Visual Storytelling and Socioenvironmental Change: Images, Photographic Encounters, and Knowledge Construction in Resource Frontiers

Abstract

Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deeply contentious, embedded in a wide variety of values, ethics, goals, and relations. Photographs are pervasively used to generate narratives about environmental change, particular social groups, and places. Yet, the sociocultural processes and power relations at play in producing "visual knowledge" and interpreting images often remain underexplored, with limited attention to how photographs and visual storytelling are engaged to (re)orient discussions about change. Challenging ways of seeing, this article discusses relational practices around photography and the narrating, experiencing, and circulating of images. It explores experiences with photovoice-a methodology aimed at realigning the dynamics of who decides what photos matter, how, why, and with what implications, sometimes pitched as a way to "decolonize" research. The study examines interactions in a village in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, where women shared visual stories to express challenges they face in relation to deforestation and other landscape changes, depleted gold deposits, limited livelihood options, and other themes, conveying place histories and ideas about home, identity, governance, and community. Reflecting on intergenerational dialogues and anxieties about the future, the analysis considers photovoice processes in refracting everyday struggles, arguing for feminist epistemologies that carefully attend to the situated ethics and contingent performative powers of visual storytelling where multiple forms of resource extraction powerfully shape community life. The article calls for greater focus on women's place-based storytelling and its communicative power, highlighting the significance of positionality when studying socioecological visualization, affect, and change.

Visual Storytelling, Intergenerational Environmental Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty: Exploring Images and Stories amid a Contested Oil Pipeline Project

“…The Tsleil-Waututh adapted methodology profiled above builds further on these components to accentuate the importance of adopting an inter-generational perspective to photovoice processes. While considerable literature is accumulating on the gendered dimension that lends itself to capture this technique [7], and others have noted how stories can surface the importance of generational ties and the "distinct sense of place" that is "passed inter-generationally" [20], much less discussion has been afforded to intergenerational aspirations articulated through photovoice work. In the Tsleil-Waututh photovoice project, the intergenerational dimension figured prominently, both in terms of participation and as a focus of concerns articulated.…”

“…Nonetheless, community-relevant actions and change must continue to underscore the goals of visual methods of inquiry [18,19]. Many photovoice projects include public viewings of the photos/captions to facilitate engagement of other community members, government agencies and/or researchers to better understand the values, concerns, and aspirations that may escape textual descriptions derived through interviews and documentary analysis [7,19,55]. The project described here is now entering its phase of the wider community, policymaker and public engagement, expected to be an ongoing process over the coming years, using all the above techniques plus social media and taking on a life of its own as the struggle against pipeline and tanker traffic expansion continues.…”

“…Lacking in the rhetoric and dominant visual representation of controversial pipeline expansion is the depiction of the values, health concerns and stories of those disproportionately affected, and likely to be among the most directly impacted in the future, namely the indigenous communities along the route of the pipeline, whose health, food sovereignty, and crucial stewardship relationship to the land continues to be affronted by fossil fuel developments [3]. Contributing to growing bodies of geographical, environmental studies and public health literature grappling with the performativity of images in environmental contestations [4][5][6][7], this article focuses on visual storytelling of health, environmental, and intergenerational justice concerns of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN), situated in British Columbia, Canada, at the terminal of the contested Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker expansion (TMX) project. A collaboration between TWN community members and non-indigenous academics in solidarity, we explore images and stories shared in settings where elders and youth alike came to discuss critical community challenges, linking well-being and cultural values with experiences of change and future aspirations.…”

“…The importance of visuals in shaping understanding and sensibilities has long been recognized [8][9][10][11] with the work of Stuart Hall [12] on how visual culture reinforces values, attitudes, and ways of understanding, seminal in this regard. Yet research on visual environmental communication has revealed an increasing tendency toward abstraction or decontextualization of images [9], obscuring the nuanced concerns, desires, and choices as to what is important to visualize from the perspective of different actors [7]. Photography can be a weapon [13] that stigmatizes or victimizes, as well as a tool that empowers; and there has been considerable concern in relation to the use of imagery and visual interventions, generating what some critical scholars have called "crises of representation" [14].…”

“…A method sometimes embraced in this spirit, "photovoice", developed originally in public health [16], involves community members leading the processes of visual exploration and has become increasingly popular as a research technique, as well as to promote local solidarity, activism, and deeper understanding more broadly. Notwithstanding the growing body of literature on such techniques, including with indigenous communities [7,[17][18][19][20][21][22], there is scant research exploring participatory photography and local visual narratives in the contexts of oil pipeline opposition. Building on debates on the meaning of images and visual storytelling as "more-than-representational" [19] in order to recognize the emotional intensities that are lived, experienced, and conveyed, this article aims to contribute to filling this gap empirically and conceptually, and calls for more research to navigate and explore possibilities, risks, and critical issues in this area.…”