Paper Short Abstract:

I offer reflections on the use of photovoice to visually document fun as it unfolds as an embodied, sensorial, and intersubjective set of relationships. Fun, I argue, ‘opens’ children up to bodily (not just cognitive) attentiveness and participation, enabling them to 'do' their health differently.

Paper Abstract:

Fun is often mentioned in studies that use the participatory-action-research methodology of photovoice, and more generally in research with young people (Fournier et al. 2014). For example, Moletsane et al. (2007) acknowledge the significance of “having fun” in enabling young people in their photovoice project to identify, understand and interpret the serious issue of HIV/AIDS. As such, when mentioned, fun is often described as if it were a universal, taken-for-granted, and easily recognisable outcome of other processes, that helps sustain cognitive attention and involvement in other things. In contrast, in this paper, I show how photovoice is a useful methodology, for not only engendering fun, but for also visually documenting it as it processually unfolds, rather than after the fact. Photographs taken by me and 45 indigenous Pälawan children in the Philippines conducting a 3-month project designed to explore and alter related health practices depict fun, not as an outcome, but as an embodied, sensorial, and intersubjective set of unfolding relationships that ‘open’ children up to bodily (not just cognitive) attentiveness and participation. Rather than simply being an outcome of other processes that enables people to think differently, bodily participation that is fun emerges as a significant transformative mode of being that, in of itself, opens bodies up to ‘doing’ things differently, including, in this context, their health.