"The presence of cameras, at the forefront of crises, either in the hands of journalists, bystanders or passers-by and sometimes even parties to the crises, has inspired multiple visual notations, commentaries and perspectives. Thus, efforts and resources are channelled towards documenting crises, t
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o help us better understand them and play a part in their resolution. Sometimes, the camera also participates in the adjudication of cases arising from crises or, indeed, even in the reconciliatory efforts after a crisis. The book aims to explore the multi-dimensional role of the camera in times of crises, with particular interest in how scholars view the camera as a [useful] tool in times of crisis in Africa. Hopefully, this book will help unravel the multi-layered tendencies of the camera as an instrument of documentation, history verification, (re)presentation of the other, and perhaps the legitimisation of narratives. The camera’s subjective framings of crisis narratives, as a manipulative tool for influence, inference and power are also explored. The book is structured into three parts. The first part focusses on the visual narratives of crises. The second part of the book explores the camera’s tendency to be a tool for representation and agency, while the third segment discusses the use of the camera as an entity for activism and advocacy in crises. These structured parts are intended to broaden the understanding of readers about the greater possibilities that images and imageries from the camera as a tool possess." (Abstract introduction, page 1)
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"Participatory methods seek to counter the extractive nature of mainstream research methods by putting control into the hands of research subjects. But participation itself does not guarantee against extraction. There is a tension between the desire for researcher-control and the prerogative of comm
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unity action in participatory methods. How can researchers committed to participation manage this tension? In this paper, we draw on the concepts of “collaborative” and “action-oriented” participatory research to describe how integrating mixed-methodologies can help different research stakeholders attain desirable, fruitful and meaningful levels of ownership and build inclusive rigour. Drawing on our work with participatory indicators and photovoice with conflict affected communities in rural Colombia, we demonstrate how combining different kinds of participatory research methods—in this case, non-visual and visual research—creates opportunities to attend to the sometimes conflicting goals of robust research, policy change and community action. Under the broad umbrella of participatory research, collaborative approaches like participatory indicators and action-oriented approaches like photovoice complement and amplify each other in such settings, embracing complexity and catalyzing multiple ways of ‘knowing-for-action’. The result is participatory research that is attuned to the complexities of conflict-affected settings, inclusively rigorous and potentially transformative." (Abstract)
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"Arts-based peacebuilding has gained attention, but evidence and research of its impact is fragmented and, in particular, the relationship between photography and peace is underexplored. This article examines photovoice as a tool for supporting everyday and community peace in conflict-affected commu
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nities. It identifies four ways that everyday peace indicator photovoice projects in Colombia bolstered community peace: by engendering healing, building territorial identity, enabling intergenerational dialogue, and catalysing action. These impacts emerged as photovoice built on enabling factors, extending existing community peacebuilding capacities, concerns and interventions. Reflecting on the constraints and tensions around working with photography in security-sensitive environments, we propose that participatory photography makes up a vital component of the peace photography genre. We argue that the careful, strategic harnessing of photovoice, and the visualisation of everyday peace, creates opportunities for raising the voices of conflict-affected communities, building shared imaginaries and nurturing dialogue, healing and action." (Abstract)
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"In at least some cases, visual images can challenge normative and normalized ways of grasping the world and prompt their viewers to see differently-and even bring people together. Seeing and Believing marshals religious resources to recast the significance of digital images in the struggle for soci
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al justice. Ellen T. Armour examines what distinguishes digital photography from its analogue predecessor and places the circulation of digital images in the broader context of virtual visual cultures. She explores the challenges and opportunities that visually saturated social media landscapes present for users and organizers. Despite the power of digital platforms and algorithms, possibilities for disruption and resistance emerge from how people engage with these systems. Armour offers ways of seeing drawn from Christianity and found in other religious traditions to help us break with entrenched habits and rethink how we engage with the images that grab our attention. Developing theological perspectives on the power and peril of photography and technology, Seeing and Believing provides suggestions for navigating the new media landscape that can spark what Armour calls "photographic insurrection." (Publisher description)
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"This book uses decolonisation as a lens to interrogate political communication styles, performance, and practice in Africa and the diaspora. The book interrogates the theory and practice of political communication, using decolonial research methods to begin a process of self-reflexivity and the cre
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ation of a new approach to knowledge production about African political communication. In doing so, it explores political communication approaches that might until recently have been considered subversive or dissident: forms of political communication that served to challenge imposed western norms and to empower African citizens and their histories. Centring African scholarship, the book draws on case studies from across the continent, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana." (Publisher description)
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"This project demonstrates that there is another way of gathering and sharing the stories of people living in poverty around the world. Until now, there has been much positive and enthusiastic discussion amongst INGO communications and fundraising professionals about how to change the way we tell st
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ories, but no one has ever put their money on the line to test whether participant-led fundraising is possible [...] Conclusions: Participant led fundraising appeals can be as, or more effective at raising funds than charity led appeals [...] Stories produced by people from the communities in which the programmes are happening can create a stronger emotional bond with donors [...] Participant led stories feel more authentic to donors [...] It is not necessary to outline to a supporter their role when communicating an issue [...] Participant-led storytelling challenged some of the saviourist narratives INGOs are accused of perpetuating, with both participants and donors recognising this and reacting positively." (Conclusions, page 24-25)
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"As the production, content, and display of humanitarian images faced the requirements of digital media, humanitarian organizations struggled to keep equitable visual practices. Media specialists reflect on past and current uses of images in four Canadian agencies: the Canadian Red Cross, the Multic
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ultural Council of Saskatchewan, the World University Service of Canada, and IMPACT. Historically, the risk to reproduce the global inequalities they seek to remedy has compelled photographers, filmmakers and publicists in these agencies to develop codes of visual practice. In these conversations, they have shared the insights gained in transforming their work to accompany the rise of new digital technologies and social media. From one agency to the other, the lines of concern and of innovation converge. On the technical side, the officers speak of the advantage of telling personal stories, and of using short videos and infographics. On the organizational side, they have updated ways to develop skills in media production and visual literacy among workers, volunteers, partners, and recipients, at all levels of their activity. These interviews further reveal that Communications Officers share with historians a wish to collect, preserve, and tell past histories that acknowledge the role of all actors in the humanitarian sphere, as well as an immediate need to manage the abundance of visual documents with respect and method. To face these challenges, the five interviewees rely on democratic traditions of image-making: the trusted relationships, both with the Canadian public and with local peoples abroad, which have always informed the production and the content of visual assets. For this reason, humanitarian publicists might be in a privileged position to intervene in larger and urgent debates over the moral economy of the circulation of digital images in a globalized public space." (Abstract)
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"Als Selfie oder im politischen Prozess, als gleichermaßen fluide wie langlebige Postings, in verstörenden Hassbildern oder als Labor des Feminismus wirken digitale Bilder in je eigenen Kontexten: Menschen inszenieren sich und werden inszeniert, vernetzen und bekämpfen sich, posieren und protesti
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eren, verfremden, ringen um Anerkennung, Deutungshoheiten und Aneignungen. Digitale Bilder brechen Normen auf, spiegeln oder verschleiern Realitäten, sind Propaganda oder Vehikel politischer Veränderungen, spalten Gegner, verbinden Gleichgesinnte oder fungieren als Glutnester von Hass und Menschenfeindlichkeit. Zugleich wirken all diese Formen visualisierter sozialer Handlungen als Katalysatoren gesellschaftlicher Prozesse, die ihrerseits wieder Dynamiken anstoßen. Die Autorinnen und Autoren beleuchten in fünf Beiträgen Formen, Absichten und Wirkungen digitaler Bildkulturen: den Bildprotest, den Screenshot, das Hassbild, den Netzfeminismus und das Selfie." (Buchrücken)
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"As a young Fulbright scholar in Bogotá, determined to democratize the photographic gaze and bring new visions and voices to public debate about Colombia's armed conflict, Alexander L. Fattal founded Disparando Cámaras para la Paz (Shooting Cameras for Peace). The project taught photography to you
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ng people in El Progreso, a neighborhood in the city's outskirts that was home to families displaced by violence in the countryside. It offered the youth of that troubled region a chance to record and reimagine their daily lives. Shooting Cameras for Peace is an in-depth look into one of Latin America's most dynamic participatory media projects. The haunting and exuberant photographs testify to the young people's will to play, to dream, and to survive, bearing witness to the resilience and creativity of lives marked by a war that refuses to die. With text in English and Spanish, Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz makes vital contributions to studies of collaborative media, photographic activism, and peace and conflict studies in Colombia. Fattal's insightful text is both a celebration of the program he initiated and a critical reflection on the genre of participatory photography and the structural challenges faced by similar media projects." (Publisher description)
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"Das mehrstufige Projekt ‚Syria on the Move‘ zielt darauf ab, aus Syrien geflüchteten Jugendlichen mittels Fotografie eine Stimme zu geben, Bewusstsein und Unterstützung für syrische Geflüchtete in den Aufnahmegesellschaften zu mobilisieren sowie gegenseitiges Vertrauen innerhalb der syrisch
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en Diasporagemeinschaft zu fördern. Das Projekt lädt junge Syrerinnen und Syrer ein, ihr Leben und ihre Erfahrungen im Exil zu dokumentieren sowie ihre Ideen und Vorstellungen für die Zukunft fotografisch abzubilden und mit anderen zu teilen." (Seite 191)
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"This article focuses on the Wiwa community in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. This community has been reviving its traditional music as part of an effort to reconstruct its social network. Moreover, its members have recently embraced visual arts as a versatile medium in the context of t
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he armed conflict. The local community of Siminke has started using visual tools not only to explicitly address their social and political issues on a regional level, but also to develop a new cultural space for self-expression and social (re)construction. Video and photography are being used here to preserve a cultural knowledge traditionally transmitted from generation to generation, a process disrupted by the armed conflict in the region. Methodology encompasses communicative methods such as interviews, visual analysis and photo-elicitation in order to understand and highlight the community’s internal perspective on the use of visual arts to reinforce their agency in pursuit of political goals." (Abstract)
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"Este artigo propõe uma discussão sobre a autoria coletiva de fotografias do grupo brasileiro Mídia Ninja. Para isso, parte de um diálogo entre alguns movimentos de protesto organizados, especialmente, nos ambientes digitais, passando pela cultura hacker, cultura do compartilhamento e o midialiv
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rismo ciberativista para discutir sobre a autoria coletiva das fotografias da Mídia Ninja. O objetivo é refletir sobre o que significa usar uma autoria coletiva e a licença flexível de direitos autorais Creative Commons, pensando o caso específico da Mídia Ninja, um grupo brasileiro de comunicação independente – formado por midialivristas – que ficou conhecido durante as Jornadas de Junho." (Resumo)
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"This handbook provides guidelines on the practice and ethics of participatory visual methods (PVM) with emphasis on their use in low and middle income countries (LMIC) for community and public engagement in health and health science. The guidelines are drawn from the hands-on experience of the auth
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ors and the insights they have gained as PVM practitioners working with these methodologies in LMIC for 10 years or more. The handbook has been developed for use by engagement practitioners who are relatively new to the field of PVM and want to learn more about what they are and how to work with them. It also aims to support health science researchers who wish to include visual methods when engaging local communities and wider publics in their work. The handbook does not explore the theory behind PVM or provide an in-depth review of the literature. For each method that is described the pioneering work in the field is cited, along with other suggested reading, should you wish to learn more." (Foreword)
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"Esta obra explora de manera arqueológica el saber constituido sobre el campesinado en Colombia durante el periodo 1965-1975. Toma como material empírico principal un archivo fotográfico documental para relacionarlo con hemerografía [y las emisiones de Radio Sutatenza] y con las reconstrucciones
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sociohistóricas de la década. El propósito es identificar el archivo, sus condiciones, su porvenir, medios y definiciones con la constitución de subjetividades políticas. Las subjetividades son entendidas aquí como procesos que, al referir universos simbólicos socialmente compartidos, dotan al sujeto de un lenguaje cultural que a continuación internaliza, y adquiere así una singularidad que lo caracteriza y por último lo representa como ser colectivo. Este texto, a través de lo visible y lo oculto de las representaciones fotográficas, descifra los enunciados posibles y las aproximaciones desde la sociología. Asimismo se hace evidente cómo los discursos, por demás contradictorios, fungen a manera de proyectos de homogeneización de la cultura campesina, en la esfera de la heterogeneidad: campesinos marcados por diferencias entre sí, multiplicidad de subjetividades implicadas políticamente en los procesos inscritos dentro de la reforma agraria." (Descripción de la casa editorial)
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"About 10 years ago we started sending each other images, back and forth, via email. Each photograph had to respond to the one just received. We have so far exchanged over 260 photographs, sharing snippets of family life, abstraction, travels, loss and humor. When we started, we had no particular pl
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an but rather we were curious about the idea of photography as dialogue and we wanted to see how our visual conversation would develop. A similar sense of open-ended inquiry informs this special issue which does not present a single resolved idea but explores the emergent, messy and indeterminate ways that images and image-making serve to facilitate – and obscure – dialogue. It is concerned with the potential and limits of photography as a dialogical medium and proposes an idea of dialogic photography that centres around the encounters, exchanges and negotiations that happen with, through and around images." (Abstract)
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"This article presents research on Los Talleres de Fotografia Social (TAFOS), a pioneering Peruvian community photography project, that demonstrates the enduring long-term impact that community-led participatory photography projects can have on the critical consciousness of participants. Participato
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ry photography is understood as an emergent process whose effects cannot be planned or predetermined but that rather needs to be understood in context, over time and from the subjective perspectives of participants. Discussing both the potential and the limitations of participatory photography, its uncertain contribution and the value of its open-ended effects within processes of nurtured emergent community development this research contributes to literature pushing for a reconfiguration in how we understand, capture and attribute the impact of participatory photography, and participatory arts and media more broadly, as a tools for social change." (Abstract)
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"This article analyses the impact of participatory photography as a tool for community development. In recent decades, participatory arts and media initiatives are increasingly agency - rather than community-led, their value assessed using linear evaluative models and framed in terms of short-term,
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measurable, results. It is argued that these tendencies impede the potential critical contribution of participatory photography to social change processes and fail to capture important aspects of the psychosocial, political and subjective impact of projects. As a result, projects struggle to prove their worth: the evidence base is weak and learning about the social reality of practice is hindered. This article presents research on Los Talleres de Fotografia Social (TAFOS), a pioneering Peruvian community photography project, that demonstrates the enduring long-term impact that community-led participatory photography projects can have on the critical consciousness of participants. Participatory photography is understood as an emergent process whose effects cannot be planned or predetermined but that rather needs to be understood in context, over time and from the subjective perspectives of participants. Discussing both the potential and the limitations of participatory photography, its uncertain contribution and the value of its open-ended effects within processes of nurtured emergent community development this research contributes to literature pushing for a reconfiguration in how we understand, capture an attribute the impact of participatory photography, and participatory arts and media more broadly, as a tools for social change." (Abstract)
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