⚠️ Research in Progress: Doctoral Defence Forthcoming
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Appendix F · Photography Prompt
Photography Prompt Card
The photography prompt card was given to participants at the close of the photography workshop and served as a reference document during the two-week photography period. Its purpose was to orient rather than direct: to hold the research question open while participants went about their daily lives on campus.
The prompt was designed around the principle that the best photovoice data comes from participants who are genuinely looking rather than performing. The card was short enough to be kept in a pocket or pinned to a phone case, and plain enough to be read on a bus between classes.
Through Our Eyes
Photography Prompt · Two-Week Photography Period
For the next two weeks, carry your camera with you.
Photograph whatever you encounter that feels relevant to any of these questions:
- Where do you feel like you belong at this university? What does that look like?
- Where do you feel like you are invisible, or like the university was designed for someone else?
- What does the institution say about students like you? What does it actually do?
- What would you want someone outside your situation to see, if they could look through your eyes?
- What do the objects, spaces, signs, and silences of campus life tell you about who this place was built for?
You might photograph spaces, objects, signs, notices, bulletin boards, food, crowds, empty rooms, views from windows, the backs of buildings, or anything else that strikes you as analytically significant. Photographing people is entirely optional. You are free to photograph yourself.
Aim for at least 15–20 photographs over the two weeks. You will select 5–7 to discuss in your individual interview. There are no wrong photographs.
You own every photograph you take. You may withdraw any image from the research at any time, for any reason. Questions? Contact Amy Tucker at [contact on file with ethics boards] or visit throughoureyes.trubox.ca
Design Rationale
The prompt is deliberately open-ended. Wang and Burris (1997) warn against photography prompts that function as leading questions: if participants are given a frame so specific that they photograph to satisfy the researcher’s expectations, the resulting images tell the researcher’s story rather than the participants’. The questions on this card are designed to orient participants toward the analytical terrain of the study (belonging, exclusion, the gap between institutional rhetoric and lived experience) while leaving the specific contents of that terrain entirely to them.
The instruction to photograph “objects, spaces, signs, and silences” reflects an important methodological choice. Much of what photovoice captures in institutional settings is architectural and spatial rather than human. The university communicates its values through its buildings, its signage, its allocation of space, and through what it fails to provide. A participant who photographs a bulletin board covered in English-only flyers, or an empty prayer room, or a food bank hidden in a basement corridor, is producing as analytically rich data as a participant who photographs a human encounter. The prompt opens that possibility explicitly.
References
Wang, C. C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309