Illuminating Systemic Harm through Visual Data: Findings from Photovoice Projects with Two Communities

Background and Purpose: The systemic harm that communities often experience while navigating different systems such as child welfare, juvenile justice, and criminal justice has been well documented in social work literature (Dettlaff et al., 2020; Jacobs et al., 2021) Yet, few studies have captured community voice and lived experience through photographic methods such as photovoice. By analyzing findings from two photovoice projects using anti-carceral frameworks, this research begins to address this gap and offers unique and powerful insights for social work on the experience of systemic oppression and harm.

This research aims to enhance social work knowledge about the experiences of navigating different systems, while also creating space for imagining and re-imagining community-oriented solutions to reducing and eliminating harm.

Methods: Both research studies were grounded in anti-carceral social work and abolitionist theoretical orientations and utilized community-based participatory research methods (CBPR), in which the community was seen as collaborators and participants as co-researchers who helped design, collect, and analyze their own data. The first study highlights the experiences of college students with foster care experience, also known as Foster Scholars, navigating higher education. The second study illuminates the experiences of systems impacted individuals navigating addiction treatment.

The primary data collection mechanism for this research is photovoice, a visual research method that allows co-researchers to collect photographs from their communities and their own lives in response to research prompts (Wang & Burris, 1997). Co-researchers then collectively analyzed the data with other participants in the study as well as the PIs utilizing the SHOWeD data analysis method (Wang & Burris, 1997).

The final phase of this research was comparing the two study samples for similar themes, patterns, and narratives.

Results: Results from these research projects are twofold. First, the research highlights the complex experience of systems involvement from two distinct populations, including intersectional oppression faced based on an individual's social positionality. With this, key themes of institutional betrayal and systemic oppression through different systems were prevalent. Secondly, this research highlights the depth and power that visual data methods, such as photovoice, can have on social work's ability to understand and resist systemic harm and violence. More specifically, it produces undeniable evidence through an empowerment-based method that acts both as a research tool and as an intervention of healing systemic harm itself.

Conclusion and Implications: This research adds to the growing body of literature that has identified the child welfare, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems as oppressive, harmful, and often traumatic for individuals impacted by them. Furthermore, this research highlights the complexities of experiencing systems impact based on social positionality.

Findings from this research carry significant implications for social work research, education, practice, and policy. By centering community voice and lived experience through innovative research methods such as CBPR and photovoice, we can develop more holistic approaches to addressing systemic harm and injustice.