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Centring Participants’ Voices as Inclusive Research Practice

Putting the Voice into Photovoice

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Handbook of Social Inclusion
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Abstract

This chapter is drawn from a Photovoice project with 12 formerly incarcerated South Australians. Photovoice is a participatory action research method, informed by a theoretical structure combining Paulo Freire’s ideas of critical consciousness raising, radical social work, and feminist theory. The voices of people who have spent time in prison tend to be trivialized or ignored altogether, so this project aimed to approach research with formerly imprisoned people in a different way by centring their voices and perspectives. To achieve this, in this project, participants became co-researchers. They were given a purposely broad research question to respond to and were then free to choose the experiences they wished to document through photographs and accompanying narratives. This chapter explores the measures that were taken to ensure that the research was inclusive in terms of recruitment, focus of the data provided, and in particular, how the voices of participants are heard in the processes of writing and dissemination.

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Correspondence to Michele Jarldorn .

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Jarldorn, M. (2021). Centring Participants’ Voices as Inclusive Research Practice. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Social Inclusion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48277-0_72-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48277-0_72-1

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