[WITHDRAWN] Point of View (POV): Engaging Young Women of Color in Photovoice for Social Change amidst Multiple Pandemics

Background: Young women of colour are often excluded from opportunities to shape policies and programs that directly impact them. Researchers emphasize the use of novel methods to more effectively engage youth in programs to amplify their voices as social change-agents. Photovoice, a community-based participatory research approach, facilitates participants’ use of photography to document their everyday experiences, challenges, and hopes, while also advocating for social change. Due to its visual methodology and transformational philosophy, Photovoice shows promise in engaging youth populations while cultivating skills as they work collectively to share their voices and raise awareness. However, such potential has not been well-documented among young women of colour, nor via virtual methods. This study therefore examines: 1) young women’s interests in joining a virtually-delivered Photovoice group; 2) what social issues young women prioritized to explore through photography; and 3) young women’s reflections on group-participation and ideas for engaging in social change efforts beyond the weekly Photovoice sessions.

Methods: The sample included young women of colour (N=9; ages 15-19) accessing after-school programming at a community-based agency that provides services geared toward young women (non-binary and trans-inclusive). Youth entered the study by being nominated by staff, or as youth self-nominated themselves after reading flyers emailed through program listservs. Interested youth were interviewed (pre-post) via Zoom using a semi-structured interview guide. Interviews offered an opportunity to describe the project, ask youth to share their thoughts on participation, ask questions, and later, describe their experiences. Youth also completed a survey (pre-post) indicating responses to scales measuring concepts such as social connectedness, self-esteem, civic engagement, and self-efficacy. The Photovoice project itself consisted of 8 weekly, 2-hour sessions facilitated online.

Results: Youth discussed that they wanted to participate in order to learn photography skills while having opportunities to engage in deep discussions about social issues. Youth indicated that they felt socially-isolated due to the pandemic, and that school did not provide opportunities for “real” discussions. As the weekly sessions progressed, youth self-named their group Point of View, and they collectively agreed to three primary topics around which to focus their photography efforts: 1) anti-Black racism; 2) body positivity; and 3) mental health and social media. Following the sessions, youth decided to share photographs, captions, and invited community dialogue through a curated Instagram “public photo gallery.” In addition to significant increases in social connectedness and interest in civic engagement measures, from pre-test to post-test, youth qualitatively indicated that their Photovoice participation was critically important and helpful to their well-being, especially in a time of heightened social isolation and anxiety felt about other concurrent pandemics of anti-Black and anti-Asian racism.

Conclusions: Youth showed strong commitment to the Photovoice project and social action dissemination activities. Their agency and enthusiasm shown also reflects the promise of Photovoice for engaging youth, and the organization has since adopted this as an ongoing program to involve subsequent cohorts of youth. As such, despite the many challenges introduced in this time of pandemic(s), this presentation highlights opportunities to meaningfully inspire youth change-agents through Photovoice.