Episode: 11-Photovoice and Participatory Action Research with Dr. Meagan Call-Cummings

Jan 12, 2021

Meagan Call-Cummings, Assistant Professor at George Mason University specializing in critical, participatory, and feminist methods. She explains photovoice and its roots, warns how it can be co-opted in schools, and describes building trustful, long-term participatory projects with students. She also reflects on positionality, ethical tensions, and creative ways to share participatory research.

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INSIGHT

Photovoice Must Be Politically Grounded

Photovoice can align with participatory action research only when it foregrounds critical, political aims rather than serving as a neutral technique.
Meagan warns photovoice becomes co-opted when stripped of justice orientation, turning into a performative classroom activity tied to literacy goals.

ANECDOTE

Middle School Photovoice That Reproduced Power

Meagan describes a 2016 middle school photovoice project with recent immigrant ESL students run by a largely white research team that felt misaligned and exploitative.
Students spoke Bengali, Arabic, etc.; team arrived quickly, lacked dialogue and relationships, and the project reproduced power imbalances instead of challenging them.

ADVICE

Prioritize Dialogue Before Project Launch

Do create ample dialogue before starting participatory projects so power dynamics, community needs, and logistics surface ahead of time.
Meagan emphasizes more pre-project conversations with teachers, students, and gatekeepers would have revealed tensions to plan for.

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Do you think dialogue is crucial to research and a step towards social change? If yes, tune-in to this episode where Adam and Joe get into a deep dialogue with Dr. Meagan Call-Cummings (PhD, Indiana University), an Assistant Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. She specializes in critical, participatory, and feminist methodologies. She is also a mother of four, one of whom makes a special cameo during our podcast. She discusses her research and a current PAR project with high school students.

Meagan has done a lot of interesting work in her career and shared three of her great articles with us (Cited below), which adds to our discussion about “Who is Action Research?”.

Adam and Joe dive into the article by asking- “what is photovoice and how do the epistemological stances of photovoice and participatory action research align?”. (1:26)

Adam then goes deeper into the conversation to clarify his understanding of the challenges of traditional power structures mentioned in Meagan’s article, and uncritical research that “runs the risk of unintended consequences that may reproduce traditional taken for granted power structures meant to be challenged and disrupted by participatory approaches like photovoice.” (6:57)

Later in the episode, Adam, Joe, and Meagan discuss the tensions within Action Research between measurable, tangible outcomes or impacts, the intangible role of collaborative ethical process, and the role of scholarship, dialogue, and other ideas of change within P/AR. Adam stresses that “doing the things that we say that we want to do” is essential for true PAR. (14:34)

*Special thanks to Tabby for her guest appearance.

Here are the references:

Call-Cummings, M. (2017). Establishing Communicative Validity: Discovering Theory Through Practice. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(3), 192–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800416657101

Call-Cummings, M., & Hauber-Özer, M. (2020). Participatory Action Research as/in Adult Education: Offering Three Methods Anchored in Vivencia, Praxis, and Conscientization. International Journal of Adult Education and Technology, 11(4), 21–33. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJAET.2020100103

Call-Cummings, M., Hauber-Özer, M., Byers, C., & Mancuso, G. P. (2019). The power of/in Photovoice. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 42(4), 399–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2018.1492536