Flagship Project Enhancing Resilience in Food Systems

Including voices in research

In Rwanda, the on-going research of doctoral student Mélanie Surchat led to a Photovoice Exhibition at the Swiss Development Cooperation in Bern. She recently traveled back to Africa to further apply the photovoice method. In this photovoice project, 17 workers involved at RUNRES innovation sites were given a camera to take pictures of their positive and negative experiences as workers employed in waste recycling. Mélanie printed these pictures and used them to carry-out interviews on the basis of what the workers had portrayed.

By doing so, the topics of discussion were driven by the workers, rather than the lead researcher. Mélanie then reviewed the pictures to organize a participatory data analysis. For the analysis, the involved workers sat together to share and discuss the pictures they had taken. After a first round of sharing, they were asked to identify common themes and to classify their pictures by these themes. By doing so, the researcher was able to validate the findings with the workers themselves rather than for them. Striving to include workers voices throughout all phases of the research process from data collection to analysis and data sharing is important to steer away from tokenistic participation in research.