Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Here we take an individual approach to study the experiences and interpretations of illness and pain. We use the participative visual analysis method Photovoice, where the informant takes the place and authority of co-researcher, through pictures, shares her own definition of her illness experience

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we highlight the interpretative viewpoint of the “informant” or “researched”, who most times have a say only through the sometimes “altered” viewpoint of the researcher. Using photovoice as a tool, we aim to raise awareness, capture individual illness narratives and encourage ownership of health interventions on female genital schistosomiasis affecting the health and lives of women and girls. This work was carried out in the West region of Cameroon, around remote fishing communities lacking necessary social structures for disease management. We set out to find the social representations of the disease and lived experiences from infected women around this condition. Here, they[informants] take ownership and present their own interpretations, capturing communicative, expressive, and symbolic aspects of their lived experiences through descriptive pictures which tell their own tale.

Through our use of photovoice, such representations become a politically sensitive activity, when peoples who were formerly only the objects of image-making (basic visual anthropology), now control the rights and choices to tell their own stories with the images of their choosing. The objective here is not for these women to emerge as victims, but as women, girls, mothers, wives, sisters, daughters; all activists and collaborators in the quest of their flourishing as humans, more specifically, for their rights to good health, equity, and their own futures. This offers a strength in the ownership of local voices, futures and challenges, which is necessary for the step forward for Africa and its inhabitants, not leaving their destiny and voices to “others”.