On Childhood and Risk: An Exploration of Children's Everyday Experiences in Rural Peru

Drawing on data from Peru, this article explores how poverty mediates diverse risks in rural children's lives. It offers four main arguments. First, risk is not simply a feature of ‘extraordinary’ childhoods, but integral to everyday, ‘ordinary’ lives. Second, children's responses to adversity are crucially shaped by sociomoral considerations. Third, children participate actively in household risk mitigation, their engagement structured by individual (biographical) and collective factors. Fourth, changing circumstances present new opportunities and challenges for children living with adversity. Current approaches focusing on so‐called ‘objective’ risks neglect children's own priorities and subjective experiences.     

‘Domestic friends’: women's friendships,motherhood and inclusive intimacy

Based on a qualitative, interview‐based study of friendship, this article examines the specificity of ‘domestic friendships’ between women. Forged from the particular experiences, emotions and challenges of motherhood, they are qualitatively different from most friendships which tend to be based on individualistic connection and self‐expression. Domestic friendships facilitate a specific form of ‘inclusive intimacy’ and shape an expansive experience of domestic life beyond the family or household. They help shape mothers’ sense of self as profoundly relational and interconnected with others, and channel a sense of biographical selfhood whose form and temporality is tied firmly to others’ lives.     

Investigating the organizational everyday: a critical feminist approach

ABSTRACT

This article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a feminist theoretical and methodological approach that contributes to collective projects of investigating and transforming social life. Elaborating on the approach, the article reports on an ethnographic exploration of visual artists’ experiences and struggles in Canada's art world – a project that started from the standpoint of practising visual artists, examined their work and relations, and explicated practices and logics of art and valued work conditioning their lives. Speaking back to formal or text-based investigations of particular institutions, the article grapples with how to engage in research that more fully reveals the ‘social,’ attending to everyday life, to the ‘life work’ that people do, and to social forms that are threaded through intersecting, localized intimate and institutional spheres.     

Voice,authenticity and ethical challenges: the participatory dissemination of youth-generated visual data over social media

Using the theoretical frameworks of childhood studies and visual ethics, this article explores ethical ways of engaging children and young people in disseminating self-generated visual data (‘participatory dissemination’) over social media. The discussion draws on a research project carried out with a group of young people in an underserved community in South Africa. The project was an educational intervention that aimed to enable the participants to bring out their experiences with the HIV and AIDS pandemic in South Africa and to reflect on related issues through participatory video making. The methodological focus was on exploring visual ethics in the context of participatory dissemination. Despite a growing interest in social media, few studies have been conducted in relation to ethics in using social media as an outlet to disseminate visual data created by young people. This article contributes to addressing this knowledge gap. It is argued that (1) the process of remaking visual data can enhance the ethics of dissemination by offering young participants an opportunity to reflect on self-representation more carefully and (2) the verbal contextualisation of participant-generated visual data can contribute to a further clarification of young people’s ideas, thereby making dissemination more ethical. I am cautious, however, to overstate the significance of disseminating young people’s verbal and visual expressions without researchers’ discretion because such expressions may contribute to stigmatising the young people.     

Digital baroque: New media art and cinematic folds

The decision to use participatory visual methods with young people in education, health or public policy research is linked to a desire to allow them to have some greater voice in the research and the professional activities that impact on their lives. But how that ‘voice’ is produced, whose voice it represents, and how the product of that research is used and interpreted are all contentious issues for researchers. This article analyses some of these conceptual, methodological, political and pragmatic issues from the perspective of a current Australian Research Council-funded project working with young people across education and health domains. It is argued that allowing or not allowing visual accounts to speak for themselves is not simply a political decision but one related to epistemological understandings about meaning, and also to different purposes of different visual projects, in particular their relative emphasis on voice as a window to the world of the young people, compared with voice as a window to ‘who I am’. The project discussed is one which aims to give greater authority and centrality to the visual accounts and voices of young people, but also one where researchers understand both the visual and voice as constructed rather than given. Case studies from the project are used to illustrate the way in which these commitments frame decisions about technology and methodology, and also to show and argue for an approach which treats the meaning of the visual evidence as something to be constructed ethnographically and reflexively over time.     

Issues of collaboration,representation, meaning and emotions: utilising participant-led visual diaries to capture the everyday lives of people in mid to later life

In recent years there has been an increasing use of visual methods in ageing research. There are, however, limited reflections and critical explorations of the implications of using visual methods in research with people in mid to later life. This paper examines key methodological complexities when researching the daily lives of people as they grow older and the possibilities and limitations of using participant-generated visual diaries. The paper will draw on our experiences of an empirical study, which included a sample of 62 women and men aged 50 years and over with different daily routines. Participant-led photography was drawn upon as a means to create visual diaries, followed by in-depth, photo-elicitation interviews. The paper will critically reflect on the use of visual methods for researching the daily lives of people in mid to later life, as well as suggesting some wider tensions within visual methods that warrant attention. First, we explore the extent to which photography facilitates a ‘collaborative’ research process; second, complexities around capturing the ‘everydayness’ of daily routines are explored; third, the representation and presentation of ‘self’ by participants within their images and interview narratives is examined; and, finally, we highlight particular emotional considerations in visualising daily life.     

Overcoming the challenges of researching ‘young offenders’: using assisted questionnaires – a research note

This short research note discusses some of the challenges involved when undertaking qualitative research with ‘young offenders’, a neglected area within the methodological literature. By drawing on previous research with ‘young offenders’, the author discusses how the use of traditional face‐to‐face interviews produced a number of research challenges which are specific to the psychosocial, biographical and institutional contexts of this particular population. In attempting to overcome some of these challenges in her current research, the author developed a specific research tool – the assisted questionnaire (AQ) – and the remainder of this article describes how its use with ‘young offenders’ helped to overcome some of the methodological challenges which had earlier been identified.     

Braided geographies: bordered forms and cross-border formations in refugee comics

ABSTRACT

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter-geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities.     

Online ghettoes,perils or supernannies? Australian young people with chronic illness and disability challenge some moral panics about young people online

Current literature focusing on young people’s digital technology use often reflects concerns that they may live virtual lives and withdraw from locally geographically situated spaces. It assumes the existence of a split between offline and online ‘worlds’ corresponding to ‘real ‘and ‘non-real’ respectively. This article reports research findings on how young people locate new social media technologies in their daily lives with particular focus on the relationship between their online and offline experiences. The voices of the young people guided the research, which found that their social media use contradicts conventional narratives of moral panic about the alleged unreality and fearful dangers of online spaces for young people.     

Images of self and spinal cord injury: exploring drawing as a visual method in disability research

This article describes the use of drawings in a research project aimed at understanding the personal experience of spinal cord injury. The article briefly reviews the use of visual methods in disability research, and then describes the specific procedures used to elicit and analyze two sets of drawings: ‘draw your self’ and ‘draw how you see spinal cord injury in your mind’. The drawings were a small but essential part of a larger study focused on the community integration and participation of adults (n = 160) with spinal cord injury. Despite the challenges posed by this method for research participants with paralysis, the drawings provided unique insight into the personal meanings of spinal cord injury and how this injury is understood and represented to others. Using examples of participants' own drawings, we show how elicited drawings are a useful adjunct to traditional interview methods in studies of disability.     

Participants’ productive disruption of a community photo-elicitation project: improvised methodologies in practice

Abstract

This article reports on an attempt to use photo-elicitation to explore contested intergenerational perceptions and experiences of ‘place’ in one English village. Participants actively disrupted the photo-elicitation project and ended up co-creating an enriched research design that allowed them to represent how they experienced ‘place’. The spontaneous, mixed media-elicitation that resulted overturns some of the more straightforward notions that are aligned with photo-elicitation techniques. This article builds on a growing body of critical literature on photo-elicitation and shows how participants’ disruption of a project’s research methods can be both challenging and fruitful in practice. The researcher’s flexibility and willingness to work with participants’ alternative approaches proved extremely effective in allowing participants to communicate their ‘imagined geographies’ and to identify experiences of social inequality. This article explores how the initially problematic in participant involvement can be turned into the productive through the use of ‘improvised methodologies’.     

Making the familiar strange and making the strange familiar: understanding Korean children’s experiences of living with an autistic sibling

Based on the findings of a small‐scale study using visual ethnographic techniques with nine South Korean children, this article explores the role of culture in understanding autism. While autism is embedded within the ‘strange’ and ‘unfamiliar’, linked to exclusion and discrimination in Korean society, the children focussed on reframing their experiences of living with autism as ‘ordinary’. Despite the limitations of the small sample, the richness and depth of data generated by children themselves offers new insights into children’s interpretations and experiences of autism and raises interesting questions for cross cultural research in the field of disability.     

Through their eyes: seeing experiences of settlement in photographs taken by refugee background youth in Melbourne,Australia

Although ‘refugees’ are frequently represented in visual media, it is predominantly as the central subject matter and rarely are they positioned as the photographers of their own journeys. In this article, we present photographic images that have been taken by refugee background youth portraying their experiences of the first years of settlement in Australia. We consider how, in our longitudinal research conducted with 120 refugee background youth, visual materials can provide equally important yet different insights in comparison to written or spoken narratives on the experiences of refugee settlement. Through an examination of the photograph’s visual content, we explore the ways in which they portrayed their early experiences of external suburban settlement environments and their depictions of interior spaces and home-making practices. We discuss how these visual insights capture an alternative way of seeing the experiences of becoming at home as the youth become emplaced post-resettlement in Australia. We argue that the photographs taken by these refugee background youth illustrate how visual methods and materials can provide equally important but often overlooked insights into early settlement experiences. Importantly, the photographic images offer a way of portraying the people, places and sentiments that are central to the everyday lives of refugee background youths in ways that oral and written narratives cannot.     

Honourable Sacrifice: A Visual Ethnography of the Family Lives of Korean Children with Autistic Siblings

Literature on the siblings of disabled children has been dominated by western psychosocial theories that focus on stresses associated with being a ‘young carer’ or on children as active agents realising their ‘rights’ rather than as the victims of familial expectations. This article presents the findings of a visual ethnographic study exploring the lives of nine children living with an autistic sibling in South Korea (hereafter Korea). Despite personal challenges and family tensions, experiences of ‘being’ a sibling were strongly influenced by Confucian familist cultural values in which sacrifice plays a central role in achieving honourable and harmonious family life.     

Ethics in context: essential flexibility in an international photo-elicitation project with children and young people

ABSTRACT

Existing literatures have discussed both ethical issues in visual research with young people, and the problems associated with applying ‘universal’ ethical guidelines across varied cultural contexts. There has been little consideration, however, of specific issues raised in projects where visual research is being conducted with young people simultaneously in multiple national contexts. This paper contributes to knowledge in this area. We reflect on our experiences of planning and conducting the International CYCLES project involving photo elicitation with young people in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. While some issues such as varying access to technology for taking and sharing photos and diverse cultural sensitivities around the use of photography were anticipated in advance, others were more unexpected. Balancing the need for methods to be appropriate, ethical and feasible within each setting with the desire for sufficient consistency across the project is challenging. We argue that an ‘ethics in context’ approach and an attitude of ‘methodological immaturity’ is critical in international visual research projects with young people.     

Left High and Dry

A ‘curious feminist’ analysis, according to Enloe, starts in the lives of women and values all women's lives regardless of their status, identity, location or access to power. In this article I use this perspective to highlight the intersections of international development and patriarchy in the lives of three women of different generations and class status as they are affected by dislocations resulting from the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) in the remote highland communities in rural Lesotho. I employ an intersectionality framework to demonstrate how their shared and divergent experiences, presented only partially and in my narrative form, tell a tale of the intertwining consequences of this multi-billion dollar international development project in the lives of rural poor women. Women's lived experiences of the LHWP reveal the contradictions of international development, exposing the masculinist imperatives that focus on generating national revenues to the exclusion of other development options, while organizing practices that dislocate the rural poor from their lands and livelihoods and implementing policies that reinforce patriarchy locally and globally. This article demonstrates the importance of bringing feminist scholarship to bear on development practice and argues specifically for the utility of intersectionality, narrative and curious feminist analyses.     

A room with a view: a metaphor analysis of Vietnamese women’s representations of living with depression using photo elicitation

Depression is complex and it is known that how people name and give meaning to this experience when they are from cross cultural backgrounds differs to that of dominant Anglo cultures. Yet surprisingly very little is known about the naming and meaning-making conventions particularly for Vietnamese communities. In Anglo cultures, people commonly describe their experiences of depression as ‘travelling through dark tunnels toward a light’; ‘climbing out of a hole’; ‘a black dog’, and the ‘descent of a black cloud’. These metaphoric representations provide us with visual messages and new meanings about the experience of depression and how it impacts individuals. In this article, we describe a study that aimed to examine if a photo elicitation method could provide a group of women from Vietnamese backgrounds with another language set by which to represent their experience of depression in the face-to-face interview context. Women were provided with a digital camera and asked to take a minimum of 10 photos about their everyday experiences of living with depression. Recruitment and face-to-face interviews were completed with an interpreter already known to participants employed at the community health centre. Participants were asked to select five key photos for discussion within the interpreted interview. In the following article, a metaphor analysis is presented to reflect on how the photos enabled further insight into Vietnamese women’s representations of living with depression and examine the application of this participatory visual method for cross cultural research settings.     

Sensitive topics in social research involving children

While there is broad consensus that involving children in research is critically important for understanding their lives, there is considerable caution around their participation in social research on ‘sensitive’ issues. Such caution is further amplified by a lack of agreement about what constitutes a ‘sensitive topic’. This article draws on data from interviews with a range of Australian stakeholders, including children, parents, researchers, ethics committee members, government and non-government organisation representatives, and other decision-makers, specifically related to the question of ‘what is a sensitive topic?’. While participants identified a range of sensitive topics, findings point to sensitivities being closely linked with the contexts of children’s lives and experiences. This requires researchers to approach research in ways that reflect more nuanced understandings of these sensitivities, help address potential concerns and facilitate the development of research relationships that promote ethical conduct of research with children.     

Marketing ‘madness’: conceptualising service user/survivor biographies in a period of deinstitutionalisation (1975–2014)

This article aims to present the lived experiences of psychiatric service users/survivors who have experienced the transition from institutional care in the 1970s and 1980s to community care services in the 1990s and post-2000s. By using a biographical narrative approach the study compares service users’ historical experiences with their contemporary experiences of community and residential care. Sixteen biographical narratives were analysed to explore how mental health services have changed over time, from the perspective of service users/survivors, their families and mental health practitioners. The study examines how the closure of NHS mental hospitals in the 1980s, which were replaced in the 1990s with new types of community and residential care services, has changed the lives of service users/survivors. Thus, the article presents these lived biographical experiences which, for the majority of service users/survivors, were defined by the process of trans-institutionalisation rather than de-institutionalisation, within a neoliberal context.     

Out of the ordinary: research participants’ experiences of sharing the ‘insignificant’

How do research participants feel about having their ‘ordinary’ lives researched? This article focuses on how research participants manage the sharing of details emerging out of their ordinary lives in the context of research – an activity which, for most, is outside of the ordinary. Despite two significant research turns – towards reflexivity and towards the ‘everyday’ – these experiences remain curiously neglected. Drawing on a study of small acts of help and support, I seek to push methodological debate about researching the ordinary beyond the technical challenges of surfacing or capturing the apparently mundane or ‘insignificant’. I do so by arguing that background feelings rooted in the living of, and sharing about, the ordinary are analytically important in their own right; that the ‘ordinary’ itself, therefore, has to be managed by research participants and researchers; and that Goffman’s notion of performance is a useful tool for understanding how this is done.