Listening to Photos: Understanding Health-, Wellness-, and Resilience-Promoting Human-Nature Relationships Through Photovoice Methodology
摘要
This chapter explores how photovoice as a methodological approach can help researchers build an understanding of health, wellness, and resilience that are bolstered through various human-nature relationships and connections. The chapter aims to build on existing photovoice literature (and visual research methodologies) by asking questions about the process of listening to the “voice(s)” of images, to outer and inner voices, and the role of listening as a research practice. To accomplish these aims, the chapter first explores modes of image-making and the notion of “voice” within previous literature, and particularly the process of photovoice. It then turns to modes of listening as they relate to the voice(s) of images and photovoice as an important, and often under looked, dyad of methodological significance. Here, the chapter draws on the work of Campt (Listening to images. Duke University Press, Durham, 2017) to explore the haptic sensibilities of listening, including multiple levels and modes of listening: listening to nature; listening to photos of nature; listening to our outer and inner voices; and listening to our own haptic responses to the process of engagement. Following this, the chapter explores the role of participants engaged in listening processes as methodology, where the authors connect more directly with some of their previous research looking at nature as sources of health, wellness, and resilience for research participants in a range of studies: young Indigenous people in Central Canada; and older adults living with chronic illness. These examples prompt the authors to interrogate the researcher’s role and the benefits of listening methodologies for both participant, researcher, and the production of data rigor itself. In the end, the chapter offers critical reflections on the ways in which photovoice and listening methodology can provide unique insights regarding human-nature relationships that support health, wellness, and resilience.