Putting people in the picture

UKZN?’s Killie Campbell Africana Museum was the scene of a new set of images on February 16-17 at a symposium organised by the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change, Faculty of Education.

The images, and the talks around the images, were all about ?‘putting people in the picture?’. Speakers included faculty and postgraduate students from History, Education, Public Health, Communication, Occupational Health, and Gender Studies, and from several universities in South Africa including UKZN, Wits, Rhodes and UCT, and from as far away as rural Nova Scotia and Manitoba in Canada, as well as McGill University, Concordia University and the University of Toronto, all places where academics are working in the area of visual methodologies.

The idea of the symposium was to bring together scholars and practitioners who are using such visual methodologies as photo-voice, performance, video documentary, and using objects as documents, as modes of inquiry but also as modes of representation in their research. Within a growing field of research, such approaches are central to the work of the International Visual Sociology Association, as well as in the burgeoning work around arts-based research within the social sciences.

The symposium came out of the work of a group of researchers in Education, Public Health and Social Work at UKZN. Led by Professor Naydene de Lange, and organised through the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change (directed by Jean Stuart and Professor Claudia Mitchell), the group has been focusing on visual and participatory approaches to addressing HIV and AIDS.

The symposium opened with a screening of ?‘My Photos, My Video, My Story?’, a short documentary about the uses of photo voice and video documentary in a health and education project in rural KwaZulu-Natal. This was followed by a presentation on ?‘performance within visual methodologies?’ by Professor Sandra Weber of Concordia, a co-founder of the Image and Identity Research Collective, and a performance by the Sekwanele Youth Organisation of Pinetown. Particular focus was given in the papers to ways in which photo voice and other visual art approaches are being used as intervention or research tools, to the ethical challenges of working with visual images and to interpretative frameworks for working with the visual.

Following the symposium, a special two day youth workshop called ?‘Taking it global?’ involved young people from the Sekwanele Youth Organisation in using photo voice as a way to explore the global context of HIV and Aids. The workshop was part of a larger project funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, with youth participants in Mont-real, Toronto and Durban. The workshop was be co-facilitated by Dr Thabisile Buthelezi from UKZN and Dr June Larkin from the Institute of Women?’s Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.