Framing Futurities in Photovoice, Health, and Environment: How Power Is Reproduced and Challenged in Arts-Based Methods

Abstract

Anchored in critical analysis of a photovoice project, this article interrogates intersections between (1) health as it is tethered to ideas about the “future” and (2) worries about “the environment.” The ways the concepts of future, health and environment are dealt with by project participants suggest that arts-based research methods may be at risk of being seen as non-political spaces safe for people with privilege to envision some peoples as having more rights than others to a healthy future. The article begins by exploring how arts-based approaches, and photovoice in particular, can result in positive generative conversations between differently positioned research collaborators. Then, guided by critical anti-racist, queer, and Indigenous scholarship on futurities and ecologies, we move on to suggest that arts-based methods might rightly be critiqued for appearing as naïve methods, susceptible to reinscribing dominant paradigms of power and privilege. This tension has implications for geohumanities, explored in the concluding sections of the article. Ultimately, we argue that working with arts-based methods across sectors must acknowledge and account for gradations of power. Gradations of power are, after all, always informing who is afforded and allowed a healthy future when what is broadly referred to as “the environment” is at stake.