Paper short abstract:

Focusing on a range of photographic materials, this paper explores the possibilities to use photographs in participatory research on transformations of Daugava river delta communities focusing on their relationships with the Freeport of Riga.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on a range of photographic materials, this paper explores the possibilities to use photographs in participatory research on transformations of Daugava river delta communities focusing on their relationships with the Freeport of Riga. The decline of Baltic fisheries and industrialisation of the port over the past decades have substantially transformed what once were fishing suburbs, rural enclaves within a city, islands providing their inhabitants with access to natural resources and water in particular.

By creating corpora of photographs and making it accessible to communities, we are problematising cultural heritage process in two ways. Firstly, we engage communities themselves in collecting and curating their visual heritage. Secondly, the collected photographs are a separate set of data to be analysed.

The studied 4 communities are both similar and also different. These are/were both traditional fishing settlements and the industrial suburbs of the city. They are both ethnically homogeneous (dominated by inhabitants of Latvian or Russian language communities) and/or heterogeneous. We can also trace exile or virtual communities connected to these areas, like employees and inhabitants of former Soviet military bases, most of whom lives outside Latvia. Based on previous social research of Latvian society and communities, we assume that the cultural heritage of our target communities can vary considerably. So we ask: is there a need to produce a common visual narrative of cultural heritage and is it possible at all?