Community-Engaged Research and Collective Knowledges: A Photo-Story Project in an Indigenous Mexican Community

Abstract:Community-engaged research in Indigenous communities constitutes an exercise of self-representation and community empowerment, through which storytelling and photo-story serve as decolonial research methodologies Photo-story may be employed at the individual or collective level, stimulating critical conversations about the past and present-day realities in Indigenous communities In this work, I document a photo-story project in a P'urhépecha community of Michoacán, Mexico The paper engages storytelling as a theoretical and methodological framework and highlights the relevance of photo-story for Indigenous historical research in community spaces Through an analysis of the project I discuss in this work, I argue that photo-story is a powerful methodological tool that enhances storytelling and contributes to the critical development of community-based projects to document, transmit, and preserve Indigenous knowledges.