Embracing a Metic Lens for Community-based Participatory Research in Technical Communication

Collaborative sensemaking through photos: Using photovoice to study gas pipeline development in Appalachia

“…While we acknowledge that our own positionalities shape the research we take on, as feminist researchers, we made clear to participants that our primary intention was to amplify their lived experiences through the research, which was designed in conjunction with a local environmental watchdog group with whom we shared data to support their public awareness campaigns. Our previous work demonstrates our commitment to returning findings to local communities for their own use (Caretta, 2020; Carlson, 2020) as well as to support organizers challenging burgeoning industry manufactured narratives of energy development. Additionally, we consistently employed member-checking in order to verify whether our preliminary analysis was in line with participant’s understandings throughout the study as described in the next section of this article.…”

“…We had this in mind as we designed our study and chose to employ photovoice methods because of the possibilities that photovoice provides participants to "identify, represent, and enhance their community" using their own pictures (Wang and Burris, 1997: 369). The power that photographs hold as sites of interpretation about Appalachians suggested to us that they could be powerful tools for interpretation by Appalachians-a sentiment shared by other researchers who have utilized photovoice in the region (see Bell, 2008;Carlson, 2020;Downey and Anyaegbunam, 2010;Gaines et al, 2022). Given the region's history and our study's goal to highlight the lived experiences of community members impacted by gas pipeline development, photovoice offered another important affordance: a way to "overcome potential narrowing of the concept of corporate-community accountability through the exclusive use of definitions and words" (Holdaway, 2018: 90).…”