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Lynch School of Education Professor Brinton Lykes, associate director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, is one of the creators of the PhotoVoice Project, a participatory action research project on post-Katrina New Orleans. The results of this research will be featured in an exhibit, “Two Communities, One PhotoVoice: African-Americans’ and Latinas’ Participatory Action Research in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” next Thursday, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. in the Murray Room at the Yawkey Athletic Center. Lykes recently spoke with Melissa Beecher of the Chronicle about the project and her personal connection to the subject.
What made you focus on post-Katrina New Orleans? Do you have a personal connection to the region?
I grew up in New Orleans, where many in my nuclear family as well as my extended family still live. Although I have not lived there for many years, I have worked in zones of armed conflict and humanitarian disasters for much of my adult life, so family roots in New Orleans coupled with the unnatural disaster of Katrina contributed to my decision to return home after many years.
My status as an “insider” or local New Orleanian opened many doors for me and for the project, yet my being white, upper middle class, and highly educated contributed to my “outsider” status within the urban working and poor African-American and Latina communities where the project was carried out.
The work could have only been done through the partnerships among Boston College’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Kingsley House, and Catholic Charities. These partnerships afforded me an opportunity to reconnect to my roots, to discover that one can – sometimes – “go home again” and allowed me to experience how much New Orleans had changed – and how much remained the same – since my childhood and adolescence there. I was also able to step very much outside of my family roots and connect to communities that I had not known as a child, to live in neighborhoods that I had only visited while doing service learning as a middle school and high school student, and to more fully understand the many ways in which race and class remain institutionalized and structure inequalities within the city.
The project demonstrated in a small and limited way that cross-race and cross-class collaboration is possible – and the results in the PhotoVoice exhibit offer a multiracial lens for viewing health disparities – and one response to them.
What is the PhotoVoice Project?
“PhotoVoice” is a term that I first encountered through the work of Caroline Wang, a public health researcher who collaborated with rural women in the Yunan Province of China to document women’s health and child care needs, contributing to policy change as well as improved health care and child care for working women in the province. In my own work, I have drawn on her methodology of combining visual images — that is, photographs and text — as well as the “talking pictures” methodology of the Chilean anthropologist Ximena Bunster. Wang drew heavily on the work of the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and I have emphasized his work as well as Participatory Action Research in my work with participatory photography.
In the New Orleans project, our goal was to use cameras, picture taking, community interviews, storytelling and group-based analyses of the story-text to document health disparities in the pre- and post-Katrina context and the work of community-based health promoters in response to these realities.
Through the participatory and action research process with women who serve their communities as health promoters, the African-American “Walkers/Talkers” and Latina Promatoras, we sought to build on their developing cross-community leadership as one response to the unnatural disaster of Hurricane Katrina.
Explain why you and fellow designers on the collaborative decided to express your research in this way.
I have worked with this methodology previously here in Boston with Latino middle school urban youth and in rural Guatemala with Maya women survivors of war and gross violations of human rights. Much of my work as a community-cultural psychologist has been spent documenting the effects of institutionalized racism, war, and gross violations of human rights and working with local communities to identify and revalue their traditional or indigenous practices and design community-based psychosocial programs that respond to the effects of these oppressive forces – and press towards social change and transformation.
Having grown up in New Orleans, I was outraged and deeply concerned by Hurricane Katrina and wondered whether some of what I had learned in my previous work might be “of use” to those in my home town. As a Spanish speaker, I sought out those working with the growing Latino/a community, a large number of whom had arrived in New Orleans post-Katrina, seeking jobs and to collaborate in recovery processes. I have also worked collaboratively with the New Orleans-based People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond for many years and contacted leaders from the African American community in New Orleans.
During my last sabbatical I returned to New Orleans for several months to explore possible engagement with local communities and had the good fortune to meet Shaula Lovera of the Latino Health Network (LHAN) of Catholic Charities and Luanne Francis of Kingsley House, the first settlement home in the South. Both coordinated community-health promoter projects, both had heard of the PhotoVoice methodology, and both were drawn to the ideas of participatory and action research as a potential resource for further training and leadership development of the local community-based health promoters in their respective programs.
Just as importantly, as women of color who had migrated to New Orleans their work was infused with attention to cultural and linguistic diversities in health and the LHAN program had participated in the undoing racism training of the People’s Institute. Thus, we had multiple points of convergence in our training and understanding of the challenges facing New Orleans in the post-Katrina context. They agreed to approach the Walkers-Talkers and the Promatoras to discern their interest. Also, Shaula introduced me to Holly Scheib who was completing her PhD thesis at the Tulane University School of Public Health and is an amateur photographer. She was very interested in collaborating with us on the project.
I gathered from the website that the participants are exclusively women and children. Why?
Much of my professional work and community-based collaborations have been engaged with women and children who are particularly vulnerable populations in wars and in humanitarian disasters such as Katrina. Women and children are also often ignored for the particular sets of skills and resources they bring in responding to such catastrophes.
That said, this project involved women as co-researchers in the PhotoPAR process but the photographs and stories were developed with the wider communities from which the women come and in which they work. Thus the participants were men, women and children.
What are the benefits of Participatory and Action Research?
Participatory and Action Research incorporates a set of principles and practices that reflect an orientation to life, to social change, and to social justice. Communities confronting social problems and/or social inequalities and local researchers and educators develop partnerships through which they document social inequalities and develop participatory processes for analyzing their causes and seeking to collaborate in actions that will redress injustices.
The process is as important as the outcome and through collaborations voices traditionally excluded from much social scientific research take center stage. In addition to developing alternative ways of knowing – or valuing those that have been historically silenced – PAR co-researchers engage in shared practices to make change. Thus the process is educational and has the potential to contribute to personal as well as social transformations within and beyond the action-reflections processes. Thus, in the New Orleans project the co-researchers learned about each others’ communities, identified similarities and differences in health disparities, analyzed some of the causes of these disparities, revalued their practices as women engaged in community-health promotion, and represented to wider communities their roles as leaders within the post-Katrina New Orleans community.
What has been the response to the project?
The project was launched at a national conference, “Katrina@5: Partners in Philanthropy” at the Marriot Hotel in New Orleans in March of 2010. Since then the promoters and organizational and BC partners have presented the work at a variety of community events including “Raising Voices, Raising Awareness, Raising Power,” a one-day Katrina anniversary conference in New Orleans, LA focusing on the Latino community of the Gulf Coast, also in 2010, and neighborhood events. We have also presented at a variety of professional organizations including the Center for Sustainable Health Outreach (CSHO) at its 11th annual Unity conference June 7-10, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio, and at the American Psychological Association meetings. This is our first exhibit in Boston and at Boston College.
The Walkers-Talkers and Promatoras have been very engaged in presenting their work and have found the photographs and texts to be an invaluable resource in communicating some of their lived experiences – and their understandings of those experiences – to ever-widening audiences. They have been welcomed – and celebrated – by the communities who participated in the project, that is, whose photos appear and whose stories are re-presented. We look forward to engaging with the Boston College community and beyond about the project and, more importantly, about the realities of New Orleans and the ongoing challenges faced by diverse communities there.