Consciousness-Raising or Unintentionally Oppressive?

Reaching toward goals of consciousness raising, equity building, and policy changing, Photovoice is typically used in community and participatory research to allow people to document and interpret their everyday lived experiences (Wang & Burris, 1997; Wang & Redwood-Jones, 2001; Wang, 2003, 2006). It is a critical approach to empowering or "unsilencing" groups often unheard by hegemonic research processes and powerful policy circles. It seeks to allow these historically marginalized groups, like those with (dis)ability labels, ethnic and racial minorities, and youth, to take control over identifying their needs, desires, and thoughts, effectively producing authentic knowledge about themselves, their lives, and their communities, rather than being told about themselves (Fals Borda & Rahman, 1991).But what if this doesn't happen? As researchers, teachers, and those who work for social change, we are often subtly and sometimes explicitly pressured to present the good face of our research and programs, of what works out, what people like, or what gets noticed. But what if things don't work out? What if our approach had negative consequences? The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to join the dialogue about what might not have worked perfectly in educational research in order to avoid potential unintended consequences in future studies; and second, to explore the boundaries and limits of approaches like photovoice as a way to raise awareness of its potential for oppression.Literature ReviewOur discussion of awareness, consciousness-raising, and oppression is based on Paulo Freire's (1970) conception of the oppressive relationship. We frame our understandings of how to free ourselves from that oppressive relationship by pulling from several theories that share critical epistemologies including critical theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory. We join with many other participatory action researchers (Cahill, 2007; Guishard, 2009; Torre & Fine, 2006; Tuck, 2009) who share this critical epistemology to argue that people who have experienced oppression are the experts of their own lives and their own experiences and should have the opportunity to meaningfully participate in shaping and guiding the research that explores those experiences. We join with Freire (1982) and the previously cited authors, as well as countless critical scholars and educators, to argue that these community-based experts are too often silenced both in and through more traditional research processes as well as in policy conversations that determine much of their everyday lives. Photovoice, then, is a fitting research method to both "un-silence" these communities through the research process and allow their voices to be heard in policy circles.A review of recent literature on photovoice, though, reveals that many of those of us who employ a photovoice approach to community-based, empowering research do so without critical reflection on its underlying epistemology as well as its potential for many thorny ethical dilemmas, including but not limited to invasion of privacy and critical issues of recruitment, representation, participation ownership and advocacy (Wang & Redwood-Jones, 2001). There seems to be over the past few decades a simplistic, uncritical reliance on photovoice that has the potential to take a paternalistic, voyeuristic, and condescending view of research participants, collectives, and communities, one that assumes deficiencies and a lack of power or voice. Wang (2003, 2006) and Wilson et al. (2007) remind us that rather than an approach that assumes its own worth, photovoice should be used as a tool for collective social planning, issue identification, and participatory evaluation. It should be a first step in participatory research, rather than a last step, used for needs assessment and planning rather than the exposition of a community's deficiencies or desires (Wang, 2003).We attempt here to show how these potential unintended negative consequences of using photovoice can occur. …