Why did Lomax use visual methods instead of another method?
Well the project was really interested in exploring children’s experiences of neighbourhood, and in particular to explore that in a context of growing social and economic inequalities in which some children grow up very much poorer than other children, and often the children that grow up in poverty live in particular neighbourhoods which are characterised by local discourses, sort of popular ideas about the places as lacking and stigmatised, and so the children grow up aware, start to become very aware of the fact they live in stigmatised neighbourhoods. The project was a participatory visual research project and it involved 13 children and young people, seven boys, six girls, aged between 8 and 12 at the time. The children themselves determined the research questions and the methods, but broadly we were interested in exploring the ways in which visual research might enable participants, children in this case, to articulate their experiences of their own lives. Although the children obviously determined the questions they wanted to ask and the methods they wanted to use, broadly we were interested in their experience of neighbourhood, what it’s like to live in a particular place at a particular time.
Visual methods are often predicated as giving voice to children and young people in particular and they’re seen as an accessible method for working with children and young people, and they can literally, it’s argued, make participants’ ideas visible to others and they’re a powerful form of dissemination, and I would agree with that, but I would like to add a caveat because I think that we really need to pay attention to how children and young people actually participate. So there’s an assumption, as is increasingly noted in the literature, that because they are supposedly child-led methods often that we don’t need to think about how children participate, and one of the central aims of the research I think was to actually explore ‘How do children participate in visual methods projects?’. So we were interested in interrogating their relationships with each other in the production of data, their relationships with adult and other child participants whom they interviewed during the filming and fieldwork, but also to explore the ways in which then the images and the film they made does enable them to give voice to their experiences.
You know, they might have control over the methods they use and the questions they want to ask, but they cannot control then what sense the viewers make of the images that are produced. So once the images are out there in the public domain, in papers or in conferences, they have no control over what adults themselves bring to the process of viewing those images.