a future beyond 2015: a future where people’s voices are heard, and where people’s experience and knowledge matters.
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Envisioning the future
The visual methods Participatory video
Digital storytelling
Participatory video is a process wherein people themselves understand the video project methodology and process and control the content of the video productions. In this sense, the main objective of participatory video communication is not to produce media materials per se, but to use a process of media production to empower people with the confidence, skills and information they need to tackle their own issues” (Shaw and Robertson 1997: 26).
Digital storytelling is the practice in which people narrate a story they wish to communicate using a range of digital media, including film, photography, animation and audio. In the digital stories reviewed here, people largely worked with a series of still images – photographs and drawings – and overlaid these images with a story that they narrated in their own language. Digital storytelling, importantly, corrects the “hidden injuries of media power since it provides the means to distribute more widely the capacity to tell important stories about oneself – to represent oneself as a social, and therefore potentially political, agent – in a way that is registered in the public domain.” (Couldry 2008: 386).
Photovoice Photovoice is a participatory-action research methodology based on the understanding that people are experts on their own lives… Using the photovoice methodology, participants allow their photographs to raise the questions, ‘Why does this situation exist? Do we want to change it, and, if so, how?’ By documenting their own worlds and critically discussing with policy makers the images they produce, community people can initiate grassroots social change.” (Wang et al 2004: 911).
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Difficult trade-offs and impossible choices
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Envisioning the future
1. Difficult trade-offs and impossible choices People living in extreme poverty frequently find themselves facing impossible choices to try to meet their needs. Most often this involves household distribution of resources, usually choosing between buying food and paying school fees for children. Other trade-offs include deciding whether to repay micro-credit loans or eat; adolescent mothers needing to provide for their children rather than complete their education; parents putting their children in orphanages because this is perceived as providing a better life; and deciding whether to plant short-term food crops or long-term cash crops. These ‘choices’ are not choices people should have to make, but are symptomatic of the situations poor people face; where one basic need is only accessible through the sacrifice of other needs and rights. Participatory visual studies similarly speak to the difficult choices that people living in poverty are compelled to make in their everyday lives. A participatory photography study with a farming community in Costa Rica highlighted the difficult tension between earning an income in a region dominated by commercial pineapple monoculture and risking exposure to pesticides that, they believe, affects their fertility and their children’s health.
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1. Difficult trade-offs and impossible choices
A mother commented that “sometimes, when I leave the kid in the kindergarten I can smell the pesticide’’; someone else mentioned in their Digital Story that ‘‘those who spread the poison in the fields have a hard time having babies’’ and ‘‘the pesticides affect their head.” (Berbes-Blazquez 2012: 871) In the Farfi District in Kenya, climate change takes the shape of drought and has had ripple effects on the livelihoods of the community living in the district. Care worked with youth, using DST methods, to understand how, with the loss of livestock, they have been compelled to earn an income through land degradation and deforestation, making them further vulnerable to other climate change related challenges like erosion or top soil depletion.
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1. Difficult trade-offs and impossible choices
In South Africa, extreme poverty is also characterised by tradeoffs, as Nosipho, a young woman living in an informal housing settlement in Cape Town describes through a digital story she created in conjunction with Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation. We hear Nosipho’s voice as she narrates the impossible choices she was forced to make between finishing her education and supporting her impoverished family by running an informal bar – called a shebeen – where she sold alcohol illegally.
She described the day she was arrested for selling alcohol illegally in a shebeen [bar] saying, “I will never forget the first day I was arrested... I was put into a van in my nightdress crying and begging for forgiveness [a photograph of a woman’s hands together, praying]. But nobody listened. I slept in the cold police cell. I curse that day.
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1. Difficult trade-offs and impossible choices
Nosipho said, “I held on [after I was arrested] because inside there was a voice telling me I was arrested for putting food on my family’s table… that’s why I started the business of selling alcohol. I saw it as a better option than being a slave to bad things. For Nosipho, the choice was clear: it was better to earn a living for her family by selling alcohol than becoming ‘a slave to bad things’. Selling alcohol came at the cost of her education, and
ultimately placed her family in an even starker financial position: her mother needed to loan money to pay her bail, and they are therefore even more reliant on the illegal, and risky, sale of alcohol in order to repay their debt. We see here how the choices Nosipho had available to her were really not choices at all, but trade-offs where her education came at the cost of her family’s livelihood.
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Social norms create barriers to access
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2. Social norms create barriers to access Participatory visual research shows that even when services like health care and education are available, traditional systems and social norms, as well as other systemic factors, act as barriers and prevent people from accessing them. Participate’s analysis of participatory research, including visual research, finds that women and girls particularly experience a set of cultural barriers that prevent them from accessing the available services. A PV process in rural Uganda, for example, found that although sexual health resources were provided by the government and by NGOs, women were unable to use these resources – like condoms - because local practices and beliefs around sexual relationships limited the women’s ability to insist on safe sex, or negotiate sexual and social relationships more generally. “That state and other NGO proclamations about the achievement of sexual health and the equality of women do not always translate into praxis on the ground and is influenced in no small part by these socio-cultural mores.” (Waite and Conn 2011: 119 - 120)
Enabling access to education as a means to address gender inequality, however, assumes that schools are places where children are safe to learn. In South Africa, even when education is available, young girls are vulnerable to violence and abuse in schools, which has – among others – direct implications for HIV infection. This is borne out in figures that place HIV prevalence for girls aged 17 – 19 years at 7.9% compared to 1.2% among boys of the same age group. (De Lange and Geldenhuys 2012) Social norms take shape through relationships, and all genders experience a set of societal expectations that limit the extent to which they can fully realise their capabilities within social and sexual relationships. Digital stories created in conjunction with Silence Speaks Digital Storytelling and Sonke Gender Justice highlight the way that social norms limit men and affect the kinds of lives they lead as partners, workers, fathers.
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2. Social norms create barriers to access
In this digital story, Zithu reflects on the way he was raised by his parents, the physical violence he grew up knowing as the norm: “A slap in the face by my mother would make me fall. I hated it when I didn’t duck.” His father had, in turn, been beaten by his father: “He would show me the scars on top of his head from the beatings his father had given him.” Through this digital story, Zithu asks, “What makes you a father” and raises the importance of understanding the transfer of social norms across generations, alongside the capacity of individuals, like himself, to actively halt and transform harmful social practices.
This story was created in partnership with Silence Speaks Digital Storytelling, www.silencespeaks.org.
If this video does not play for you, please open the movie file ‘Zithus_story’ directly accompanying this PDF
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Strengthening capacity
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3: Strengthening capacity “The ability to view immediately one’s own self speaking on videotape assists individuals to see themselves as others see them. This self-image conveys the impression immediately that one’s own knowledge is important and that it can be effectively communicated. These video techniques create a new way of learning, which not only build confidence, but show people that they can say and do things that they thought were not possible before.” (Snowden 1984) Key findings from Participate’s review emphasised the importance of strengthening the capacity of individuals and communities through participatory research processes. The outcome of participatory visual research is the process. It is a process of strengthening capacity to identify and communicate the most pressing issues facing individuals and communities in order to bring their voice out from the margins and into the centre: into a place where they can be heard by other members of their community, local and national leaders and policy makers.
3.1. Transforming communication, changing lives Visual tools, learnt through participatory video (PV) for example, can be transformative as a means of communication, but they also have the capacity to generate income. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) centres in India, for example, had prioritised training people in basic computing skills but it was through working with PV and DST that people realised they were more likely to find work if they had creative design skills. A member of a local ICT centre in Delhi therefore developed a vocational media course by using digital storytelling techniques in order to support women to identify the required design skills that would equip them for the labour market. “Digital storytelling workshops had already demonstrated to Aseem that the women participants had a keen interest in the creative and expressive use of technologies. Here then digital storytelling has become an important component in an employment focused training programme.” (Tacchi, 2009: N.P.)
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3. Strengthening capacity
3.2. Reshaping social norms by talking Participatory visual processes not only equip individuals and communities with technical skills to use communication technologies, it also engages with the social norms that silence marginalised individuals and groups. Rural women in Fiji used PV to define the work they did themselves, thus challenging bureaucratic or ‘top down’ constructions of women that positioned them as subjects and not as agents, living complex lives and contributing in valuable ways to their communities.
“The video… legitimised women’s work and became the catalyst for rural women to be ‘reimagined’ by the bureaucrats. By their skillful use of technology and their confident appearance in front of the camera (something the bureaucrats themselves struggled with), the women re-presented themselves as active citizens capable of negotiating their own futures, instead of state dependents who waited for top–down mechanisms to intervene.” (Harris 2009: 545).
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2. Social norms create barriers to access
3.3. Bridging communities by listening Participatory visual processes enable people and groups to engage with new or unusual perspectives, leading to a deeper understanding of the challenges that limit the wellbeing of individuals within and across communities. Using a combination of PV and theatre, Abah et al (2009) worked to facilitate dialogue among Christian and Muslim groups in an area of Northern Nigeria facing outbreaks of violence linked to religion and ethnicity. Through careful work in Muslim and Christian safe-havens, people became confident in the research process and therefore more willing to participate and learn from groups they had previously been antagonist, even violent, towards.
“[Participatory video] recorded messages from people on opposite sides of the religious and ethnic divides, asking for recognition of a common need for basic survival among the poor; for the poor Muslims and Christians to recognise that it is the politicians and elite workers who benefit from their suffering.” (Abah et al 2009: 22). As a result, “Muslims and Christians were enabled to hear different and unimagined sides of the story, and in ways they never had before. For example, the Muslims discovered that the Christians, like them, were victims of rumour, and that Christians were equally victims of the greed of politicians.” (Abah et al 2009: 22)
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Claiming rights
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4: Claiming rights Individual and community capacity development has translated in some cases into an increased capacity for collective action to claim rights. However, even when individuals live in countries that have a human rights legal framework in place, many are still unable to exercise these rights because individual, community, social and institutional barriers prohibit access to the systems that will ensure the respect for their rights. Participatory visual research highlights these barriers to claiming rights alongside the importance of challenging these barriers and creating institutional and infrastructural linkages – like transport networks that facilitate access to police stations, clinics and courts for example – to support people in claiming their rights.
“They have won significant labour rights. But many domestic workers remain undocumented and continue to suffer exploitation and abuse in their places of work. The domestic workers’ struggle is not just one for labour rights. It is also for dignity: to be treated as fully human. Re-presenting their humanity, as well as revealing the conditions in the places where they live and work became a vehicle for [this] participatory photography project.” (Cornwall et al 2010: 53)
In Salvador, Brazil, a participatory process worked to bring the largely invisible experiences of domestic workers’ daily lives into public spaces where the disjuncture between their rights and reality was made visible.
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4. Claiming Rights
A digital story from Nepal similarly speaks to the disjuncture between apparently empowering legislative changes and the disempowering reality of local norms and bureaucracy that make it difficult for people to claim their rights. Legislation was passed in 2009 to protect Nepalese women affected by domestic violence; however, without effective public education and government accountability for enforcement, this legislation has little real traction in Nepalese women’s lives. Digital stories were created in a four-day workshop run with SAATHI Nepal, a non-governmental organisation working to eradicate genderbased violence, and Silence Speaks Digital Storytelling. They were then shown across communities in Nepal, broadcast over radio and television, to raise awareness about this Act, and to compel communities to hold each other and the government accountable in enforcing the provisions of the Act in order to address domestic violence.
In it, we learn that education “came to [her] life not as a right but as a privilege.” Hlakrayprue’s family and community believed that educated women marry into other ethnic groups and go off to the homes of their in-laws; women were therefore discouraged from studying. Without support from her family, Hlakrayprue’s studies were stopped, but eventually, with the assistance of a private donor, she was able to continue her education and subsequently established a committee in her community to assist young girls with their education. She says, “The goal of this organisation is to ensure that no woman gets dropped off education and that our properties do not get sold off. Whereas our society has left us behind, now our community values our views and even seeks our opinion in resolving disputes.” Importantly, Hlakrayprue’s story highlights the dynamic nature of social norms and the strategic ways that women and - importantly - men, can resist and transform these oppressive practices.
In a digital story created through the Pathways of Empowerment programme, Hlakrayprue Khayawng speaks to the dynamic ways that women in Bangladesh actively negotiate restrictive gender norms in order to claim their rights – in this case, access to education.
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Crisis, uncertainty and volatility
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5. Crisis, uncertainty and volatility Participatory visual research indicates that climate change cannot simply be understood as a series of volatile shocks that send individuals, communities, even countries, into crisis. The studies also underline the value of understanding and supporting the innovative strategies that local communities have developed for managing these shocks. From Nepal to Kenya, Mexico to Vietnam, people living in extreme poverty are using visual methods to communicate how climate change undermines their already precarious lives. Their videos, photographs and digital stories speak to the many faces of climate change; its ripple effects on their lives; and the resilient strategies they have developed to manage these volatile effects.
5.1. The face of crisis In Nepal, climate change is seen in the rivers that flood their banks every monsoon season (Khamis et al 2009). In Kenya, crisis takes the face of drought, killing large numbers of livestock and creating ‘ghost villages’ as pastoralist communities are forced to migrate to cities in search of work (Owl 2011).
Digital story created in conjunction with Care
If this video does not play for you, please open the movie file ‘Makays_story’ directly accompanying this PDF
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5. Crisis, uncertainty and volatility
In this digital story, Makay Shuriye, speaks about her life as a young woman and mother of five children living in Nanighi, Kenya and working to manage the myriad effects of climate change on her and her community’s life. Shuriye’s digital story speaks to the crisis and uncertainty wrought through climate change: “Increasing frequency and severity of droughts in recent decades has rendered us more vulnerable to its impacts. Livestock mortality rates have increased, pasture lands have diminished, and livestock body conditions have weakened. As a result, a lot of in-migration happened that increased livestock and human diseases.” Participatory studies reflect the extent to which migration has become the answer to the shocks of climate change. Although migration was identified by most as a positive coping strategy, the studies revealed that migrants experience some of the worst and most poor living and working conditions. Consequently, development planners need to be aware of mobile populations and the specific needs of migrants, who frequently have less access to or knowledge about services and programmes.
5.2. Ripples of uncertainty Climate change directly affects the livelihoods and wellbeing of people living in poverty not only because of its implications for agricultural production, a key source of income for many, but because it has ripple effects that reinforce the fault lines of inequality that act as barriers to development. For example, in Nepal, as described above, children’s digital stories show that not only does the flooded river destroy their homes and village but it prevents them from reaching their school, which undermines their education - an important component in ensuring better development outcomes for communities, like this one in Nepal, struggling to overcome material poverty. Further, in her digital story described above, Shuriye raises the impact of these interlocking effects for women and young children. Referring to the implications of drought on livestock death, migration and disease, she says, “This situation particularly impacts negatively on women. This increases malnutrition due to the scarcity of milk.”
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5. Crisis, uncertainty and volatility
5.3. Managing volatility Garin Mahamane is 73 years old, and lives in Niger. Over his life, he has witnessed several shocks as climate change has become more apparent in his community.
In this digital story, created in conjunction with Care, Mahamme traces some of these changes alongside the strategies his community have developed for managing drought and deforestation.
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5. Crisis, uncertainty and volatility
Mahamane’s digital story speaks to the emergence of local interventions to address the impact of climate change through planting and caring for indigenous trees. However, it also underlines the complexity of resilience and the importance of generating responses across multiple levels spanning the community, government and non-governmental organisations.
“Since 30 years ago many things have changed. What are those changes? A decrease in rainfall has resulted in fewer trees, lack of wood. And land for agriculture‌ In the past when there were a lot of trees we had ostriches, and more than other species. So we understand that trees are important. We decided to take care of the trees that grow naturally. Then we planted 650 trees.
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5. Crisis, uncertainty and volatility
We see that planting trees stops the desert, But now the lack of trees have worsened the situation. The winds coming from the desert are killing the trees. If we plant trees and take care of them through the Natural Assisted Regeneration we can start fighting these problems caused by climate change. “
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Envisioning the future
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