Photo, voice and culture: towards a new understanding of the relationship between narratives and images collected in collaboration with international students

Photovoice is a participatory action research that involves participants as co-researchers throughout the research process, with the objectives to empower the participants and change their current conditions. It is a widely applied visual methodology among vulnerable populations. Researchers engaging with photovoice encounter many challenges on the level of ethics. The ethical issue of protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the subjects in photos is rather complex and partially out of control of the researcher, as the responsibilities for fieldwork are transferred from the researchers to the participants who are treated as co-researchers. Thus, introducing participants to the ethical guidelines and cultivating their ethical sensitivities is of crucial importance. Analysis in photovoice studies is another major challenge researchers are confronted with. Researchers usually focus on the narratives provided by participants in the interpretation phase of the research cycle. We argue that this does not fully do justice to the important role of photos to provide meaning, and to an analytical process that begins with the production of a photo and continues during dissemination of the visual material.

This dissertation has a dual objective. Content wise, it aims to gain a deeper understanding of the acculturation processes of international students, a group that we consider vulnerable because they need to cope with multiple challenges on adapting to a new culture and new academic life. Most research studying adjustment experiences of international students target English-speaking countries. We therefore want to focus on a non-Anglophone study environment. In terms of methodology, it intends to situate photovoice in a bigger context of arts-based research, present a worked example of ethical briefing and develop a more comprehensive analytical framework that deepens our understanding of the visual material generated in photovoice. In Chapter 1, a theoretical framework is developed in which three families representing the relation between art and research are classified: research about art, art as research and art in research. Arts-based research is further categorized into five main forms – visual art, sound art, literary art, performing art and new media. We situate visual methodologies including photovoice in the broad context of socially engaged arts-based research practice. In Chapter 2, we apply photovoice in two empirical studies to explore the adjustment experiences of Asian and South American international students in Flanders. We conclude that for habits that do not require a lot of individual effort to change, most participating Asian students tend to adopt an integration or assimilation acculturation strategy, while for primary cultural values and ideologies which are part of a broader cultural heritage, they are more likely to adopt a separation strategy. In the second case study on South American students we found that the situational and individual variables identified on the pre-sojourn and in-sojourn level interplay with the adjustment process, leading to different levels of adaptation of international students. While most photovoice studies link success to change in external conditions of participants, we argue that the concept of change should take into account changes in the internal habit of mind of participants, which we consider a necessary condition to push towards change on a policy level. Chapter 3 calls for a context-sensitive ‘situated’ ethical perspective involving research participants and people displayed in the photos into an ethical dialogue. In Chapter 4, some question matrices are designed with the dimensions that photovoice researchers might need to consider to achieve a more comprehensive analysis of the variety of data gathered. It includes three sites – site of production, site of photo and site of audiencing, and three modalities – technological modality, compositional modality and social modality. Researchers are expected to balance between risks and benefits of the analytical decisions they make, involve participants in the analytical decision making process and be more attentive to the analytical strategies that may disempower participants.