Conference Program

This panel contribution offers a feminist epistemological reading of photovoice, understood not as a participatory visual technique but as an epistemic and ethical device that reshapes the conditions under which knowledge is produced in contexts marked by inequality, vulnerability, and structural violence. Situated at the intersection of feminist research, visual methodologies, and critical migration studies, the contribution focuses on how interpretive authority is distributed—or contested—when working with images, narratives, and embodied experiences in research with migrants and refugees.

Drawing on a critical reconstruction of the genealogy of photovoice and on recent feminist scholarship, the contribution shows how the institutional expansion of the method has often been accompanied by processes of depoliticisation and visual extractivism. In many applications, participation is reduced to the act of taking photographs, while interpretation, theorisation, and public circulation remain under academic control. From this perspective, the central issue is not methodological in a technical sense but epistemological: who interprets images, who decides what becomes visible, and who controls the meanings and effects of visual knowledge.

Against these tendencies, the contribution proposes a feminist re-anchoring of photovoice structured around three key dimensions. First, it argues for the centrality of care as epistemic infrastructure rather than as a moral or emotional supplement. Working with images in migration contexts entails negotiating pain, fear, memory, and exposure; without sustained relational care, the risk of reproducing epistemic and affective harm remains high. Second, photovoice is conceptualised as a space for negotiating pain, where images do not represent traumatic experiences but enable them to be activated, named, and politicised without resorting to spectacle or re-victimisation. Within this framework, emotions are recognised as epistemic dimensions rather than as subjective residues external to knowledge production.

Third, the contribution examines photovoice as a practice of epistemic justice, insofar as interpretive power is effectively redistributed. Drawing on recent studies involving migrants and refugees, the analysis shows how co-interpretation of images, co-authorship, and collective control over visual circulation can displace entrenched cognitive hierarchies and generate situated knowledge that cannot emerge through representational methodologies alone.

Finally, the contribution addresses the challenges introduced by the digital circulation of images—expanded visibility, risks of re-identification, and enduring digital traces—and argues for understanding ethics not as a preliminary protocol but as shared, processual responsibility. From this perspective, photovoice emerges not as an abstractly inclusive method, but as a demanding feminist practice that requires rethinking rigor, care, and responsibility in contemporary social research.