91丝瓜视频
Creating and picturing social justice
While the IHDW is focused on its working groups tackling foundational research at the national and international level with our established researchers, the Participatory Cultures Lab, a sister project of the IHDW is a site for graduate and postgraduate students to create and share with the community at large. The two sisters often work in tandem on a variety of processes and community interventions听that weave within the projects listed on the institute's website. The PCL is the home for our big family focused on creating and picturing social justice.
Participatory Cultures Lab听-听Picturing Social Justice
Who are we?
We are a CFI funded lab under the direction of Claudia Mitchell, providing space, technology, and support to students, postdoctoral fellows, researchers, projects and international initiatives incorporating participatory visual methodologies, art and media- making as critical forms of research and intervention In the lab, we conduct research focusing on how participatory visual methodologies can help to deepen an understanding of such social issues as youth sexuality, HIV and AIDS, sexual and gender-based violence, disabilities, and poverty alleviation. While this work engages a variety of groups including teachers and health care workers as well as young people, a key focus is on the idea of 鈥済irl-led/youth-led activism鈥� - empowering girls to find their voices and giving them the tools to speak about their own health and well-being and propose ideas for change.
What issues does the lab address?
Here researchers, artists and collaborators ask such questions as:
- How can participatory visual and arts-based methods help raise the voices of marginalized communities in policy dialogue and policy-making?
- What kinds of technical adaptations need to be made in rural and remote settings, poorly resourced areas, and working in conflict zones?
- What are effective ways of ensuring inclusivity in relation to youth with disabilities?
- How can playful and immersive research and creation experiences contribute to learning and transformation?
- How can visual and other arts-based practices can play a role in social change?
How does the lab address these issues?
Organized as a well-equipped and inviting lab space, the PCL supports innovative doctoral and postdoctoral projects and tests out and promotes the use of participatory arts-based and visual techniques, such as digital storytelling, drawing, photovoice, participatory video and cellphilming, participatory archiving, participatory arts-based game design, and the study of objects. These tools and methods are also linked to reflexive approaches to research including memory-work, and self-study. These methods are used in the process of collecting, analyzing, and working with research, framed within the broad question of 鈥榳hat difference does this make?鈥� We are particularly interested in studying these approaches in relation to knowledge mobilization, focusing on the exhibitions, screenings, and engagement of audiences.
Deliverables and Impact
Through the many research, training, capacity building and community outreach activities, the PCL has successfully attracted national and international funding (CIHR, SSHRC, IDRC, Dubai Cares, Trudeau Foundation). With this funding, we have been able to pioneer innovative approaches to using mobile technologies in rural and poorly resourced areas such as cellphilming, No-Editing- Required (N-E-R) approaches to film-making, and designing composite videos as 鈥榮peaking back鈥� tools. We have been able to provide HQ training to doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows on the various visual methods.
Through our various networks, we have offered training institutes on participatory visual methods and engaged in capacity building in participatory visual methods through collaborations with international NGOs (e.g. Plan, Oxfam, Global Affairs Canada, CODE). Through its collaboration with the 91丝瓜视频 Art Hive Initiative, the P. Lantz Artist-in Residence program for the last 6 years, and through its close links to the Institute for Human Development and Well-being, We have contributed to the expansion of the use of arts- based tools and methods in the faculty. Since the last 9 years, the PCL established and hosted the 91丝瓜视频 International Cellphilm Festival annually.
鈥淚 want Canadians to understand that research like mine, and that of my team, puts ordinary people at the centre in defining what needs to be changed. This kind of work, however, also requires community leaders and policy-makers to do a great deal of listening and acting.鈥�
- Claudia Mitchell
This work of the PCL has supported the voices of Indigenous girls, young women, and youth in conflict zones and in policy dialogue in the global South (Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Vietnam). A good example of this is the development and local adoption of a new protocol on Forced and Early Marriage in rural South Africa as a result of the digital stories produced by girls and young women in the community.
Our work has been recognized both nationally and internationally, with the founder being made a member of the Royal Society of Canada (2015), the recipient of the SSHRC Gold Medal for Impact (2016), recipient of the Leon-Gerin Laureate in the Social Sciences (2019), the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Mid-Sweden (2016), and recently honoured as a Canadian Woman of Impact (2021).
- Pioneer innovative approaches to using mobile technologies
- Training to doctoral students & postdoctoral fellows
- Engaged in capacity building through collaborations with international NGOs
- Established and hosted the last 9 years of the
- Supported the voices of Indigenous girls, young women, and youth
- Recognized both nationally and internationally
Participatory Cultures Lab - Picturing Social Justice
A CFI Funded Lab under the direction of Claudia Mitchell, providing space, technology and support to students, researchers, projects and initiatives incorporating PVM, art and media making as critical forms of research and intervention.
Training in Participatory Visual Methods
- PhD Students
- Postdoctoral Fellows
- Researchers in Medicine, Anthropology & Environmental Studies
- Courses on Visual Methods
Studying & Promoting Art for Social Change
- P. Lantz Artist in Residence
- Making Connections
- Workshop Series
Capacity Support: Research-to-action
- Pioneering new tools
- Adapting methods to poorly resourced areas
- Decolonizing through design
- PVM training: International NGOs
- Toolkits, webinars and videos
- Primary Research Projects
- Related Research Projects
- Selected Publications
- International Cellphilm Festival
Primary Research Projects
-
Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led 鈥楩rom the Ground Up鈥� Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa
Funded by SSHRC & IDRC -
More Than Words: Studying the Impact of Arts Based Survivor Engagement on Families and Communities
Funded by Women & Gender Equality -
Canadian Young People in the Context of COVID-19
Funded by the Minist猫re de la Sant茅 et des Services Sociaux (MSSS) -
Participatory Research in Education and Agency in Mali (PREAM)
Funded by Dubai Cares
Related Research Projects
-
Transforming Girls鈥� Education Project, Sierra Leone
-
Constructing Feminist Identities Through Participatory Visual Methodologies
-
Nurturing Warriors: Understanding Mental Wellness and Health
-
Risk Behaviours among Young Indigenous Men
-
Portrait X: Preventing Gender-Based Violence: the Health Perspective Teen/Youth Dating Violence Prevention
-
Storying Transnational Knowledges: Connection through Narrative
-
Learning with and from the global South: Opportunities for engaging girls and young women with disabilities across Southern spaces
Selected Publications
-
Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
-
Our Rural Selves: Memory, Place and the Visual in Canadian Rural Childhoods
-
Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back through The Arts to Address Sexual Violence
-
Visual Encounters in The Study of Rural Childhoods
-
Participatory Visual Methodologies in Global Public Health
-
Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community and Policy
-
Handbook on Participatory Video
-
Was it Something I Wore? Dress, Materiality, Identity
-
Picturing Research: Drawings as Visual Methodology
-
Doing Visual Research
International Cellphilm Festival
Workshops
Social Media Campaigns
Global Participation
Symposia
