Conference Program

Ensuring spaces for genuine participation to foster collective agency is a fundamental principle for building democratic communities, especially in academic contexts.

Universities, as privileged places for critical learning, must foster students' ability to influence decision-making processes and community life.

This study explores Photovoice as a participatory methodology capable of transforming university students into coproducers of knowledge, fostering critical awareness, empowerment, and lived democracy.

The project was implemented as part of a teaching experience within the Community Psychology program for community educators and community psychologists.

The methodological design was divided into four phases: 1) theoretical training on empowerment, participation and visual methods; 2) guided photographic production, to represent aspects of everyday life that escape common sense, to raise awareness among the academic community and stakeholders, and to advance proposals for change; 3) collective discussions structured according to the SHOWED model; 4) public feedback and deliberative dialogue with academic stakeholders.

The empirical corpus comprises 214 photographs. Each student captured, through 10 photographs, their perspective on an outdoor space nestled in a tree-lined green area on campus, which welcomes students for lunch breaks, studying, or socializing with each other and with faculty.

This informal yet democratic space represents a space for relationships, where they can build and enhance a sense of belonging to the learning community.

Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), integrated with principles of participatory analysis, highlighted three macrocategories: 1) the gap between formal representation and effective decision-making power; 2) daily micro-practices of informal democracy among peers; 3) structural and symbolic barriers that limit empowerment.

The process has produced transformative effects, in terms of operational proposals for improving campus life and for the development of critical and constructive awareness that sees formal and informal leadership engaged in democratic dialogue.

The findings suggest that Photovoice simultaneously functions as an epistemic device for community intervention, facilitating the co-construction of meaning and the activation of deliberative practices. The feedback initiative led to the establishment of a joint roundtable with students and faculty to review participatory practices, as well as the creation of a Student Voice laboratory. The study contributes to the debate on democratic education in the university setting, proposing Photovoice as a tool capable of integrating research, critical training and bottom-up transformation.