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Research Highlights
"Visualizing the Narrative of Displacement: Participatory Photography with Refugee and Immigrant Young Adolescents"
Dr. Maryam Kia-Keating’s collection of children’s photographs open a window into the lives and experiences of immigrant and refugee youth. In the context of a growing immigrant population in the United States, Kia-Keating is three years into a research project that she hopes will help educators, youth-based organizations, and psychologists understand the lives of these young newcomers, illuminating their struggles with acculturation, adjustment and mental health, as well as their resilience in terms of indicators such as self-efficacy, hope, meaning-making, sense of belonging, and social agency. Funded by the Alliance Healthcare Foundation, Kia-Keating has been working closely with the AjA Project (www.ajaproject.org), an international non-profit organization, who besides teaching photography to the students in afterschool programs, also exhibits the students’ work in community settings, with a focus on impacting both individual self-efficacy as well as broader social change, by positively impacting the communities in which the students live.
Kia-Keating and her AjA team have adopted a mixed methods approach to studying the youth in the participatory photography program, both examining quantitative psychosocial variables over time, as well as conducting in-depth qualitative interviews using the photographs as a tool to learn about the children’s experiences. They’re studying a multiethnic group of 87 middle and high school students, participating in one of four afterschool programs in San Diego public schools and an inner-city housing project. Students originate from a variety of countries spanning the globe including Somalia, Uganda, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Mexico, and the Marshall Islands.
Kia-Keating turned to the students’ visual narratives (i.e., their photographs) to enrich their verbal narratives (i.e., their in-depth qualitative interviews). Students chose a photograph that represented each of seven concepts: themselves, their family, their old home, the experience of migration, their new community, their sense of belonging, and their hopes for the future. They then used the visual depictions to create meaningful autobiographical accounts of their experiences. Her team, now fine-tuning the analyses of these data, looks for thematic premises that help to elucidate the children’s transformations, beliefs, fears, challenges, representations, and meaning-making.
Out of several hundred photographs, Zemar, a 14-year old male from Afghanistan, chose a photograph of himself buried to his neck in sand as the one that best depicted himself. In the photograph, his face is turned to the side and he is squinting uncomfortably because of the sand going into his eyes. It is not the first photograph you might assume a teenager would choose to represent himself. Zemar’s unexpected explanation brought insight and provided a lesson: “when I take this picture, it shows me I have to be much better than that.” The day of the photograph, his friends had buried him under the sand and he was trapped there until his sister came to his rescue. Zemar started to question the influence of his friends, and described the transformation that took place: “It shows me how I was and how I am now…much better than that there.” The photograph not only provided him with a metaphor for his vulnerability and discontent, but served as a continual and tangible reminder for him to maintain the positive changes in his life, a motivator to stay out of trouble, and to make careful choices.
The goal of Kia-Keating’s project is to help educators and psychologists gain a greater understanding of immigrant and refugee children’s perspectives about their lives and experiences, their struggles and successes, and inform future educational programs and mental health interventions.
This work is being presented at the Harvard University Cultural Agents Initiative (www.culturalagents.org) conference called “Visible Rights: Participatory Photography by and for Children/Youth” and during a panel focused on “Looking Behind the Lens: Participatory Photography in Research and Intervention With Diverse Youth” at the 2008 Society for Research on Adolescence conference in Chicago. Kia-Keating’s presentation is titled “Visualizing the Narrative of Displacement: Participatory Photography with Refugee and Immigrant Young Adolescents.”
Photo Caption:
This photo depicts the AjA Project’s current community exhibition, placing large-scale photographs taken by middle school students on city streets, to illuminate public spaces and open up dialogue about immigrants and refugees in the communities where they reside.