Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls: Transnational Approaches 9781800730342

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ETHICAL PRACTICE IN PARTICIPATORY VISUAL RESEARCH WITH GIRLS

Transnational Girlhoods EDITORS: Claudia Mitchell, McGill University; Bodil Formark, Umeå University; Ann Smith, McGill University; Heather Switzer, Arizona State University Girlhood Studies has emerged over the last decade as a strong area of interdisciplinary research and activism, encompassing studies of feminism, women and gender, and childhood and youth and extending into such areas as sociology, anthropology, development studies, children’s literature, and cultural studies. As the first book series to focus specifically on this exciting field, Transnational Girlhoods will help to advance the research and activism agenda by publishing full-length monographs and edited collections that reflect a robust interdisciplinary and global perspective. International in scope, the series will draw on a vibrant network of girlhood scholars already active across North America, Europe, Russia, Oceania, and Africa, while forging connections with new activist and scholarly communities.

Volume 1

The Girl in the Text Edited by Ann Smith Volume 2

Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls: Transnational Approaches Edited by Relebohile Moletsane, Lisa Wiebesiek, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, and April Mandrona

ETHICAL PRACTICE IN PARTICIPATORY VISUAL RESEARCH WITH GIRLS Transnational Approaches

Edited by

Relebohile Moletsane, Lisa Wiebesiek, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, and April Mandrona

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Relebohile Moletsane, Lisa Wiebesiek, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, and April Mandrona

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moletsane, Relebohile, editor. Title: Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls: Transnational Approaches / edited by Relebohile Moletsane, Lisa Wiebesiek, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, and April Mandrona. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2021. | Series: Transnational Girlhoods; volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058134 (print) | LCCN 2020058135 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800730335 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800730342 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Girls—Research—Methodology. | Girls—Social conditions— Research. | Participant observation. | Visual sociology—Research—Methodology. Classification: LCC HQ798 .E84 2021 (print) | LCC HQ798 (ebook) | DDC 305.23082—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058134 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058135

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-033-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-034-2 ebook

CONTENTS List of Illustrations, Figures, and Tables

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Foreword Claudia Mitchell

ix

Introduction

Doing Ethical Research with Girls and Young Women in Transnational Contexts Relebohile Moletsane, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, and April Mandrona

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Chapter 1

Going Public? Decolonizing Research Ethics with Girls and Young Women Naydene de Lange

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Chapter 2

Think/Film/Screen/Change: Negotiating Ethics with Rural New Brunswick Girls and Trans and Non-binary Youth Casey Burkholder

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Chapter 3

Doing Ethical Research with Girls in a Transnational Project Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane

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Chapter 4

Alternative Imaginings: Re-searching Sexualized Violence with Rural Indigenous Girls Anna Chadwick

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Chapter 5

Cellphilming and Consent: Young Indigenous Women Researching Gender-Based Violence The Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia with Katie MacEntee, Jennifer Altenberg, Sarah Flicker, and Kari-Dawn Wuttunee

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Chapter 6

Reflecting Critically on Ethics in Research with Black South African Girls Tamlynn Jefferis and Sadiyya Haffejee

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Chapter 7

Using Photovoice for Ethical Research with Teenage Mothers in Kenya Milka Nyariro

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Chapter 8

“Yu Ai Tron!” (Your Eye Is Strong!): Gender, Language, and Ethics in Cameroon Jennifer A. Thompson

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Chapter 9

Participatory Video as Method: Ethical Conundrums of Researching Cyberviolence Targeting Girls and Young Women Hayley R. Crooks

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Coda

Toward a New Ethics in Transnational Research with Girls and Young Women in Indigenous and Rural Communities Relebohile Moletsane, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, and April Mandrona Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS, FIGURES, AND TABLES Illustrations 2.1. Seeking participants for the Think/Film/Screen/Change workshops.

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3.1. Storyboard by Social Ills Fighters.

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4.1. I Have Fire!

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4.2. Uneven Borders.

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4.3. Blanketing Stories and Honoring Refusal.

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5.1. Participant negotiates anonymity while posing with a storyboard.

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5.2. Cellphilm screenshot from “Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia.”

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6.1. Girls portray a verbally abusive house mother.

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6.2. A girl cries after her house mother is verbally abusive.

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7.1. A polluted river in the community where women wash sacks for recycling.

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7.2. An isolated alley where girls and women risk being sexually assaulted.

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7.3. A photo narrative with captions of the meaning of each photograph selected by the participants.

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7.4. A local security person accompanying a young mother to take pictures.

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Figures 1.1. Ethics at the intersection.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, FIGURES, AND TABLES

Tables

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5.1. Excerpt from the consent form.

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5.2. Cellphilms and anonymity strategies.

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6.1. Summary of “Five Steps to Feeling Better.”

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FOREWORD

Claudia Mitchell This new volume (Volume 2) in the Transnational Girlhood book series, Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls: Transnational Approaches goes, as the famous expression has it, thickly and deeply into the ethical considerations of what it means to do participatory visual research with girls and young women. Some of the books in this series are building on previous Special Issues of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. The first volume in the series, The Girl in the Text, edited by Ann Smith (2019), came out of a Special Issue. Likewise, “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood,” guest edited by April Mandrona (2016), is the mainspring of this new volume. Taking as its point of entry participatory visual fieldwork with girls and young women in Indigenous and rural contexts in Canada and South Africa, the book also includes chapters on work done in Cameroon and Kenya, along with several other sites in Canada that are not directly related to indigeneity. Across all the sites, researchers grapple with critical questions related to the methods and tools of participatory visual research they are using such as photovoice, participatory video, and cellphilming, and also to the commitment to taking seriously the voices of the girls and young women with whom they work who are often the most marginalized in their communities. Importantly, cutting across this work is a focus on sexual and gender-based violence. How are questions of ethical practice in participatory visual research complicated by the Research Ethics Boards and Committees that regulate all our research? Concomitantly, how do the issues raised here offer more nuanced considerations that could further inform the broad area of research ethics? I am struck, for example, by the fact that few of the issues addressed in this book are covered in my own university’s compulsory online Course on Research Ethics, although the university does ensure that those working with Indigenous communities follow specific protocols. The course does not reference the unique situation of girls and young women (although it does take up vulnerability in broader ways) or the special instances of rurality (or spatiality) and of working with visual data such as photos or videos. Furthermore, although it does address where data are going to be stored and for how long, the course offers no case studies of ownership when it comes to the issue of who owns the data or ix

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who determines how it is going to be used. I recognize, of course, that each of these points has its own particularity, and no single course is going to address them all. At the same time, however, what this mini-audit of what is not in this particular online course reminds us is that there is clearly a need to see up-close the situated and relational nature of ethical issues and to note how thoughtful and reflexive researchers are taking up these concerns. The editors of this volume, three from the University of KwaZuluNatal (UKZN), South Africa (Relebohile Moletsane, Lisa Wiebesiek, and Astrid Treffry-Goatley), and one from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, Canada (April Mandrona), know what it means to navigate the complexities of participatory visual research with Indigenous girls and young women, particularly in the context of sexual and gender-based violence. The research experience of the lead editor, Relebohile Moletsane, as the J. L. Dube Chair in Rural Education at UKZN and the director of the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change, is exceptionally pertinent here, and the experience and expertise of all the other editors in working with participatory and arts-based methods is extensive. Five of the nine chapters in this volume come directly out of the work undertaken by the authors in the international research project “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” with which they have all been involved in various ways since 2014. Most of these contributors are currently still associated with this project either directly or indirectly and have gone on to embark upon related research. Given my own position as co-leader of this project with Relebohile Moletsane, I am very proud of the depth and breadth of knowledge about ethical practices that has come out of the sustained work represented in this volume. It is worth noting that once we had been awarded the CAD 2.4 million for this project, the ethics application took close to a year to meet approval across all eight involved academic institutions in the two countries since we would be working with visual data and with minors—young Indigenous people—on the theme of sexual violence. Of the many other issues we might have anticipated and the contributions to this book address so compellingly is the duality of the notion of consent itself. Informed consent lies at the heart of doing ethical research, and this brings particular challenges given the producer roles of girls and young women in creating videos, exhibitions, and so on in participatory visual research. Consent is x

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also, however, something that is subject to on-going negotiation; this is true of both the consent to participate in a project and the consent related to sexual activity. It is this negotiated aspect of consent that is one of the most critical features that we have to take into account if we are to understand the implications of sexual violence and the rights of girls and young women. Critically, the first authors of one of the polyvocal chapters on consent are girls and young women. As for transnationalism, as the editors and the various contributors highlight, there are many different features of what the concept of transnational can include in relation to the project of understanding ethical practices. These range from the recognition of the global contexts of sexual and gender-based violence to the ways in which strategies and knowledge travel across borders; and from the collaborations that are evident not just in the composition of the writing teams but in the variety of scholarly citations they offer, to the recognition that ethical practices need to be shared. Although the chapters in this book were completed just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, it seems clear that the complexity of issues addressed here lays the foundation for deepening an understanding of what the global pandemic can teach us about transnationalism and ethical practice in working with girls and young women. In conclusion, and on behalf of Berghahn Books and the other coeditors of Transnational Girlhoods, Ann Smith, Heather Switzer, and Bodil Formark, I am delighted to welcome Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls: Transnational Approaches to this international series. Claudia Mitchell is a Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Faculty of Education, McGill University where she is the director of the Institute for Human Development and Well-being and the founder and director of the Participatory Cultures Lab. She is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning journal Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her research focuses on participatory visual and arts-based approaches to working with young people and communities in relation to addressing critical social issues such as gender equality and gender-based violence. She has been working on girls’ education for twentyfive years and in a wide range of country contexts in West Africa, Southern and Eastern Africa, and East Asia Pacific. She currently leads two large funded projects focusing on girl-led “from the ground up” policymaking to address sexual violence with Indigenous girls in Canada and South Africa. She is the author, co-author, and co-editor of thirty books. xi

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Doing Ethical Research with Girls and Young Women in Transnational Contexts Relebohile Moletsane, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, and April Mandrona

In my community, there was a girl who grew up with no family. Her parents died because of AIDS, and she had to hustle for herself and her siblings. She bought a newspaper to look for a job and found something. They called her for her details and told her to prepare for her travel. The day came when she left for Johannesburg. When she got there, she was told to do prostitution. She tried to refuse, but then she thought of her family and their need for money. So, she did it for her family, and after a while, she started to earn well and bought some nice clothes. Two years later, she started to feel sick, and so she went to a doctor. The doctor told her that she was HIV positive, and she needed to return home to be treated by her family. After one month, she died after confessing to her family what work she had been doing! —Digital story script, South Africa, 2016

This story was created at a digital storytelling workshop in 2016 by youth activist members of the group Leaders for Young Women’s Success (L4YWS) in rural South Africa. Their production was part of an ongoing Notes for this section can be found on page 16.

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transnational study called “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girlled ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa.”1 Led by McGill University in Canada and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa, the Networks for Change (as the project is popularly known) uses participatory visual methodology (PVM) to address sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) across fourteen rural and urban research sites in South Africa and Canada. A number of chapters in this volume analyze work from some of these sites. The participants’ narrative in the digital story cited above captures some of the complex social and structural difficulties faced by many girls and young women living in diverse societies, but perhaps most acutely by those living in rural and Indigenous communities. Quarraisha Abdool Karim and Cheryl Baxter (2016) conclude that compared to the general population in South Africa, girls and young women living in rural environments carry a far greater burden of poverty, gender discrimination, GBV, and disease, including higher rates of HIV infection. This phenomenon is not peculiar to South Africa. Despite the numerous protective international treaties in existence and the national and international laws that aim to support gender equity and address GBV, the phenomenon continues globally. Given these adverse circumstances, girls and young women, particularly those living in Indigenous, rural, and Global South communities, tend to be vulnerable to various forms of GBV. Consequently, university Research Ethics Boards (REB) and Research Ethics Committees (REC) are particularly stringent when researchers propose to work with these so-called vulnerable populations and often require the implementation of additional protective measures to reduce the risk of harm. While these measures are certainly necessary, they can discourage scholars from working with girls and young women and can hinder much-needed research. Consequently, as Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, and Relebohile Moletsane (2016) remind us, many of the circumstances that result in girls and young women being disproportionately susceptible to harm remain unaddressed and the cycle of marginality and vulnerability endures. However, as feminist scholars Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall have argued, because conceptualizations of girls and young women as vulnerable often ignore their agency and personhood, we need to resist reinforcing a notion of girlhood that has “congealed into a single sad story in which imperiled girls await rescue, with limited hope or success. In this 2

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story, girls appear in perpetual crisis and permanently vulnerable not only because of dire circumstances but also because of something intransigent and intrinsic to girlhood itself ” (2010: 667). Thus, there is an urgent need for research that strikes a balance between a recognition of the complex challenges faced by girls and young women in different contexts, and an acknowledgement of their voice and agency. Specifically, we need critical studies that can help us navigate the ethical challenges of working with girls and young women. These studies must focus on understanding their needs and be directly informed by this population’s perspectives. Contributions to this edited volume address how such work might be done safely and ethically. Internationally, there is consensus that research must involve working directly with girls and young women as both producers of knowledge and agents of change in their own lives (Kirk and Garrow 2003; Oakley 1994). Girlhood studies is a growing area of interdisciplinary research and social action, in which researchers work with girls and young women to understand and address critical issues in their lives. The overarching aim of this field of study is not only to understand the problems; it is also to transform the long-standing and paternalistic assumption that girls and young women are passive, incompetent, and/or inherently vulnerable research subjects (Clark and Moss 2011). Accordingly, scholars working in girlhood studies seek to engage with girls and young women in meaningful ways, approaching them as knowers, key research partners, and leaders in social development (Kirk et al. 2010; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2008; Schratz and Walker 1995). As Claudia Mitchell argues, for research to enable girls’ participation and create opportunities for their voices to be heard, it must use “girlmethod” (2011: 51), a feminist methodology that involves research for girls, with girls, and about girls (see also Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2008). Such research, located in various social and academic contexts, often uses participatory approaches to involve girls in collaborative research that focuses on the issues that impact on their lives. PVM, which includes creative and arts-based methods such as drawing, photovoice, digital storytelling, collage, and cellphilms, has emerged as a valuable way of drawing on the knowledge and experiences of communities and research participants to inform and guide research processes and social change. PVM has become popular for engaging young people in research since the methodology is usually fun to use and can help subvert power imbalances that can arise between adult researchers and young participants (Carter and Ford 2012; 3

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Johnson et al. 2012; Mitchell and Sommer 2016). Internationally, scholars have shown how these arts-based approaches can help negotiate the terrain of challenging topics, including sexual violence and HIV infection, particularly in work that involves young people (Gubrium et al. 2016; Mitchell and Sommer 2016; Theron et al. 2011). By repositioning participants as co-researchers and challenging the unequal power relations that tend to arise between researchers and the communities with whom they work, this approach can contribute to the democratization and decolonization of research (Gubrium and Harper 2013; Mitchell et al. 2018). Despite the reported advantages of using this approach in research, ethical dilemmas do arise. Using PVM often raises ethical questions regarding the gaze, or, put differently, who has the right to look and who is looked at. The methodology can also present ethical issues regarding how image production and dissemination practices might be used to maintain hierarchal power-relationships, present normative constructions of truths as universal, vilify those who are less powerful in various spaces, and marginalize their knowledges, histories, and stories. As Shannon Walsh (2014) argues, this is particularly true when researchers apply a participatory visual approach uncritically. For example, in the pursuit of the aims of fostering more equitable research relationships and foregrounding the voices of our co-researcher participants, it is important that we carefully consider which visual methods, equipment, and software we use in our work. This will help to avoid recreating or reinforcing inequality and marginality. The technological affordances of digital methods are a central concern in a number of the chapters in this volume. For example, the ubiquity of the cellphone has led to digital media becoming more widely accessible and has encouraged PVM researchers to use digital methods in their work. While it is valuable for young people to learn digital media skills, the use of high-tech methods, especially in resource-poor settings, may exacerbate unequal power relations through the researcher’s ownership of these tools and their proficient digital media skills (MacEntee et al. 2016; Wang 2000). However, as several chapters in this volume illustrate, PVM does not always require the use of expensive or high-tech tools. Treffry-Goatley and colleagues (2016) have found that fundamental principles of participatory visual research (PVR) are sometimes at odds with formal ethics processes. For example, in PVR, there is an overt emphasis on participant autonomy. Thus, participants are characteristically understood as co-researchers and co-owners of the visual work and knowl4

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edge generated in the project. However, as Rose Wiles et al. note, “the principle of respect for autonomy may present considerable difficulties for visual researchers in relation to confidentiality and anonymity” (2008: 6). For example, scholars cannot name participants or share their images without running into conflict with the protectionist discourse of formal research ethics. To address this, context-specific work that can help guide the ethical use of PVM with girls and young women is needed, particularly in research that involves rural and Indigenous communities. The chapters in this edited volume engage critically with the ethical dilemmas encountered by participatory visual researchers in their work with girls and young women and the strategies they employ to address them. Research with girls necessarily invokes a range of legal and ethical commitments (Mandrona 2016). However, while research on girlhood in various contexts is relatively abundant, work that focuses on the experiences of girls and young women in Indigenous and rural communities is limited. This book builds on a 2016 themed issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal titled “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood.” The issue focused on “the need for an ethics of girlhood studies.” The guest editor of this special issue, April Mandrona, raises pertinent questions in her introduction to the volume. She asks, “What are the unique features of a girlhood studies ethics? . . . How might the changing socio-political forms of girls’ lived experiences and the representation of these inform the meaning of constructs framed as being in the best interest of the (girl) child and in doing the most good and least harm?” (2016: 4, emphasis in original). Building on the concerns of this special issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, with the exception of one chapter that deals with young people in urban locations, our book considers ethical practice in participatory research with girls and young women at the intersection of rurality and Indigeneity and transnational girlhood. The chapters offer both practical and theoretical insights that can guide the ethical application of PVM in working with girls and young women in a variety of contexts.

Indigeneity, Rurality, and Transnationalism The chapters in this book focus on understanding and addressing the various issues facing girls and young women in communities and institutions. Seven contributions are framed around the three key concepts of 5

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Indigeneity, rurality, and transnational activism, and how they influence ethical practices and formal ethical processes involving PVM with girls and young women in various communities. The setting of the study in chapter 9 is urban, and the participants in it are young women and men. We explain this inclusion below. Indigeneity Experiences and understandings of what it means to be Indigenous vary widely. For example, in Canada, the word “Indigenous” is defined by identity and minority group membership and refers to three distinct groups: First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. Each of these cultures is informed by its historical relationships to specific geographical locations. In South Africa, the term is associated with the Black African majority and the Khoisan, who also have different cultural heritages. Nevertheless, despite the complex and diverse nature of Indigeneity, there are overarching issues that affect Indigenous people and communities, including representation, identity, self-determination, sovereignty, and cultural and linguistic autonomy. Indigenous people are also connected by practices of solidarity, ongoing struggles against colonial and imperial forces, and designations such as the “Fourth World” (Hall 2003). In particular, as Indigenous scholar Sandrina de Finney argues, unlike “the individualized, empowered postfeminist liberal girl” (2015: 169) that dominates girlhood studies literature, girls in Indigenous communities tend to focus on their communal and cultural relationships. With this focus, their efforts are geared toward tackling pertinent issues in their lives and the realities of people in their communities. Citing the work of Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler (2014), de Finney argues that girlhood scholars tend to ignore or, at best, pathologize Indigenous girls’ desire for a different kind of girlhood. Thus, according to her, “the omission of Indigenous girls from girlhood studies creates critical gaps in our conceptualizations of girls’ agency, materiality and political and cultural desires, while excluding Indigenous girls themselves from contributing to a vibrant scholarship of girl cultures” (2014: 169). Linked to this, as April Mandrona argues, scholarship that examines the “ethics of research into Indigenous girlhoods, self-governance, and responses to gender-based violence” is needed urgently. Such exploration will open up numerous possibilities for study, “including the ethics of recognition, truth-telling, and decolonization, as well as indigenization” (2016: 6). Thus, most of the contributions to this volume focus on Indigenous girlhood experiences and 6

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on understanding how visual researchers, in particular, use PVM to work safely and ethically with girls and young women to understand pertinent issues in their lives. The rest of the chapters, which include non-Indigenous populations, illustrate how, in considering the ethics in our research, Indigenous and non-Indigenous issues are in conversation with one another. From this perspective, we believe that identity and corresponding marginalization are intersectional and complex, and that including multiple voices will enable us to better understand the ethical responsibilities of researchers working with girls and young women in various contexts. Rurality While urban areas are home to growing, often geographically scattered Indigenous populations, most Indigenous peoples still reside in rural territories. In particular, as the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports, the majority of the children (age 0 to 19) in the world live in rural locales (UNICEF 2017). Girls and young women from such rural communities tend to be vulnerable to GBV generally and sexual violence in particular. For example, in a World Health Organization (WHO) survey, Andrew Morrison, Mary Ellsberg, and Sarah Bott report that in “rural areas, the lifetime prevalence rates for physical violence range from 33.8 percent (Brazil and Thailand) to 61 percent (Peru). For sexual violence by an intimate partner, the rates vary from a low of 6.1 percent in urban Japan to a high of 58.6 percent in rural Ethiopia” (2007: 26). These high rates of violence are a function of the unequal gender norms that govern relationships between men and women and boys and girls and often lead to discrimination and violence against girls and women in rural communities (Amnesty International Canada 2004; Moletsane 2011; Treffry-Goatley et al. 2017). Compounding these challenges are specific environmental, socio-cultural, and economic forces (see Corbett 2007). For example, in their toolkit, “Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence,” the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN) and Women’s Earth Alliance argue that environmental violence disproportionately impacts the lives of Indigenous populations, particularly girls and women. Linking environmental violence to GBV, particularly sexual violence against girls and women, they argue: For Indigenous communities in North America, the links between land and body create a powerful intersection—one that, when overlooked or discounted, can threaten their very existence. Extractive industries have drilled, mined, and 7

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fracked on lands on or near resource-rich Indigenous territories for decades. Although the economic gains have been a boon to transnational corporations and the U.S. and Canadian economies, they come at a high cost to Indigenous communities, particularly women and young people. (2016: 2)

Such violence is not unique to North America. For example, femicide in Mexico and El Salvador is concentrated in the borderlands; and GBV against Black African girls is endemic in rural South Africa and can be linked to such environmental violence. Other challenges experienced by rural girls and young women include reduced access to services, educational opportunities, physical infrastructure, and technology (for example, connected mobile devices), and damaging unequal gender norms and practices (UNICEF 2017). Our focus on rurality and Indigeneity stems from our interest in safely and ethically engaging with the most marginalized girls and young women so as to understand and address the various forms of marginalization they face, and the violence that is so often associated therewith. However, as Andrew Isserman suggests, the “separation of territory into town or country, urban or rural, leads us to define rural simply as homogeneous with respect to not being urban” (2005: 465–466, emphasis in original). In addressing this presumed binary, scholarship on rurality recognizes that there are ways in which rural and urban are not dichotomous, but are deeply connected and mutually informing. In South Africa, for example, rural and urban spaces are intertwined through the migration of people who carry traces of the places they encounter, and rural lives are fluid and represent multimodal connections across geography (Neves and Du Toit 2013). As seen in the work of Canadian filmmaker Amanda Strong, there is often a link between urban Indigenous people and their rural roots. Thus, while, for the most part, this book focuses on how girlhood scholars use PVM to ethically and meaningfully engage girls and young women in rural and Indigenous contexts in the research process, the chapter by Hayley R. Crooks reports on work located in an urban setting. In including this chapter, the book attempts to disrupt the prevalent conceptualization of rural and urban as dichotomous, and to illustrate how researchers might use PVM to work ethically with girls and young women to examine their experiences of GBV in an urban environment. Transnationalism Growing transnational networks of Indigenous activism and cultural production (and international pan-Indigenous movements) exist that inter8

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rogate Indigenous structures and rhetoric through the use of visual media and narratives (Córdova and Salazar 2008). For example, the notion of “transrurality” (Mandrona and Mitchell 2018: 8) describes how rural places, although distinct, are also interconnected spaces through the widespread impact of globalization on cultures and spaces throughout the world. The notion of transnationalism brings focus to cross-boundary political, geographic, and relational spaces; emphasizes the agency of other actors besides state powers; and highlights direct linkages across international borders that allow for the flow of people, ideas, and creative practice (Ashutosh 2008; Blunt 2007; Featherstone et al. 2007). In this collection, we are interested in breaking down traditional boundaries in research to embark on a transgressive process of scholarly dialogue and inquiry that positions girls and young women at the center of a transnational girlhood movement. Although commonly understood to refer to physical movement across national boundaries, as Catherine Vanner states, transnationalism “also encompasses communication and cultural transfer across nation-states . . . A transnational person, action, or idea is connected to various nation-states and contributes to all these spaces, highlighting an experience of mobility across states while recognizing the ongoing power of national borders” (2019: 116). Informed by Vanner’s review of scholarship on transnational feminisms, this book disrupts the narrative of girls’ universalized experiences around the globe. It seeks to “prioritize the voices of traditionally marginalized [girls and] women from [rural and Indigenous communities in] a critical counter-hegemonic call for global systemic change” (Vanner 2019: 117). In so doing, the chapters highlight the local experiences of girls revealed through the use of PVM, and the ethical dilemmas and solutions associated with using this methodology. The book also allows for a complex mapping of studies that use PVM to understand and address such issues as GBV and sexual violence across national and disciplinary borders. This mapping exercise builds on the pioneering work of girlhood scholars Jackie Kirk, Claudia Mitchell, and Jaqueline Reid-Walsh, who, inspired by feminist mapping, aim to identify and analyze potential points of “convergence among those studying girlhood . . . to discover what we can learn/lose by crossing disciplinary borders” (2010: 15). Through what we now think of as transnational feminist mapping, we aim to better understand girls and girlhood in national, transnational, and international contexts and learn more about the ethical use of PVM to address social issues affecting girls and young women in differing contexts. 9

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This book contributes to the field of girlhood studies by sustaining dialogue about girlhood in a variety of spaces, including Indigenous, rural, and urban communities, and building a “discourse community that does not ‘cut up’ girls’ lives, but seeks to establish an ‘imagined community’ among scholars, practitioners and activities” (Kirk et al. 2010: 15). This discourse community not only analyzes the ethical dilemmas that emerge when we use PVM with girls and young women but is also in dialogue about the strategies that work to address them. By highlighting the experiences of young people and the ethical dilemmas that emerge from using PVM, we aim to challenge the essentializing discourses that speak for them, particularly for girls and young women (Vanner 2019). In addition, by adopting a transnational feminist perspective in the chapters of this book, we seek to underscore the importance of analyzing the varied local experiences of engaging young people ethically in PVR and linking these to global experiences and structures of power. In her introduction to the first book in the Transnational Girlhoods series, of which this book is the second volume, Ann Smith suggests that while in a literal sense transnationalism “has to do with how borders between Nation States are becoming less rigid and more porous rather than impermeable,” the term can also function as “a way of describing a weakening of cultural and other ethnic imperatives” (2019: 1). Through an analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions: A Novel (1988), Smith explores how the protagonist, Tambu, can move across the border between the mission where she goes to school, a space constructed by English colonialism, and her rural village home. Smith believes that “[f ]or Tambu these borders between what is acceptable in England and Africa and what is unacceptable are permeable; she accommodates the differences” (Smith 2019: 3). In Smith’s analysis of the transnational girl in Nervous Conditions, there are two borders or boundaries that are at various times, in various spaces, and for various people either permeable or impermeable. These are the border between the former colonial power and the post-colonial context, and that between the urban and the rural. The girls and young women who appear in the chapters in this volume cross similar literal and figurative borders. As an exercise in engaging with the core concepts of this volume— Indigeneity, rurality and transnationalism—our aim in bringing together these chapters is to contribute to a deeper understanding of these concepts themselves, and the nuanced relationship between them as they 10

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are and can be applied in our work. The diverse, sometimes seemingly contradictory understandings and experiences of Indigeneity and rurality across geography, space and place highlight the need to explore these understandings and experiences from a transnational perspective. As illustrated by the chapters in this volume, exploring the opportunities for “communication and cultural transfer” (Vanner 2019: 116) offered by the crossing of boundaries both transnational and between the Indigenous and the rural as identities, and as political, geographic, and relational spaces, provides insight into how we can ethically engage in research and activism with girls and young women, particularly in contexts of marginality. As part of the Transnational Girlhood series, this book showcases reflective writing from various cultural and geographic contexts in which interdisciplinary scholars offer practical and theoretical discussions of how they work ethically with young people. The book offers concrete case studies and examples that might contribute to making the use of PVM safer and more ethical.

Introducing the Chapters in This Volume This edited book presents contributions from participatory visual researchers whose work, in the main, involves girls and young women (as discussed above, one chapter focuses on work that included boys and young men, while another focuses on work that included trans and non-binary youth). These groups are often marginalized and excluded from the research process. The chapters explore the ethics of using PVM with young people to address various social issues, including sexual violence, in communities. Reflecting on the principles of autonomy, social justice, and beneficence evoked through this work, the authors engage with the ethical dilemmas they face in using PVM in their research with marginalized groups. Some, though not all, of the chapters discuss work undertaken as part of the Networks for Change. As discussed above, this transnational and transdisciplinary project aims to use PVM to better understand sexual violence experiences from the perspectives of girls and young women toward fostering and supporting girl-led community and policy change. With a focus on working with Indigenous girls and young women in Canada, and girls and young women from rural communities in South Africa, the Networks for Change has generated research and facilitated community 11

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activism in diverse contexts. The work focuses on the central themes of this volume: ethical practice, Indigeneity, rurality, and transnationalism. This first three chapters in the book focus on the ethics of using PVM in work with girls in a variety of rural contexts. In chapter 1, “Going Public? Decolonizing Research Ethics with Girls and Young Women,” Naydene de Lange uses examples from her participatory visual work with girls and young women in South Africa to explore two questions closely related to the ethics of such research: “Who is going public?” and “Who allows the going public?” Arguing that REC guidelines have not yet been transformed sufficiently to address the use of PVM and, linked to it, the issue of participants sharing their visual productions publicly, she makes a case for university RECs to rethink what counts as ethical practice in various forms of research, including PVR. In chapter 2, “Think/Film/Screen/Change: Negotiating Ethics with Rural New Brunswick Girls and Trans and Non-binary Youth,” Casey Burkholder focuses on the challenges involved in seeking ethical approval for a research project that aimed to create cellphilms with girls and young people from rural areas who are transgender and/or non-binary. Burkholder discusses how ethical practice was built into the conceptualization and design of the study, while acknowledging that it is difficult to claim ethical practice in research that takes place on unsurrendered and unceded Indigenous land, in this case, of the Wolastoqiyik peoples. She concludes that the opportunities provided by an online activist transnationalism are diminished by the local concerns of the young people themselves. This is particularly true of disseminating the cellphilms to audiences unfamiliar with the specificities of being a rural girl or a trans or non-binary young person in New Brunswick, Canada. In chapter 3, “Doing Ethical Research with Girls in a Transnational Project,” authors Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane draw on their experience of working with girls in rural South Africa. They reflect on how PVM can facilitate transnational connections between girls living in Canada and South Africa in a way that does not put them at risk of harm. They suggest that PVM can offer traditionally marginalized participants, including girls from Indigenous and rural communities, opportunities to engage directly in research and produce visual media about their localized experiences. However, the production of these visual texts and their potentially widespread public consumption may give rise to new ethical issues, particularly in contexts of presumed vulnerability and systemic marginalization. 12

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The next three chapters focus explicitly on Indigeneity and explore the ethical dilemmas occasioned in working with rural and Indigenous girls and young women. In chapter 4, Anna Chadwick engages with the ethical and theoretical foundations of researching and “re-searching” (de Finney et al. 2018: 31) in a project conducted with Indigenous girls in northern Canada about sexualized violence. In “Alternative Imaginings: Re-searching Sexualized Violence with Rural Indigenous Girls,” she reflects on work using arts- and land-based workshops with Indigenous girls and the ethical dilemmas she encountered as a racialized diasporic researcher in a settler colonial country. In chapter 5, “Cellphilming and Consent: Young Indigenous Women Researching Gender-Based Violence,” the Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia with Katie MacEntee, Jennifer Altenberg, Sarah Flicker, and KariDawn Wuttunee analyze how consent was negotiated during a project that used cellphilm as method to explore young Indigenous women’s perceptions of and responses to GBV in Saskatoon, Canada, and how they sought to promote choice regarding anonymity and recognition. Of particular interest in the chapter is that the findings are explored in conversation with Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans 2014 (CIHR et al. 2014). The authors draw attention to the importance of ethical conduct for research with youth and Indigenous communities, as well as best practices gleaned from the academic literature on the ethics of PVM. They conclude that in order to develop a more ethical practice in PVM, it is essential to allow young women and their guardians to negotiate the terms of their involvement in research and to strategize accordingly. In chapter 6, “Reflecting Critically on Ethics in Research with Black South African Girls,” Tamlynn Jeffries and Sadiyya Haffejee reflect on the ethical challenges that arose in relation to the dissemination of their findings in a study that employed participatory visual techniques with Black adolescent girls living in a rural area in South Africa. They argue that the research processes in studies that employ PVM pose a challenge to RECs and draw attention to the need to reevaluate policies to incorporate its principles. They suggest strategies for addressing ethical challenges inherent in working with PVM, including prioritizing girls’ voices in dissemination and social change agendas, and negotiating anonymity with girls while still foregrounding their voices. In chapter 7, “Using Photovoice for Ethical Research with Teenage Mothers in Kenya,” Milka Nyariro takes up the tensions between the re13

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quirements of REBs in a Canadian institution and the ethical imperatives of participatory research in Kenya. She reflects on how she negotiated ethical tensions in a photovoice project with young mothers in Kenya. She argues that REBs should take into account the contextual variance between individual projects and acknowledge that ethical practice in research is not a stable, linear, or static process but a series of ongoing negotiations, reflections, interpretations, and experimentations. In chapter 8, Jennifer A. Thompson turns our attention to the complexities of language and power in PVR in multilingual contexts. Drawing on her work using photovoice and participatory video with girls and young women in Southwest Cameroon, Thompson explores power relations between researcher and participant through a focus on the politics of language. Titled, “‘Yu Ai Tron!’ (Your Eye Is Strong!): Gender, Language, and Ethics in Cameroon,” the chapter concludes that while language is critical to the dialogue that PVM seeks to stimulate, little research has been done that investigates the ethical and methodological implications of language in this kind of research. For Thompson, language offers a way of exploring the complicated enactments of power in PVM. In chapter 9, “Participatory Video as Method: Ethical Conundrums of Researching Cyberviolence Targeting Girls and Young Women,” Hayley R. Crooks reflects on the ethical issues that arose in a series of participatory video workshops with young people living in Montreal, Canada. The workshops focused on understanding and addressing cyberviolence in their lives. For Crooks, this collaborative filmmaking project explored understandings of cyberviolence and the strategies her participants used to address it. Crooks draws attention to the serious impact that this transnational form of GBV has on girls and young people living in an urban community in Canada. While the chapter does not focus on either rurality or Indigeneity, and her research includes boys and young men, it provides a unique focus on the pertinent issue of cyberviolence, a pervasive form of GBV that affects girls and young women living in diverse transnational contexts. Linked to this, focusing on GBV in online spaces, as the chapter does, further blurs the boundaries between rural and urban. While there are real historical inequities between spaces designated as rural and urban that continue to negatively affect the lives of girls and young women in these spaces differently, some of the issues transcend geographical context. Concluding the book is a Coda that reflects back on what motivated us to edit a volume of this nature, including the ethical issues participatory visual researchers often encounter and the strategies they adopt to address 14

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them. In the Coda, we also project forward, and in so doing, invite researchers to think seriously about the ethics of doing participatory visual research with girls and young women (and other young people) in rural and Indigenous (and other marginalized) communities.

Conclusion: Toward a New Ethics in Transnational Girlhood Studies? The contributions in this edited volume offer a fresh perspective on how PVM can be used ethically in research with girls and young women and how these participants might become transnational girlhood activists. The chapters aim to challenge the exclusion of girls and young women from research, particularly those living in rural and Indigenous communities, and to interrogate the uncritical use of PVM in research with this population. These contributions highlight how girlhood scholars might safely and ethically engage with the most marginalized girls and young women to understand and address pertinent issues, including GBV, from the perspectives of those who experience them. Our recognition of the intersection of Indigeneity, rurality, and transnational childhood generally, and girlhood in particular, requires the development of new understandings of the ethical complexities involved in each of these areas. To do this, the chapters (with the exception of one which reports on a study undertaken in an urban context and includes boys and young men) engage with the ethical dilemmas encountered by participatory visual researchers in their work with girls and young women in a variety of rural and Indigenous contexts. Through this edited volume, we aim to contribute to the development of a discourse community that not only takes seriously an approach to transnational girlhood studies that is responsive to local environments, cultures, and experiences, but also seeks to use PVM ethically to address the marginalization of women and girls across the world.

Relebohile Moletsane is Professor and the J. L. Dube Chair in Rural Education in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal with research interests in poverty alleviation, HIV, gender inequality, and GBV as barriers to education and development. She is co-PI with Claudia Mitchell, of an IPaSS grant: “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Approaches to Addressing Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa.” 15

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Astrid Treffry-Goatley is a South African researcher based at the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her areas of interest include gender and health, girlhood studies, film studies, and ethnomusicology. She has extensive experience using participatory methods to understand and address key health challenges, including HIV-drug adherence, healthcare systems, and gender-based violence. Lisa Wiebesiek is the Research Manager of the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her current work focuses on using participatory visual methodology to work with girls and young women to better understand and address gender-based violence in rural communities. April Mandrona is the Director of Art Education at NSCAD University. She received a PhD in Art Education from Concordia University and was an SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Mandrona’s current SSHRC-funded research supports children with refugee experience in making picture books that reflect their perspectives and creativity.

Note   1. This partnership project (2014–2020) is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada (grant number: 895-2013-3007), and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in South Africa (grant number: 107777-001) through the International Partnerships for Sustainable Societies (IPaSS) joint initiative. Four of the chapters in this volume discuss work undertaken as part of the “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” project. All of the authors of these chapters gratefully acknowledge the funding that made their work with Indigenous and rural girls and young women possible.

References Abdool Karim, Quarraisha, and Cheryl Baxter. 2016. “The Dual Burden of Gender-based Violence and HIV in Adolescent Girls and Young Women in South Africa.” South African Medical Journal 106(12): 1151–1153. https:// doi.org/10.7196/SAMJ.2016.v106.i12.12126. Amnesty International Canada. 2004. Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada. Ottawa: Amnesty International. Ashutosh, Ishan. 2008. “(Re-)creating the Community: South Asian Transnationalism on Chicago’s Devon Avenue.” Urban Geography 29(3): 224–245. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.29.3.224. 16

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Blunt, Alison. 2007. “Cultural Geographies of Migration: Mobility, Transnationality and Diaspora.” Progress in Human Geography 31(5): 684–694. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0309132507078945. Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). 2014. “Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans.” Retrieved 11 September 2018 from http://www.pre.ethics.gc.ca/pdf/eng/tcps2-2014/ TCPS_2_FINAL_Web.pdf. Carter, Bernie, and Karen Ford. 2012. “Researching Children’s Health Experiences: The Place for Participatory, Child-Centered, Arts-Based Approaches.” Research in Nursing and Health 36(1): 95–107. https://doi.org/10.1002/nur .21517. Clark, Alison, and Peter Moss. 2011. Listening to Young Children: The Mosaic Approach, 2nd ed. London: National Children’s Bureau. Corbett, Michael. 2007. Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community. Black Point, NS: Fernwood Press. Córdova, Amalia, and Juan Francisco Salazar. 2008. “Imperfect Media and the Poetics of Indigenous Video in Latin America.” In Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics, ed. Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, 39–57. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 1988. Nervous Conditions: A Novel. London: The Women’s Press. de Finney, Sandrina. 2015. “Playing Indian and Other Settler Stories: Disrupting Western Narratives of Indigenous Girlhood.” Continuum 29(2): 169–181. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022940. de Finney, Sandrina, Shantelle Moreno, Anna Chadwick, Chantal Adams, ShezellRae Sam, Angela Scott, and Nicole Land. 2018. “Sisters Rising: Shape Shifting Settler Violence through Art and Land Retellings.” In Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane, 21–46. Boston: Brill Sense. Featherstone, David, Richard Phillips, and Johanna Waters. 2007. “Introduction: Spatialities of Transnational Networks.” Global Networks 7(4): 383–391. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2007.00175.x. Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. 2010. “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance.” Feminist Studies 36(3): 667–690. Gubrium, Aline, Alice Fiddian-Green, Kasey Jernigan, and Elizabeth Krause. 2016. “Bodies as Evidence: Mapping New Terrain for Teenage Pregnancy and Parenting.” Global Public Health 11(5–6): 618–635. https://doi.org/10.1080 /17441692.2016.1143522. 17

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Gubrium, Aline, and Krista Harper. 2013. Participatory Visual and Digital Methods. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Hall, Anthony. 2003. “The American Empire and the Fourth World: The Bowl with One Spoon.” McGill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series 34. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Isserman, Andrew. 2005. “In the National Interest: Defining Rural and Urban Correctly in Research and Public Policy.” International Regional Science Review 28(4): 465–499. https://doi.org/10.1177/0160017605279000. Johnson, Ginger, Anne Pfister, and Cecilia Vindrola-Padros. 2012. “Drawings, Photos, and Performances: Using Visual Methods with Children.” Visual Anthropology Review 28(2): 164–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-458.2012 .01122. Kirk, Jackie, Claudia Mitchell, and Jaqueline Reid-Walsh. 2010. “Toward Political Agency for Girls: Mapping the Discourses of Girlhood Globally.” In Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vascolles, 14–30. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kirk, Jackie, and Stephanie Garrow. 2003. “‘Girls in Policy’: Challenges for the Education Sector.” Agenda 56: 4–15. https://doi.10.1080/10130950.2003 .9676016. MacEntee, Katie, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas. 2016. What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Mandrona, April. 2016. “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9(3): 3–9. https://doi:10.3167/ghs .2016.090302. Mandrona, April, and Claudia Mitchell. 2018. “Visual Encounters and Rural Childhoods: An Introduction.” In Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods, ed. April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell, 1–18. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Mitchell, Claudia. 2011. “What’s Participation Got to Do with It? Visual Methodologies in ‘Girl-Method’ to Address Gender-Based Violence in the Time of AIDS.” Global Studies of Childhood 1(1): 51–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/ gsch.2011.1.1.51. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jaqueline Reid-Walsh. 2008. “Girl Method: Placing Girl-Centred Research Methodologies on the Map of Girlhood Studies.” In Roadblocks to Equality: Women Challenging Boundaries, ed. Jeffrey Klaehn, 51–59. Montreal, QC: Black Rose Books. Mitchell, Claudia, and Carrie Rentschler, eds. 2016. Girlhood and the Politics of Place. New York: Berghahn Books. Mitchell, Claudia, and Marni Sommer. 2016. “Participatory Visual Methodologies in Global Public Health.” Global Public Health 11(5–6): 521–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2016.1170184. 18

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Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2018. “Addressing Sexual Violence in South Africa: ‘Gender activism in the making.’” In What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Contemporary Africa, ed. Elina Oinas, Henry Onodera, and Leena Suurpaa, 317–336. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV. Moletsane, Relebohile. 2011. “Culture, Nostalgia, and Sexuality Education in the Age of AIDS in South Africa.” In Memory and Pedagogy, ed. Claudia Mitchell, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, and Susann Allnutt, 193–298. New York: Routledge. Morrison, Andrew, Mary Ellsberg, and Sarah Bott. 2007. “Addressing GenderBased Violence: A Critical Review of Interventions.” The World Bank Research Observer 22(1): 25–51. https://doi: 10.1093/wbro/lkm003. Neves, David, and Andries Du Toit. 2013. “Rural Livelihoods in South Africa: Complexity, Vulnerability and Differentiation.” Journal of Agrarian Change 13(1): 93–115. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12009. Oakley, Ann. 1994. “Women and Children First and Last: Parallels and Differences between Children’s and Women’s Studies.” In Children’s Childhoods Observed and Experienced, ed. Berry Mayall, 13–32. London: Falmer Press. Schratz, Michael, and Rob Walker. 1995. Research as Social Change: New Opportunities for Qualitative Research. London: Routledge. Smith, Ann. 2019. “The Transnational Girl in the Text: Transnationalism Redefined?” In The Girl in the Text, ed. Ann Smith, 1–12. New York: Berghahn. The Native Youth Sexual Health Network and Women’s Earth Alliance. 2016. “Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence.” Native Youth Sexual Health Network and Women’s Earth Alliance. Retrieved 27 January 2020 from http://land bodydefense.org/uploads/files/VLVBReportToolkit2016.pdf. Theron, Linda, Jean Stuart, and Claudia Mitchell. 2011. “A Positive, African Ethical Approach to Collecting and Interpreting Drawings: Some Considerations.” In Picturing Research: Drawing as Visual Methodology, ed. Linda Theron, Claudia Mitchell, Ann Smith, and Jean Stuart, 49–62. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Treffry-Goatley, Astrid, Lisa Wiebesiek and Relebohile Moletsane. 2016. “Ethics of Community Based Participatory Research in Rural South Africa: Gender Violence through the Eyes of Girls.” LEARNing Landscapes 10(1): 341–361. https://doi.org/10.36510/learnland.v10i1. Treffry-Goatley, Astrid, Lisa Wiebesiek, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. “Technologies of Nonviolence: Ethical Participatory Visual Research with Girls.” Girlhood Studies 10(2): 45–61. https://doi.org/10.3167/ ghs.2017.100205. UNICEF. 2017. Annual Results Report 2017: Gender Equity. New York: UNICEF. Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” 19

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Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–132. https://doi.org/ 10.3167/ghs.2019.120209. Walsh, Shannon. 2014. “Critiquing the Politics of Participatory Video and the Dangerous Romance of Liberalism.” AREA Royal Geographic Society 48(4): 405–411. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12104. Wang, Caroline. 2000. “The Future of Health Promotion: Talkin’ Technology Blues.” Health Promotion Practice 1(1): 77–80. Wiles, Rose, Jon Prosser, Anna Bagnoli, Andrew Clark, Katherine Davies, Sally Holland, and Emma Renold. 2008. “Visual Ethics: Ethical Issues in Visual Research, National Centre for Research Methods paper.” Retrieved 22 January 2020 from http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/421/.

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Going Public?

Decolonizing Research Ethics with Girls and Young Women Naydene de Lange

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that researchers should reposition “those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators” (2017: n.p.) in the research. Participatory visual researchers from different countries around the world doing transnational research with marginalized groups of people in different cultural and ethnic contexts have been contributing to such a repositioning through close scrutiny of, and sensitivity to, the underlying ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological philosophical underpinnings and practice of participatory visual research (PVR). In this way, they endeavor to work with participants in co-producing knowledge, co-analyzing the knowledge produced, and co-presenting the findings emanating from their participants’ own insider knowledge not only to other researchers but also to policymakers and members of the participants’ own communities. In these ways, participatory visual researchers allow for dialogue that deepens the understanding of the issue under study and enables action for social change. In collaborating with research teams made up of scholars from South Africa as well as countries such as Canada and Sweden in the Global North, I have come a long way in persuading our university Notes for this section can be found on page 40.

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ethics committees to allow me (as they see it) to do PVR even as I resist the dehumanizing of knowledge and rebel against the taken-for-granted principles of Western ethics. I have explained to our university Research Ethics Committees (REC) how ensuring confidentiality and anonymity acts as an effacing of co-researcher participants who want to have their stories heard because they want to make sure that the issues under study in their communities are addressed. While, following Claudia Mitchell (2011), I tread carefully to ensure that I do the most good and the least harm to the participants, a further ethical challenge arises when the participants—girls and young women who are the owners and co-producers of the knowledge—want to represent themselves and share this knowledge publicly, whether at a scholarly conference or in the community. In this chapter, therefore, I ask, “Who is going public?” and “Who allows this going public?” It is at this going public juncture that a narrow understanding of ethical practices, in drawing on constructs such as anonymity and confidentiality, places boundaries around the public and, possibly, the transnational sharing of their work by participants across actual national borders as well as in what Ann Smith calls a transnational “cultural border-crossing” (2019: 10, emphasis added) between, for example, the rural and the urban. A serendipitous move from one university to another in South Africa and meeting two scholars, one from Canada and one from South Africa,1 several years ago challenged my conception of social science research as I explored, with them, what was then seen as a new methodology in the field of education research. The Canadian scholar, Claudia Mitchell, experienced in using participatory visual methodology (PVM) in the Global North, introduced us South Africans, Relebohile Moletsane and me, to it. We were doing research in KwaZulu-Natal, a province in which HIV, AIDS, and gender-based violence (GBV) affected the population, particularly Indigenous girls and women, severely, and we tried out various participatory visual methods, including drawing, photovoice, and participatory video, with the teachers and learners from schools and with healthcare workers from a healthcare clinic in a rural community. The purpose was to produce knowledge (as researchers do) but also to address issues related to HIV-infection, AIDS, and GBV with the co-researcher participants (as activist researchers with a focus on social justice and social change do). After more than a decade of working together and refining our understanding of how PVR in a critical and transformative paradigm works, we have been sensitized to various ethical issues in doing so and also to the issue of who is permitted to go public when we are working in a transformative and critical paradigm. 22

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In this chapter, I explore the ethical challenges of going public in two ways—by using examples from our participatory visual work with groups of Indigenous girls in South Africa and discussing the need to rethink ethics in the social sciences in relation to such research on the one hand, and locating all this within a framework of the relationship between the political activity of decolonizing research (with all its cultural transnational implications) and PVM, on the other. I hope to provide some answers even as I provoke further discussion.

Going Public: What Does This Mean? What does it mean to go public in the social science research community? More importantly for this chapter, what does it mean in the context of PVR within a critical and transformative paradigm? Elizabeth Miller, Edward Little, and Steven High (2018), in their recent work Going Public, The Art of Participatory Practice, reiterate the importance of going beyond production (knowledge and artifacts) and making public the knowledge and artifacts co-created with participants, thus engaging actively with the public in dialogue that will (or might) lead to action in addressing urgent social issues. For us, going public occurs through various modes and is addressed to various audiences in various contexts; it takes the form of conference presentations, academic journal articles, books, chapters in books, popular publications, exhibitions, videos and cellphilms, dialogues with stakeholders, and so on at home in South Africa and abroad. In an era of social media, going public also means using platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and any other similarly available platforms, all of which span the globe. This, however, brings to the fore the issue of whose voice is to be heard. My overarching question is, therefore: “How might a decolonizing framework inform the ethics of going public with participatory visual work with Indigenous girls and young women nationally, internationally, and transnationally?”

Decolonizing Research through a Critical and Transformative Paradigm The purpose of social science research is a contentious issue, with some scholars arguing that it is only to produce sound knowledge. These scholars dismiss any other purpose of research as being outside the domain 23

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of a social scientist’s work. In this chapter, I refer to research, in particular social science research, whose purpose, following The Belmont Report (1979), a US set of guidelines, is to produce sound knowledge and, simultaneously, with PVR, to bring about social justice. For Norma Romm, the central concern of social science research should be “to strengthen conversations and actions geared to justice” (2018: 374) that will lead to “justice-oriented transformation” (2018: 402) in society. The philosophical imperatives of critical and transformative research underlie social science research that seeks to “make a difference” (De Lange 2012: S6) not only in society in general but in the lives of the co-researcher participants. The current debates in several countries about decolonization and, in particular, those in South Africa, where I live and work, are of paramount importance in their trying to unravel what decolonization of the mind, the university, as well as the curriculum, knowledge, and research actually means in practice (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017). Michalinos Zembylas (2018) argues that decolonization (of, in this instance, research) should be seen as a wider ethical and transnational political project that concerns not only universities but societies around the globe, including groups often marginalized, othered, and/or ignored such as those made up of Indigenous girls and young women. Although I (with my two colleagues) have been engaging in PVR for a long time, since before the enhanced consciousness about decolonization set in South Africa, I had, quite simply, positioned my work with South African Indigenous girls outside of a positivist paradigm given my realization that my research could be more generative when I was not focused on merely producing sound knowledge of the so-called Other (read Black), but was focused, rather, on research with the these traditionally othered girls that had the potential to change that which was unjust. Romm, citing Kenneth Gergen (2015), refers to his analogy of research as either “watching” or “shaping” (2018: 314). When we, as researchers, watch the othered we write about them, but when we do research with each other we might shape their world and ours and, in a transnational exchange, together change that which is unjust. This analogy helps to explain why research and research methodology should be decolonized and how this might happen. When the research canon, the general rule by which research is judged, requires and favors research approaches that are informed by a positivist ontology and epistemology, research becomes watching the othered through the use of positivist methodologies and positioning the othered as the object of study—those who will provide the data that will 24

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answer the research question. However, when researchers move beyond a positivist ontology and epistemology and use research approaches that are informed by a critical transformative ontology and epistemology, research becomes a culturally transnational shaping of each other through the use of participatory methodologies, such as PVM in this case. This positions the participants as co-researchers, as experts in their own life worlds, and as those who know what is needed to leverage change. Such research, as Bagele Chilisa explains, “go[es] beyond Euro-Western research issues of power that mainly focus on the ‘I’ (the researcher) and the ‘you’ (the researched) to more involving I/we relationships that see reality differently” (2009: 420) and has the researchers working together with the participants toward social justice and a more caring society. This, clearly, has value in a decolonizing research debate but also has implications for ethics since “ethics and epistemology are seen as inextricably connected” as Francis Akena (2018: viii) makes clear. NdlovuGatsheni (2017) argues that repositioning “those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators” in the research, could undo research’s “dirty history” (2017: n.p.), thus respecting and valuing them. The title of Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane’s (2018) edited book Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speaking Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence refers to participants—Indigenous girls and young women—going public to disrupt the shameful legacies that cause them so much pain by speaking back. They are indeed best positioned to do so. Achille Mbembe reminds us that such repositioning should not be a “compensatory project, but an epistemological project, with philosophical depth.” He argues that “decolonisation is humanisation of knowledge” that enables a deeper understanding of the experiences of the othered since sharing experiences enable empathy and healing. In this way, research could become an ethical project, undoing the “dirty history” (2016: n.p.) of research and, I would add, a transnationally significant project in this regard.

Participatory Visual Research Participatory visual researchers have been contributing to the project of decolonizing research through the repositioning of “those who have been [the] objects of research” to whom Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2017: n.p.) refers. I have, in our research projects, communicated findings not only in ac25

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ademic journals and books, and at conferences, but I have also enabled co-researcher participants to communicate their work to relevant communities and policymakers. For example, I enabled “Girls Leading Change,”2 a group of fourteen young women who were teacher education students, to talk about their work on sexual violence encountered at university to various university policymakers (De Lange et al. 2015). I have used PVM to produce sound knowledge as well to open up spaces for dialogue aimed at developing a more nuanced understanding of the issues under study and helping to ensure social justice. Part of this has been facing the challenge of having participants, the co-producers and owners of the knowledge, go public themselves and share the knowledge they produced. It is here that ethical dilemmas emerge; committees steeped in an ethics of research as watching, as I have already explained, are unwilling to face such a possibility, never mind see its value. The conceptual framework (see Figure 1.1) shows how PVR located in a critical and transformative paradigm intersects with research that is decolonizing and transnational as it opens up the possibility for the participants themselves to co-create knowledge and also to go public with it in various contexts. It is, however,

     
  









   
 
  
 
  
 



Figure 1.1. Ethics at the intersection. Created by Naydene de Lange. 26

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at the intersection of the three constructs that ethical issues for the university ethics committees emerge.

Ethics Social scientists in most countries, and, of course, also in South Africa given its white British colonial roots, are mandated to uphold research ethics as stipulated in The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research (1979), which draws on a biomedical framework. The Belmont Report has been the ethics guideline for four decades without any changes having been made to it. However, there is growing “dissatisfaction with [the] predetermined codes and frameworks designed for [positivist] epistemological and methodological contexts” (Clark 2013: 15) that do not take into account other criteria for judging the ethicality of research. Romm, a South African scholar, in her recent work Responsible Research Practice, Revisiting Transformative Paradigm in Social Research (2018) provides a valuable critique of The Belmont Report and offers a reconfiguring and reviewing of it that is more in line with research that has transformative and, therefore, more shaping, and, I would add, (in both its literal and cultural senses) transnational consequences. Paige Castro-Reyes et al. (2017) tell us that amendments to The Belmont Report principles are in the pipeline to accommodate community engagement research. While the changes are still to be made, it is a necessary adjustment that could enable a move beyond a biomedical framework with positivistic philosophical underpinnings toward a transformative paradigm that could create opportunities for revisiting ethics in PVR. As Andrew Clark points out, “ethical decision-making in [participatory] visual research should be considered with regard to epistemological approaches, specific research contexts, and in relation to researchers’ and participants’ own moral frameworks” (2013: 2). So, in the meantime, like other international scholars (Chilisa 2009; Mertens 2012a; L. Smith 2013), I continue writing about how I address ethical issues in research contexts such as working with Indigenous coresearcher participants in communities, and in PVR that is positioned in a critical and transformative paradigm. Having grappled with ethics in PVR, I have offered explanations to the RECs at universities to show how research in a different paradigm works differently, and how my work is ethical, although it does not fit into the straitjacket of the ethical guide27

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lines of The Belmont Report. Clark concurs that for his and his colleagues’ research, too, there was “a lack of familiarity among ethical review panels with regards to [participatory] methods and methodologies, the nature of the data they collect and analyze, and the inappropriateness of existing, normative ethical frameworks” (2013: 19). I realize that the epistemological framework used by ethics boards is not appropriate when the research with marginalized co-researcher participants takes on a shaping nature, or, in other words, when the research is located in a transnational critical and transformative paradigm, and is focused on contributing “to transforming social rifts and deep emotional/psychological wounds” (Akena 2018: vii) often caused by colonization. The Belmont Report is underpinned by three key principles—respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Mertens (2012a) and Romm (2018) try to reconfigure and reframe these principles in terms of critical and transformative research in an attempt to provide extended or alternative understandings of how social research can be responsibly and ethically exercised. To this I add reference to the importance of transnationalism in relation to girlhood.

Informed Consent Informed consent, as defined in The Belmont Report, means that the participant is informed about the research and consents (voluntarily) to being part of the research. The participant is further informed that she or he will provide information as requested and the researcher may use and analyze the data to generate findings, and then disseminate them to various academic audiences. What is problematic for Chilisa (2009) and for me, of course, is that while the participants might have consented to the researcher using their data, they are often unaware of the possibility that the researcher might represent them and their stories in ways that might not do them most good and might position them and their community in a culturally nationalistic and negative way, thus contributing to or perpetuating a deficit discourse about them and their community. We can see that consenting to the researcher’s representing the findings is not only potentially highly problematic, but we need to also understand that the meaning of consent differs across social, cultural, and relational contexts (Clark 2013). Perhaps these difficulties could be obviated if participants are given the opportunity to represent themselves within a transnational framework. 28

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In passing, I am reminded of Haidee Lefebvre’s (2018) analysis of media coverage of the drawings of Annie Pootoogook, an Inuit artist. Lefebvre points out that media coverage focused on the few drawings of sexual violence and hardly reported on the many drawings that depicted sexual happiness and fulfillment, thus choosing to skew the representation of Inuit women towards the deficit nationalist Canadian discourse that focuses on violence while neglecting the positive representation of sexual happiness experienced by Inuit women.

Anonymity and Confidentiality Researching ethically, according to The Belmont Report, requires anonymity of data; only the researcher knows or can identify which responses belong to which participants. Confidentiality of data requires that the knowledge-sharing of the participant cannot be traced back to her or him, but, as Clark indicates, “the questioning of often taken-for-granted practices such as anonymization and confidentiality also echoes reports of participants’ demands that their experiences and narratives are explicitly attributed to them and, potentially, offer some (albeit tentative) resistance to top-down institutionally imposed codes of ethics” (2013: 6). An example of such resistance is seen in Avivit Cherrington’s (2015) study “‘Research as Hope Intervention’: A Visual Participatory Study with Rural South African Primary School Children.” She writes, Both the traditional office, as well as St. Kizito’s3 board and staff, took a personal interest in my study, requesting that I acknowledge their support and participation as a sign of their commitment towards efforts of community-building. Therefore, my thesis features the true names and faces of the children, as well as the staff members, who engaged voluntarily in the research and waived their rights to confidentiality. (2015: 112)

In her study, located in a transformative paradigm, Cherrington made every effort to ensure that no harm was done, but also made sure, in negotiation with the co-researcher participants, the traditional council,4 the board, and the staff, that the truths the participants owned and wanted to share about hope, were made public in the community (by the participants themselves) and in her thesis. There are many ways participatory visual researchers have tried to work within the current ethical framework with its emphasis on anonymity such as pixelating the pictures to disguise the participants (thus evoking images of criminals and victimhood, both 29

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part of nationalistic discourses about Indigenous girls and women) or by using photographs in which people are not recognizable, but, as Clark states, it is often impossible, impractical, or even illogical to maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of individuals in artwork, photographs and film. Visual methods are often justified on the grounds that they can reveal information that text-based methods cannot . . . Consequently, altering visual material by “disguising” participants in order to preserve their anonymity and maintain confidentiality may destroy the very purpose of producing data visually. (2013: 21)

Furthermore, Clark argues that how researchers represent participants “needs to be considered in relation to questions of paternalism, empowerment and respect for participant voice” (2013: 7). It is therefore important that in my participatory visual work with Indigenous girls, I consider carefully with them how they can represent themselves and go public with their truths (and visual artifacts), in a way in which their voices are respected, heard, and listened to. I strive to have them contest, implicitly if not explicitly, the all too common African culturally nationalist belief that Black girls in South Africa should remain silent on the subject of sex, sexuality, and, therefore, GBV. This kind of transnationalism, I believe, leads (or should lead) to a way of looking differently at ethics in research.

Stories about Going Public In this section I draw on four examples from the “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” project (hereafter the Networks for Change) to make my point. After each example, I offer what I call a dialogue with self in which I reflect on transnationalism, decolonization, methodology, going public, and ethics. The idea of a dialogue with self comes from autoethnographic research, and I draw on Chris de Beer’s (2016a; 2016b) way of noting down insights into his own research process. I refer to PVR with two groups of young Indigenous Africans. One is made up of seven girls called “Young Girls Leading Change” from a secondary school in a rural area with whom we have been working for the past four years, and the other is a group of fourteen female teacher education students (Girls Leading Change mentioned above), all from rural areas, who attend the city university at which I work and with whom we have worked for the past six years. My colleagues and I have developed 30

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strong relationships with these girls and young women. With both groups I have produced cellphilms, made policy posters and action briefs, and have facilitated their using the sets of visual artifacts to initiate and carry out dialogue with school and community members in the first group and with university members and policymakers in the second. I acquired ethical clearance from the university REC to do PVR and clearance for the participants to disseminate their work. I also had permission from the Department of Basic Education and the secondary school authorities, written consent from the parents, assent from the school girls, permission from the university, and consent from the female teacher education students, all framed, adjusted, and explained so as to adhere to The Belmont Report ethics guidelines as best I could while pushing the boundaries to do research that is critical and transformative.

Where Are the Girls? In 2013 I embarked on piloting participatory visual methods in the Networks for Change project to address sexual violence at university working with Girls Leading Change to explore their understanding of sexual violence in the university context and to enable them to present their work to policymakers at the university in order to raise awareness, influence policy, and change how sexual violence was addressed. Seeing the growing confidence with which the young women presented their work, their growing conviction over time, how they responded to the questions posed to them by the policymakers, and the change their work was bringing about in themselves and in the university, made me feel that at last I had understood and worked out how to do critical and transformative research with cultural transnational significance. I saw the effect and consequences of PVR located in such a paradigm and the change it could bring about. It was with this realization and with what was innovative educational research in which the participants discussed their concerns about sexual violence at university with university policymakers who could change things at the university that I set off to an Interdisciplinary Social Science conference in Split, Croatia, to disseminate the findings and speak about the methodology. I presented a paper “Visual Participatory Methodology and Policy Dialogue: Girls Leading Change in Addressing Sexual Violence at a University in South Africa” (De Lange 2015) in which I showed our participatory visual work, argued for the importance of participants as 31

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co-researchers and experts in their lived experiences, and spoke about how our participatory work enabled the female teacher education students to present their work to various policymakers at university and to push for and see change. The presentation elicited animated and robust discussion, but then there was a question from a member of the audience: “Why then, are you presenting the work and where are the Girls Leading Change”? Dialogue with Self This unanticipated question made me think about two questions: “Who is going public?” and “Who allows the going public?” Even though I had acknowledged my two colleagues and all fourteen of the Girls Leading Change by name (with accompanying photographs) and felt pleased that I had represented expertly the participatory research with the participants, the question about where the Girls Leading Change were lingered and became explicitly linked to the issues of ethics, and to power—my power to use their knowledge and to go public at an international conference. I realized that I was still perpetuating a colonizing nationalistic research framework in talking about them and their work. How could I change tack, go the whole way, and get the Girls Leading Change to represent themselves and their work at conferences5 too? How could I work, as Catherine Vanner advocates, “to strengthen transnational girlhood . . . [by] connect[ing] girls from different localities and build[ing] from the experiences they choose to share”? How could I mobilize “with them to enact structural changes [to help] create a better world in which to be a girl”? (2019: 128).

Hearing the Girls’ Perspectives I invited two of the seven Indigenous girls (then in Grade 10) from Young Girls Leading Change in the Networks for Change project at a secondary school in a rural area to present their work at the international conference “Pathways to Resilience IV: Global South Perspectives” in Century City, Cape Town, in 2017. I asked them to present on their exploration of GBV in their own school community using cellphilms, and also to talk about the policy posters and action briefs they had made to put forward their ideas on addressing GBV in their school community, along with their demands. In preparation for the conference I worked with the two girls and agreed on what information should be presented on the PowerPoint, 32

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which cellphilms should be shown, and who would be saying and doing what. They, as co-researcher participants, were going public with their own work, with me, the researcher, playing only a small part in the presentation. They presented their visual data, spoke in English (their mother tongue is isiXhosa), and responded efficiently to the questions from the delighted audience. In reflecting on their presentation, they indicated that they felt good about sharing their co-created research, responding to the questions, mixing with and talking to the delegates, and that they had learned a lot. We solicited feedback from the audience using a paper pool technique, which required asking them to write comments on pieces of paper the girls handed out. One member of the audience wrote, “So brilliant to see the girls in this project and hear their perspectives from them.” Young Girls Leading Change had gone public at an international conference. Dialogue with Self Did I facilitate this opportunity for two participants in response to the question posed to me at the 2015 conference about why the Girls Leading Change were not presenting their own work? Was it an epistemic act, one that was in line with our chosen transformative and critical framework, or was it a compensatory act? Did this matter? The girls told their collective stories about GBV, which reflected the injustices with which they lived and voiced their concerns but also their solutions to the complex problem. Were the stories of violence in their community sufficiently cloaked as collective stories to ensure that they were not at risk of being harmed by telling them? Was it fair to ask them to present in English, the colonizers’ language, and not their mother tongue? Did the language they had to use contradict the dictates of a decolonizing framework? Did this contribute in any way to the demands of transnational girlhood?

Who Decides? Linked to this second story of Young Girls Leading Change going public at a conference, we again tried to ensure that participants themselves went public with their own work, this time at a national conference on the theme of education, decolonization, and transformation. We submitted an abstract about our participatory visual work with our names and made it clear that a group of Indigenous school-going co-researcher participants 33

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were co-presenting with us. This was accepted after the peer review process. When some of the conference organizers/scientific committee members then realized that some of the presenters were what they called “school children” who were presenting their work at an academic conference, we were informed that we, the researchers, had to present on the schoolchildren’s behalf and that the co-researcher participants could not be present at the conference. The reasons given were that it was an academic conference and that the learners did not know anything about decolonization. Continued communication (and pressure from us) yielded a compromise that the school children could come to the conference, do their fifteen-minute presentation, and then leave. This meant that they would not get the opportunity to interact with the other delegates, share their experiences, and learn from the conference experience. In other words, there would be no opportunity to engage in any practice of transnational girlhood working “towards change for a world in which there is more justice” (Vanner: 127). My email response to our research team reveals my frustration: “Unfortunately, the decision demonstrates a lack of understanding of what decolonizing research means and demonstrates a perpetuation of exclusionary practices, and of wielding power over the Other.” We did not want a compromise and withdrew our presentation. Our research team had begun to understand the importance of enabling our co-researcher participants to go public with their work, but the nature of the knowledge economy in academia in this instance was an obstruction. Dialogue with Self While we, the research team, were trying to do research within a decolonizing framework, we were clear about who owned the knowledge, who should present the knowledge, and who should engage with the audience but some of the conference organizers did not see it this way. This raises the question of whether knowledge production is the domain solely of academic researchers. What would it take for academia to shift its thinking about participants (adults and children) as expert co-researchers with insider knowledge? What epistemological work needs to be done to position participants as able and competent co-researchers who could also represent themselves and go public with the knowledge they own? How does ethics come into play when we deny them this right to go public? How do we stop those in academia who want to hold the power to decide on this? How do we respond to tokenistic gestures like offering these learners only fifteen minutes of speaking time and nothing more? How do we influence 34

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the knowledge economy to decolonize and view not only academics but participants as able researchers?

Who Wants to Hear Their Truths? I return to Girls Leading Change, the fourteen teacher education students who explored sexual violence on their university campus; this story refers to one of their early dialogues for which they were armed with their set of visual artifacts—a set of cellphilms, policy posters, and action briefs—and were presenting the work in a series of dialogues with policymakers at the university. They presented their work to the Deputy-Vice Chancellor of Research and Engagement and the Dean of the Faculty of Education to test the waters and engaged in robust dialogue with them. Satisfied that we had their support, we then asked these two officials who else they thought we should talk to in the university, and so we went on to the next person or persons. When Girls Leading Change presented their findings on feeling unsafe at university to a certain sector of policymakers, the alarmed response from this audience was “What if this gets out to the newspapers”? We were taken aback. After all, we were having the presentations and dialogues with the policymakers to get them to understand the risks of sexual violence on campus and to ensure a safe campus with our help. We were not doing research for the sake of only producing sound knowledge, and the going public was not appreciated by some policymakers; this, understandably, unsettled Girls Leading Change. Dialogue with Self Working within a transformative and critical paradigm, using PVM to enable the voices of the co-researcher participants to be heard was a step in the right direction of decolonizing nationalist research and the sexist university policy in place, but not all the university policymakers were ready to accept the Indigenous girls’ stories of their experiences and their agency in making change happen. That old ethical dilemma relating to knowledge production was apparent. Should we be producing sound knowledge, or should we be producing sound knowledge and (re)shaping unjust contexts? Did the response from some of the policymakers once again remind the Indigenous girls that their lives did not matter? How could our transformative research be used to disrupt unjust institutional structures that count for so much in the institution’s relationship with its Indigenous 35

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women students? How did the policymakers’ response affect a relational ethic? Why were the ethical standards of the policymakers and the ethical standards of the researchers and Indigenous girls incongruent, and how do we, as researchers, make them congruent? Might our participatory visual work put Indigenous young women further at risk of intimidation in the university and its structures?

Discussion The four stories from my experience of doing PVR with Indigenous girls and young women in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, in addressing sexual violence help to explain how going public within a decolonizing transnational framework might not be congruent with the international ethics framework with its narrow view of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice as articulated in The Belmont Report. The guidelines, or, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, the components of the “stiff armour of artificially constructed ethical codes” (1993: 34), used by university RECs in several countries, are limiting because they are more suited to a positivist paradigm (see also Clark 2013; Romm 2018). As I have argued in this chapter and elsewhere (De Lange 2012) we need to be doing social science research differently in positioning participants as co-researchers alongside us as researchers, thus changing the power differential and enabling the co-researcher participants to make choices regarding what they want to do, how they want to do it, and how and where they want to use the data and findings to activate the necessary change in their communities. We want them to engage in transnational girlhood practices. As Romm (2018) points out, if the university research ethics committees broaden their definitions of research and researcher it would be easier for scholars to do research from a transformative and critical paradigm and contribute to the decolonizing of research that will, in turn, be of tremendous benefit to marginalized Indigenous communities. Clark (2013) also suggests that the definition of “participants” be revised. They are not “potentially vulnerable ‘subjects’ [who need] to be protected by a ‘codified set of procedures that assumes a standardized, researcher-driven model of scholarship’” but are rather “individuals capable of engaging in a collaborative and negotiated research process” (Martin [2007] cited in Clark 2013: 12). In such a research process, as Clark makes clear, one should be “engaging

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in dialogue with participants about what would make . . . research ethically appropriate for them as well as us” (2013: 11). Gaining informed consent, as put forward in The Belmont Report, from Indigenous co-researcher participants is problematic in that the guidelines have an “undue cultural bias toward non-Indigenous ethical stances” in, for example, preferring “written informed consent” in a context in which “asking people to sign letters (or even just to give written consent) and telling them that if they refuse we can look for an alternative [mode of giving consent], already puts the balance in favour of asking for written consent and indeed signed consent (implying this is the best form)” (Romm 2018: 340). This hinders the establishing of an I/we relationship with people with whom we want to build a relationship of trust and shared responsibility for the outcomes of the research. Drawing on my experiences in relation to relevant literature, I offer some propositions for ethical research and going public, using participatory visual work as a decolonizing transnational methodology with Indigenous girls and young women in the context of critical and transformative research. Situated Ethics For Helen Simons and Robin Usher (2000), contexts, participants, and research methodologies all differ and require a more nuanced ethical approach to allow for such differences. For Clark, this means a more “iterative and flexible ethical approach that [is] adaptive to and situated within specific contexts” (2013: 11). In other words, the ethics of each research project should be scrutinized against the backdrop of its unique context, purpose, and participants. As Clark points out, “re-situating [the] ethicsrelated debate . . . in an emergent landscape of alternative ethical practices” (8) cannot be underscored enough. Respect for Cultural Difference It is necessary to be cognizant of the fact that different cultures have different takes on ethics and its constructs so research ethics should be exercised in ways that “respect cultural differences” (Unisa6 Policy on Research Ethics [2014] cited in Romm 2018: 405). This implies a negotiation and renegotiation of ethics in keeping with the cultural context of the participants. Layers of Ethical Practice Throughout the research process, layers of ethical practice should be considered in collaboration with the participants regarding the planning of 37

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the research, the generation of the data and artifacts, the analysis and interpretation, the storing and ownership of the data, and the display and dissemination of the research in different contexts (Clark 2013). This means that it is not meaningful to have a one-off ethical clearance since a participatory process is iterative, takes place over a long period of time, and is shaped by the context, the participants, and their knowledge construction. All these aspects require their own layer of ethical consideration. Ethics of Care An ethics of care, as proposed by Carol Gilligan (1982), is linked to the notion of research having a shaping effect and changing or removing, with the participants, that which is unjust in their lives. In this way, the researcher becomes attentive to the problem, takes responsibility to do something about the problem, draws on her or his competency to address the problem, and is responsive to the participants who experience the problem. The nature of PVR, as I understand and practice it, is to disrupt that which is unjust and to facilitate making a difference in society through the research itself. I care about what I do, and I care about injustice, and I know that an ethics of care makes a difference in my life, too. Relational Justice Romm (2018), in drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars referred to earlier, such as Chilisa (2009) from Botswana and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 2005) from New Zealand, argues for principles such as “Relationship, Respect, Reciprocity, and Responsibility” in research designs within a critical and transformative paradigm, and points to researchers, therefore, taking responsibility for how research shapes the context in which it takes place. Wendy Austin extends the values to include others known to be of special significance to Indigenous groups in Australia, such as “reciprocity, respect, equality, responsibility, survival and protection, and spirit and integrity” (2015: 35). Employing these principles in research will lead to work with participants that is ethical. Power Relations How power plays itself out in research relationships needs to be the subject of constant reflection, particularly when we are working in a critical and transformative paradigm. This means, for example, that we ensure that balanced viewpoints are offered, that participants as co-researchers 38

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are enabled to become more self-aware of their own constructions as well as the constructions of others, that the research enables action, and that power relations are carefully addressed (Mertens 2012b; Romm 2018). A transformative paradigm indeed requires a philosophical framework based on “recognizing those dimensions of diversity that are associated with power difference” (Mertens 2012b: 802). I have struggled, in my own participatory visual work, with minimizing the power differences between myself and participants and have come to see how PVM can be used to enable co-researcher participants to be positioned as knowers, as experts in their lived experiences, and to give them the confidence to go public with their knowledges.

Conclusion While my thinking about research has shifted toward locating it in a critical and transformative paradigm, I acknowledge the need to be more reflexive in terms of the ethics of such research. As a researcher, I must ensure that I am not complicit in continuing the “dirty history” of research as Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2017: n.p.) puts it. My research team and I and our co-researcher participants, working in a critical and transformative paradigm, should not be afraid of going public on the basis of the narrowly interpreted guidelines of research ethics positioned in a positivist paradigm, and should, as Clark encourages, “engage in critiques of what may have become ‘taken-for-granted’ ethical practices, and challenge positivistinspired, universalist, protectionist and objectivist thinking about research ethics. Moreover, in pursuing agendas around the politics of participation, and recognizing those who choose to participate in research as active individuals able to engage in ethical debate” (2013: 15). It is, therefore, imperative to call for the revision of The Belmont Report and other ethics guidelines in relation to decolonizing frameworks. We, as social scientists, should, however, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us, remain vigilant “against new formulations of colonization and appropriation” (cited in Miller et al. 2018: 3) so that we can indeed change the landscape of ethical practice in PVR with Indigenous girls and young women everywhere, and advance the ideals inherent in the project of decolonizing research and the related project of developing a transnational girlhood that challenges the ethical rules based on colonizing discourses that essentialize girls and young women. 39

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Naydene de Lange is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Education at the Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Her research focuses on using participatory visual methodologies in addressing gender and HIV&AIDS issues—using a “research as social change” framework.

Notes 1. I met Claudia Mitchell from McGill University (Canada) and Relebohile Moletsane from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) in 2003, and since then, we have worked together in several projects trying out various participatory visual methodologies. 2. The “Girls Leading Change” (Sandisiwe Gaiza, Zethu Jiyana, Melissa Lufele, Bongiwe Maome, Lelethu Mlobeli, Asisipho Mntonga, Takatso Mohlomi, Wandiswa Momoza, Happy Mthethwa, Elethu Ntsethe, Zikhona Tshiwula, Zamahlubi Mabhengu, and Thina Kamnqa) have been working together since 2013, their first year at university, and continue to do so. 3. St Kizito is a Children’s Programme located in Witsieshoek, QwaQwa, Free State, South Africa. 4. A traditional council governs the people of an Indigenous tribe, in this instance the Batlokoa Indigenous people. 5. In 2016, I obtained funding for “Girls Leading Change” to do a panel presentation, “Dialogue to Address Sexual Violence at a South African University” at a meeting of Women-on-Wednesday, at St Cloud State University, Minnesota, United States, 30 March 2016. 6. University of South Africa, a distance-learning environment.

References Akena, Francis. 2018. “Foreword.” In Responsible Research Practice: Revisiting Transformative Paradigm in Social Research, ed. Norma Romm, vi–ix. Cham, CH: Springer International. Austin, Wendy. 2015. “Addressing Ethical Issues in Participatory Research: The Primacy of Relationship.” In Participatory Qualitative Research Methodologies in Health, ed. Gina Higginbottom and Pranee Liamputtong, 22–39. London: Sage. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. 1979. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Bethesda, MD: Department of Health, Education and Welfare. 40

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Castro-Reyes, Paige, John Cooks, Elaine Drew, Kelly Edwards, Elmer Freeman, Mei-Ling Isaacs, Alice Park, Lola Sablan-Santos, Sarena D. Seifer, Nancy Shore, and Eric Wat. 2017. “Research Ethics Reconsidered in the Context of Community-Engaged Research: Proposed Revisions to the Belmont Report and Federal Regulations Guiding the Protection of Research Participants.” Retrieved 9 October 2020 from https://www.ccphealth.org/wp-content/up loads/2017/10/Research_Ethics_Reconsidered_final.pdf. Chilisa, Bagele. 2009. “Indigenous African-Centered Ethics: Contesting and Complementing Dominant Models.” In The Handbook of Social Research Ethics, ed. Donna M. Mertens and Pauline E. Ginsberg, 407–425. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cherrington, Avivit. 2015. “‘Research as Hope Intervention’: A Visual Participatory Study with Rural South African Primary School Children.” PhD diss., Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Clark, Andrew. 2013. “Visual Ethics in a Contemporary Landscape.” In Advances in Visual Methodologies, ed. Sarah Pink, 16–37. London: Sage. De Beer, Chris. 2016a. “Creative Self-Awareness: Conversation, Reflections and Realisations.” In Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education, ed. Daisy Pillay, Inbanathan Naicker, and Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, 49–68. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. ———. 2016b. “Examining Aspects of Self in the Creative Design Process: Towards Pedagogic Implications.” Educational Research for Social Change 5(2): 96–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2221-4070/2016/v5i2a7. De Lange, Naydene. 2012. “Researching to Make a Difference: Possibilities for Social Science Research in the Age of AIDS.” SAHARA-J: Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS: An Open Access Journal 9 (supp.): 3–10. ———. 2015. “Visual Participatory Methodology and Policy Dialogue: Girls Leading Change in Addressing Sexual Violence at a University in South Africa.” Paper presented at the 10th Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference, Split, Croatia, 11–14 June. De Lange, Naydene, Relebohile Moletsane, and Claudia Mitchell. 2015. “Seeing How It Works: A Visual Essay about Critical and Transformative Research in Education.” Perspective in Education 33(4): 151–176. Gergen, Kenneth J. 2015. “From Mirroring to World-Making: Research as Future Forming.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(3): 287–3. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, Haidee. 2018. “In Contrast: Media Coverage and Annie Pootoogook’s Drawings of Sexual Violence and Sexual Happiness.” In Disrupting Shameful Legacies, Girls and Young Women Speaking Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane, 193–214. Leiden, NL: Brill Publishers. 41

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Martin, Deborah G. 2007. “Bureaucratizing Ethics: Institutional Review Boards and Participatory Research.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6(3): 319–328. Mbembe, Achille. 2016. “Future Knowledge and the Humanities Today.” Paper presented at the 4th South African Education Research Association Conference, Port Elizabeth, 23–26 October. Mertens, Donna. 2012a. “Ethics in Qualitative Research in Education and the Social Sciences.” In Qualitative Research: An Introduction to Methods and Designs, ed. Stephen Lapan, Mary-Lynn Quartaroli, and Frances Riemer, 19–39. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass. ———. 2012b. “Transformative Mixed Methods, Addressing Inequities.” American Behavioral Scientist 56(6): 802–813. Miller, Elizabeth, Edward Little, and Steven High. 2018. Going Public, The Art of Participatory Practice. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Mitchell, Claudia. 2011. Doing Visual Research. London: Sage. Mitchell, Claudia, and Relebohile Moletsane, eds. 2018. Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speaking Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence. Leiden NL: Brill Publishers. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2017. “Decolonising Research Methodology Must Include Undoing Its Dirty History.” The Conversation, 26 September. Retrieved 13 January 2018 from http://theconversation.com/decolonising-re search-methodology-must-include-undoing-its-dirty-history-83912. Romm, Norma. 2018. Responsible Research Practice: Revisiting Transformative Paradigm in Social Research. Cham, CH: Springer International. Simons, Helen, and Robin Usher. 2000. Situated Ethics in Educational Research. London: Routledge Falmer. Smith, Ann. 2019. “The Transnational Girl in the Text: Transnationalism Redefined?” In The Girl in the Text, ed. Ann Smith, 1–12. New York: Berghahn Books. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed Books. ———. 2005. “On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norma K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 3rd ed., 85–107. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 2013. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. New York: Zed Books. Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–130. Zembylas, Michalinos. 2018. “Knowledge, Praxes, and the African Purposed Curriculum.” Paper presented at the Redirections/Ukutshintswa Kwendlela seminar for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation, Port Elizabeth, 25 July. 42

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Negotiating Ethics with Rural New Brunswick Girls and Trans and Non-binary Youth Casey Burkholder

Girls and transgender (trans) and non-binary young people from rural areas engage in activism both online and offline, but what does this activism look like? Jessalynn Keller argues that researchers often ignore the kinds of activism that girls (and in my work I also center the experiences of trans and non-binary youth) engage in especially when “adult researchers [are] looking for more traditional activist practices that feminists have used historically, such as public demonstrations, legal challenges, and commercial boycotts” (2016: 261). When the ways the political activism of girls is understood through a specific and narrow lens, “[their] ideas, stories, and theoretical contributions . . . remain largely hidden from view. They continue to appear in both the public and academic domain only as occasional images—as visual objects rather than as intelligent and intelligible political subjects” (Taft 2010: 5). In her discussion of the music and activism of Sri Lankan-British artist M.I.A. as an example of transnational girlhood, Lisa Weems argues that “like the term gender, girlhood is a heterotopic discursive space populated Notes for this section can be found on page 59.

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by various images, texts, and practices, including policy, research, media, and lived experience” (2009: 119). Because girls and trans and non-binary young people have been marginalized in political participation because of age, transphobia, and misogyny (see Taft 2010), they have worked to create “alternative spaces where they can perform activist identities and engage in projects of social change” (Keller 2015: 261); they produce blogs, make media, and contribute to other community spaces, both offline and online. As Sidney Tarrow (2005) points out, these online practices are examples of transnational activism that acknowledge the ways young people—especially in their online practices—engage with networks beyond national borders and position issues that matter (such as LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive justice) in multiple spaces and states (Binnie and Klesse 2013). I am interested in broadening an understanding of girls’ transnational activism to include the contributions of trans and nonbinary youth because these young people can already be described as having crossed borders in relation to their gender expression as well as their online media-consumption practices. In engaging in transnational activism in online spaces, young people have significant opportunities to express their ideas about the world and about what matters to them as well as build networks across disparate settings. They consume media through their specific lens, are already savvy in their digital media consumption, and work to culture-jam and speak back by connecting across “a rich array of digital platforms to connect, rant, strategize” (Brown 2016: 1). They create spaces in which their ways of knowing can be seen and heard. In the context of New Brunswick (NB)— unceded and unsurrendered Wolastoqiyik territory—I seek to understand the ways girls and trans and non-binary youth, who live and go to school in rural spaces, do this. However, settler colonialism—the process of seeking to destroy the inhabitants of a territory in order to replace them with a new settler society (Wolfe 2006)—complicates engaging girls and trans and non-binary young people in transnational media-making and online activism because the agential spaces they create occur on the stolen land of the Wolastoqiyik peoples. As Jessica Taft (2010) and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014b) point out, even when their activism may reinforce the status quo, the work they are doing, through their gender expression and through media-making, organizing, and networking (both online and offline) needs to be recognized as situated on stolen land and as political. While some research has been undertaken on NB youth (Varma-Joshi et al. 2004; Eyre 1999, 2010; Rogers 2017), there is a dearth of research 44

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about girlhood here. Even more marginalized are those girls who live in rural areas and those young people who identify as trans and/or nonbinary. What are the issues these rural young people are concerned with in this particular context? How do they engage in political actions in online and offline spaces? Which borders do they have to cross in personal and geographical terms? How do these young rural people use online spaces to offer critique and encourage solidarities in and across rural and urban space? My project seeks to treat the concerns and activist practices of girls and trans and non-binary young people as “substantive, meaningful political action” (Taft 2010: 48) that transcends borders while contributing to a clearer understanding of the local issues that face NB youth. Here I describe the process of negotiating ethical approval for a series of workshops called “Think/Film/Screen/Change.” I originally developed the workshops to engage with rural female-identifying young people in NB. However, the initial workshop (which was to have been held in August 2018) was canceled because of a series of challenges described later in the chapter. The subsequent workshops (held between December 2018 and February 2020) changed the original focus of the study on girls when trans and non-binary participants were welcomed into the project. I consider the issues highlighted by a university Research Ethics Board (REB) in relation to this project on such activism and the issues highlighted by the youth themselves. I investigate the ethical considerations involved in creating cellphilms, archiving them, and disseminating them over time with and for these participants and to larger publics. I reflect on the process of negotiating ethical clearance at an urban NB-based university, as well as on recruiting girls and trans and non-binary youth from rural areas for the workshops. By opening up recruitment to trans and non-binary young people (not just those who identified as girls), I was able to mitigate the project’s problem of low participation and allow for various kinds of transnational border-crossing, both in the workshop spaces and by disseminating the media produced online.

Who or What Counts as Rural in New Brunswick? In the Canadian province of NB, understandings of rurality are complex. As the University of New Brunswick’s Rural Action and Voices for the Environment (RAVEN) research group has reported, the distinction between what is rural and what is urban is sometimes unclear since “rural 45

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areas get distinguished from urban areas not only based on population and population density but also by geographic isolation from large urban centers and land-use” (2018: 1). Rural areas in this province include towns and villages, farms and woodlots, small off-the-grid communities, and fishing villages. In seeking participants for this project, I connected with teachers and activists I knew to be working in rural areas, and those I met through my own activism in relation to the “Fredericton Feminist Film Collective,”1 on issues of reproductive rights, environmental justice, gender-based violence (GBV), access to abortion services, accessible transportation, and childcare.

Participatory Visual Research with Girls and Trans and Non-binary Youth from Rural Areas A great deal of the literature on rural girlhood and participatory visual methodology (PVM) emerges from the South African context. Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange argue that one of the main goals of working with PVM in rural South Africa includes engaging the “community in exploring and ‘making visible’ the issues about which people are silent— those issues which are ‘hidden’ and around which community action is required” (2011: 179). Mitchell and De Lange acknowledge that the practice of making these community issues visible in rural contexts can bring with them ethical challenges. As they say, “the very process of stepping outside of everyday life to produce the videos can create feelings of uneasiness and vulnerability to some participants” (2011: 179) who are caught on what can be described as the border between the cultural imperatives of not talking about sex and related issues of GBV on the one hand and the need to be heard on the other.

Why Cellphilms? As activist researchers, it is important to create opportunities to engage girls and trans and non-binary youth in creating media that mirrors their own media-consumption practices. Building on the ways young people are already engaging with media, I sought to engage these NB girls and trans and non-binary youth in cellphilm method (see Adams and De Lange 2018; Dockney et al. 2010; MacEntee et al. 2016; Mitchell et al. 46

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2017) during which the participants created short cellphilms about their political concerns and activist practices. Cellphilming is a method first developed in South Africa and has been used to address diverse issues, including GBV in South Africa (MacEntee 2015; Moletsane et al. 2015); screenings and ethical research (MacEntee and Mandrona 2015); dissemination and archiving, and community filmmaking practices and youth civic engagement (Burkholder 2017); identity (Watson 2013); teacher education (Burkholder and MacEntee 2016; Mitchell and De Lange 2013); Indigenous language revitalization (Schwab-Cartas 2016, 2017; Schwab-Cartas and Mitchell 2014); digital memory work and reflexivity (Schleser 2014); and aesthetics in mobile filmmaking (Dockney and Tomaselli 2010; Schleser 2011). The cellphilm method is inherently political from the choices the producers make in the brainstorming process to the narratives they decide to pursue, and from the specific images they attach to the story (both still and moving) to their editorial choices and the ways cellphilms are screened and archived (Burkholder 2017).

Think/Film/Screen/Change: Cellphilming with Girls and Trans and Non-binary Youth In the Think/Film/Screen/Change workshops, I worked with girls and trans and non-binary youth from rural and urban areas in NB to address community issues through qualitative (semi-structured group discussions) and participatory visual research (PVR) methods (cellphilms), and other art-making practices (including screen printing, photography, sculpture, stencils, clothing modification). Drawing on the “personal and intimate” (Schleser 2014: 154) nature of cellphilms, I attempted in the workshops to refocus participants’ everyday media-making practices toward addressing the pressing social issues identified by girls and trans and non-binary youth (such as GBV, poverty, and water and food security) through the creation, exhibition, dissemination, and archiving of cellphilms. I was interested in how the participants might make visual the similarities and differences between their experiences and how sharing these visual productions online might encourage transnational solidarities between NB young people, and those located in other geographies and sociocultural contexts. The process of cellphilming in a research context like this (from brainstorming in a workshop to disseminating the texts) is an example of youth 47

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Illustration 2.1. Seeking participants for the Think/Film/Screen/Change workshops. Photo by Casey Burkholder. Poster design by coyote watson.

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activism since each element of the process is inherently political, as I mentioned earlier. Through the creation of cellphilms and sharing these texts in a participatory digital archive, the research aimed to create transnational spaces in which the participants could screen their works for broad audiences so as to respond to traditional media that tends to exclude, other, or commercialize the perspectives of young people. In particular, I wanted to highlight the rights of participants themselves to have control over their visual productions with a view to seeing how this could aid (local and transnational) activism.

Theorizing Ethical Issues in Participatory Visual Research Writing about the complexities of Canada-based feminist research and the Canadian Tri-Council2 ethical policies, Linda Eyre suggests that “the implications of the Tri-Council policy on feminist research practice needs to be documented, concretized, and challenged. The following questions must also be addressed: Who is implicated? Who benefits? Why now?” (2010: 75). A further complication beyond the ethical policies raised by the Tri-Council is that any research taking place within Canada—a settler state—is affected by settler colonialism defined as colonial violence involving settlers coming to a territory, occupying land, and working to remove the original inhabitants from the territory through discursive means as well as through policies and practices (see Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006). Eyre argues that the Tri-Council ethics policy that governs ethical research by the major federal research agencies in Canada has “smoothed over ethical dilemmas of epistemology and methodology and enabled the perpetuation of individualistic ideologies and colonizing practices” (2010: 79). Even in research methodologies that engage in from-the-ground-up knowledge production, the protocols and ethical practices in the territory and the ways democratizing research may smooth over the complexities of working and living on stolen lands are worth examining further. Writing from the context of a PVR project with girls from rural areas in South Africa, Naydene de Lange argues that “the visual participatory approaches fit into the framework of an asset-based approach [that] brings about a necessary shift to an enablement perspective, in which collaboration, dynamic partnerships and participatory methods are emphasized and practiced” (2008: 181). However, it is difficult to claim such enablement or

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a democratizing transformative practice when the research is undertaken on unceded and unsurrendered territory3 as is the case of the Think/Film/ Screen/Change workshops. Thinking critically about the lands on which fieldwork is undertaken, Farhana Sultana has noted that there is a critical disjuncture between the daily realities of fieldwork on the one hand and institutional guidelines for ethical research on the other. She insists that ethical practice in “conducting international fieldwork involves being attentive to histories of colonialism, development, globalization and local realities [if we are] to avoid exploitative research or perpetuation of relations of domination and control” (2007: 375). While I do keep in mind Sultana’s point about not perpetuating relations of domination in the research design, my facilitation of the Think/Film/Screen/Change project necessarily cements some relations of colonial domination: I am a white, settler, adult, cisgender woman. My very presence in the workshops as the organizer, and as the facilitator, means that the relations of domination and control are present in the research, no matter how much I may try to minimize them, or what my (radical, transformative) intentions to create an asset-based situation might be. April Mandrona’s understanding of ethical practice developed through her work with children in rural South Africa using art-making. Through this work she sought to “understand the lives of young people who must navigate various and often competing norms regarding their proper moral behaviour (i.e. their expressions of sexuality, presence in public and private spaces, and participation in civic life)” (2014: 161). In the context of NB, I sought to make visual (quite literally through cellphilms) Mandrona’s understanding of ethical practice in arts-based research with my participants. In her study, Mandrona saw ethical practice as understanding, transnationally insofar as this was possible, their complicated lives—including their gender, social class, and experiences of violence and loss—as they navigated competing expectations in a variety of social spaces. Ethical practice, as she describes it, asks practitioners to think deeply about the assumptions that accompany their findings (Mandrona 2016). The Think/ Film/Screen/Change workshops and the media that emerged from these workshops acted as an extension of ethical practice in that I had young people make art to help them (and me) understand their experiences with school, gender, sexuality, rurality and social class and to allow them to speak back to these experiences. I did my best to minimize the power differential, particularly where I had to take on the role of workshop facil50

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itator, but acknowledge that my gender, age, and relative privilege, as well as the fact that the workshops took place on stolen land, make it difficult to ignore the ways my facilitation maintained systems of oppression even as we attempted to address them as a group. If any kind of transnational activism is to take place, the workshop facilitator must be prepared to engage in similar ethical practice as the situation demands. For example, noting that the University Ethics Committee had raised a concern about the possibility that creating a video about GBV might perpetuate damaging stereotypes, Mitchell and De Lange describe how they dealt with an ethical challenge that arose in their work with participatory video in rural South Africa. We were concerned when one group of students staged their narrative of three boys raping a girl at school in a way that might be construed as reinforcing gender stereotyping and gender-based violence. To counter our concern, we developed a booklet to accompany the video and conducted workshops with the teachers and students on ways of using the composite video and booklet on gender-based violence in a sensitive way. (2011: 183)

I dealt with a similar ethical dilemma. While it is important to allow the girls and trans and non-binary young people to share their ways of experiencing the world, some components of visual productions might trigger discomfort in members of a local or transnational audience, as well as invite space in which misogyny and transphobia might proliferate. So, rather than denying young people the opportunity to share these stories with others and being careful to nurture transnational links to communities beyond their own, I had to take on the role of ensuring the safe sharing of these materials as we uploaded and shared the media on a YouTube channel. We developed a protocol in the workshop that led to my being appointed the moderator of our channel. If a comment was made that was violent, transphobic, or misogynistic, I had it removed from the public YouTube page. Aside from this monitoring, we needed to think about ways to help local and transnational audiences contextualize and understand these media productions. For example, going forward, we plan to develop a booklet and a screening protocol to accompany the media sharing in online spaces. These practices might be effective strategies to disseminate the media produced by girls and trans and non-binary young people in safer ways, especially for transnational audiences who may be unfamiliar with the NB context and have different histories of girl and trans and non-binary activism. Making explicit a set of trigger warnings to be re-edited into the beginning of the cellphilm might also be effective. 51

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Ethical Issues: Participant and REB Perspectives I turn now to a discussion about the ethical issues surrounding the Think/ Film/Screen/Change project from the perspectives of the participants and of the members of the REB from whom I sought ethical approval to engage in this media-making project. Participation and Transportation In August 2018, I set out to hold the Think/Film/Screen/Change workshops with rural NB girls at the university where I work in Fredericton. An ethical issue arose in my holding these workshops that explored the concerns of rural participants as well as urban ones at an urban university. While I drew on the resources that I had at my disposal (such as space, classrooms, technologies, and access to food services), hosting the workshops at the university proved to be problematic. I thought that holding the workshop at the university would allow for girls and trans and nonbinary youth from different rural locations as well as from Fredericton, to collaborate across other communities in a kind of local transnationalism through the solidarities made through art production (Smith 2019). I sought participants through Facebook, Instagram, word of mouth, and posters that I put up around NB. As I mentioned earlier, an ethical complexity that I encountered in seeking girls as participants for the study was that some of those who wanted to participate identified as transgender or non-binary so I began, simply, to broaden my search for participants who were “trans, non-binary, or female-identifying” to make more space for asset-based approaches to studying gender, rurality, and youth activism. As was the case for Kristine Blair et al. (2011), the most successful recruitment strategy was word of mouth, including that of other interested young participants. However, the weekend before the workshop was to begin, four of the five rural female-identifying participants withdrew because they could not find transport to the workshop. Regular buses and trains do not connect Fredericton and the rural communities in which some of the participants with whom I intended to work live, so those participants would have needed to be transported to the university by a parent or guardian. As a result, when I held the workshops between December 2018 and February 2020 at the university, only two of my participants were rural while the other four were urban. A further complication in holding the cellphilm-making workshop with girls and young people from rural areas in an urban center is that, 52

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as Sarah Wilson and E-J Milne point out, “Participants may not always be able to access places they wish to photograph” (2016: 152). The visuals that were available in the workshop space included classrooms, green spaces, art rooms, and cafeterias—quite different from those the young people access in their daily lives, both at home and at school. As a result, the spaces depicted in the media produced here necessarily look different from those the girl and trans and non-binary participants usually navigate. Furthermore, as Wilson and Milne argue, while participants’ own interpretations of the visuals they have created are important since researchers must work with young people themselves to look at, discuss, and try to understand their visual productions, “the ‘concrete’ or ‘static’ dimension of photographs may block discussion of more fleeting or ethereal connections.” In being aware of this, members of an adult audience that includes the researcher can use this opportunity to question and unsettle their assumptions about, and possible prejudices related to, these “young people’s current and future lives” (Wilson and Milne 2016: 152). The researcher could further facilitate transnational activism by involving the girls and trans and non-binary youth themselves in developing further audiencing strategies, and in producing specific guides and additional texts to accompany their visual productions. Although transport and the resulting lack of participation from rural girl and trans and non-binary participants were the greatest challenges to the workshop from my point of view as well as that of the participants, the REB did not share any concerns in relation to bringing the young people from rural areas to the urban university in order to participate in the workshops and create media. The REB did not query the category of girl either, and it was only through connecting with participants who identified as trans and non-binary that I learned that I needed to broaden my conception of “girls” and project participants beyond “girls.”

Negotiating Informed Consent Both the REB and, to a much lesser extent, the participants highlighted consent as a central concern. The REB raised a concern about exactly when and how assent would be obtained from participants and consent from their parents. Their questions concerned issues such as whether consent to participate in the research would be obtained on the first day of the workshop or if parents and participants would be contacted before 53

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the workshop for me to obtain their signed consent. The REB also asked if I would seek and negotiate consent face-to-face or by regular mail. The reason the REB highlighted this concern was that they felt that the letter of information that I had created for the young participants and for their parents was written at a fairly high level of complexity, so they suggested that face-to-face clarification might well be necessary. Responding to the ethical issues implicit in this feedback, I agreed that face-to-face clarification would benefit all and decided to obtain consent from participants and parents via e-mail for them to review before the first workshop. I also printed copies of the consent/assent form to give to participants and parents when they arrived for the workshop. No parents, girls, or trans and non-binary young people raised any concerns about consenting to being part of the project. The main concern of parents, as made evident in early communication with them, was financial until I clarified that the workshop was free. I made it clear that participants would be part of a research project, and they could choose in which part of the research they would like to engage. I explained to parents that the participants could also choose to attend the workshops and not be a part of the research. The participants had no questions about what was to be included in the workshops. However, one girl, aged thirteen, wondered why her parent was required to sign the consent form. I explained that the university’s REB required parental consent for all participants who were under eighteen years of age. She thought that this practice “made it seem like [she] didn’t know what [she was] doing.” While minors are described as vulnerable in research and societal contexts, I want to acknowledge the sometimes violent and risky local and culturally transnational spaces that girls and trans and non-binary minors already navigate without parental consent in their everyday lives: schools, streets, malls, chatrooms, social media sites, and so on. To deny young people’s abilities to consent—especially those aged thirteen and older— and understanding what is to be gained and risked in participating in research denies their agency as well as their everyday realities.

Screenings One of the key components of the Think/Film/Screen/Change workshops was to develop the ability of the girls and trans and non-binary young people to lead screenings in their schools and rural communities in or54

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der to share their understandings about the issues that matter most in their lives. The REB was concerned about negotiating ongoing consent from the participants in relation to these screening events; its members noted that it was problematic to ask minor participants to consent to any use of their cellphilms before the cellphilms had been produced. Until they engaged in the workshop and produced the cellphilms and had a clear sense of what was expected, the REB suggested that these proposed participants were not in a position to decide whether they wanted to see these cellphilms displayed publicly, used by me as the researcher, and/or shown at conferences. The REB also noted that while the participants had the right to refuse specific uses of their cellphilms and withdraw their creations from the study, some might find it difficult to take that step having already given signed consent for such uses. As a result, I was counseled to seek signed re-consent for the cellphilm screenings and dissemination related to subsequent use of these at the end of each workshop. In this way, the REB reasoned, the participants would understand more clearly that they had the right to refuse to have their productions used, no matter what they had said originally. The REB members did not believe it would be necessary to seek re-consent from parents in relation to the subsequent screenings. As a researcher who uses visual methodologies, I have thought deeply about ongoing and informed consent, but have not yet found a satisfactory solution to the problem posed here. I think the suggestion by the REB to offer two participant consent forms, one before the workshop, and one after, is an excellent one, but I am not sure that two consent forms achieve the goal of obtaining ongoing consent from participants in this participatory project over time. Ongoing consent to share the cellphilms online is particularly tricky when public audiences from outside NB context engage with the cellphilms. The audience may respond with hateful, misogynistic, transphobic language or may minimize the seriousness of the young people’s messages with celebratory comments about the young people’s bravery. As Ann Smith (2019 personal communication) points out, there are transnational concerns in sharing the cellphilms broadly when it is unclear how they will be read by transnational audiences. Despite the suggestion of including trigger warnings at the beginning of the cellphilms and a yet-to-be-developed screening guide, the REB also suggested that screenings beyond the workshops, at places like local schools and community centers, were beyond the current scope of the ethics approval. The REB approval covered only the workshop activities, the de55

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velopment of a YouTube-based archive, and uses arising directly out of it, and not the subsequent screenings and associated travel with the legally minor participants that I had hoped to include. I see future screenings as an opportunity for researching with participants, including debriefing with them after the screening. However, this refusal of consent for any subsequent screenings and associated travel with the minor participants meant that the rural participants in the study who traveled to Fredericton to engage in the workshops would not have been able to screen the cellphilms at their own schools or in their own community centers as part of the research project. Because the screenings are a source of data rather than strictly dissemination, a further application from the REB was required. I complied and submitted a new application for ethical approval in this regard. Having now received this additional REB approval, and the participants’ assent, we had planned to engage in the school and community screenings in the 2020/2021 school year, but these in-person screenings have been put on hold due to the coronavirus. In-person screenings are meant to be opportunities to disseminate the research findings and knowledge produced (namely, the cellphilms) with the participants, and for recording the participants, audience and young people’s reactions to sharing and screening their cellphilms as data. In this way, youth activism and data collection can go hand in hand. I will work with participants to create screenings in places and at times that most benefit them and their communities. I know that in developing the community- and schoolbased screenings, some challenges might arise in relation to the ways the participants position the media they have created, particularly those cellphilms that deal with sensitive, violent, or political matter. As a researcher, I have an ethical responsibility to be aware of this and to do what I can to deal with any problems that arise.

Privacy and Confidentiality One of the REB’s main concerns was about privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality—issues that I have negotiated with REBs at other institutions in the past in engaging in visual research. The REB was concerned about disclosing the identities of the youth participants, but this concern was not highlighted in the recruitment stage by the participants who create short videos and selfies and post them regularly and publicly in online spaces anyway. Sharing their images like this is an integral part of the participants’ 56

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identity construction and negotiation. Also, participants have shown great pride in the visuals they have produced and want to claim ownership of the cellphilms and other art they have produced and share these images with attribution to themselves—this, after all, is surely what activism is about? For me to receive ethical approval, the REB recommended that participants should not take photographs or videos of people other than themselves without obtaining signed consent from those individuals. Of course, the REB’s concern about the potential risk inherent in the public use of images is problematic, especially when we are working with youth participants because it fails to acknowledge the agency and activism of young people. Young people understand the risks and opportunities of sharing images online since they do so already in their daily lives. However, the REB members did not acknowledge the everyday media-sharing decisions that youth already make, and they required that I insert the sentence “Participants are advised that they should not film other people” on all consent forms as well as on the letter of information given to participants and their parents. The REB suggested that it is the responsibility of the research team, and not just of individual participants, to make sure that images of non-participants are not made, shown in the workshop, or posted. Responding to this feedback, I updated the phrasing related to taking images of people who are not in the project. In denying young people’s agency around the production and sharing of images to satisfy the REB’s concerns, I was disrupting one of what Catherine Vanner calls the “essential features of transnational girlhood . . . recognition of girls’ [and trans and non-binary young peoples’] agency as local, national, and global activists despite constraints imposed by global structures of patriarchy and (neo-colonialism); and a counter-hegemonic agenda that challenges oppressive global systems to create more equitable societies for all girls [and trans and non-binary young people]” (2019: 126).

Concluding Thoughts: Where Do We Go from Here? Since transportation was a barrier to girls and trans and non-binary young people’s participation in the Think/Film/Screen/Change workshops, it is clear that in order to reach rural participants, I will have to move future workshops to different rural places in order to make them more accessible to rural participants. This work requires me to think about the ways, as a facilitator, I may, however inadvertently, create conditions that further 57

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marginalize participants who cannot travel, do not have access to the research spaces, or may be uncomfortable with the suggestion of the university as a neutral space. This will require me to build relationships with key community members in order to have access to spaces in which to hold the workshops. Without attending to the key issue of transportation and access to the workshop spaces, it will not be possible to do the Think/ Film/Screen/Change workshops equitably with rural participants. The cellphilm method, and the sharing of cellphilms online and through community screenings, is, as a process, a transnational activist and political practice. The choices that cellphilm producers make through each step of the process of production, to the decisions about where and how to share them, for what purposes, and for how long, address the ways the cellphilm method encourages participants to share stories that have an impact on their lives and on those of members of their communities. They also serve to create links to other communities transnationally. The choice to share cellphilms across audiences is also an example of civic engagement, particularly as we work collaboratively on the development of a shared Think/Film/Screen/Change YouTube page as a way of sharing the content of the films broadly and simultaneously providing confidentiality to the producers of the cellphilms. Rather than understanding the development of the cellphilm archive or the sharing of cellphilms as clicktivist4 practices (Kahne et al. 2014), I argue that the creation and maintenance of the cellphilm archive on YouTube may be seen as an example of the political activism of girl and trans and non-binary young people that may lead to transnational partnerships or conversations across geographical borders about what it means to be a rural girl or a rural trans or nonbinary young person. The aim in creating a participatory digital archive online (see Burkholder and MacEntee 2016) for the young people’s cellphilm productions and discussions of activism and protest in rural spaces was to add specifically to the literature on youth resistance that acknowledges young people in everyday online and offline political actions (see, for example, Jenkins 2016; Kahne et al. 2014; Tuck and Yang 2014a). Following Tuck and Yang (2014a), my findings from this study illuminate how young people assert themselves as civic actors helping to counter the ways nation-specific structural inequalities and dominant discourses are upheld. As Jessalynn Keller suggests, the online spaces that young people curate to share ideas about their experiences and articulate feminist and trans-positive political futures offer “legitimate and valuable spaces for feminist activism—often one of the only places in which they can 58

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engage in such practices” (2016: 275). To this I would add that the notion of a feminist transnationalism would be especially pertinent to girls and trans and non-binary youth from rural areas who may be isolated from other young people as they create and share thoughts about their lives and the issues that matter most to them, particularly in the possible conflict between the needs of anonymity and acceptance. If we are to encourage any kind of transnational girlhood through PVM and online activism, we need to consider how we do so in ways that include the experiences and activisms of trans and/or non-binary youth as well.

Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant (grant number: 430-2018-00264), and the New Brunswick Innovation Fund under the Emerging Projects Grant (grant number: 2019-005). Casey Burkholder is an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick, interested in critical teacher education, and participatory visual research methods. In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance & activism, gender, inclusion, DIY media-making, and Social Studies education, Casey believes her work may contribute to “research as intervention” (Claudia Mitchell, Doing Visual Research) through participatory approaches to equity and social change.

Notes 1. The Fredericton Feminist Film Collective (FFFC) is a is a collective of artists, creators, activists, and humans who make, screen, and talk about works by and for queers, trans folks, and women from an intersectional feminist position. I co-founded the FFFC in 2017 with Dr. Sabine Lebel. See our events and activism at https://www .facebook.com/pg/frederictonfeministfilmcollective/. 2. The Tri-Council refers to three Canadian federal research agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 3. Fredericton, NB, is a settler-built city on Wolastoqiyik territory that occupies land covered under the Peace and Friendship Treaties. In these treaties between the Mi’kmaq, Wolatoqiyik, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot peoples and the British Crown in 1725, there was no agreement to surrender or cede land to the settlers. A territorial acknowledgement that the land on which I research, live, and work, is un59

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ceded and unsurrendered provides context for engaging in ethical research practices in this territory. 4. Slacktivism and clicktivism are terms that denote online practices in which users share political and activist readings, actions, petitions, and the like, but are perceived to not act politically in their offline lives.

References Adams, Marianne, and Naydene de Lange. 2018. “Seeing Things: Schoolgirls in a Rural Setting Using Visual Artefacts to Initiate Dialogue about Resisting Sexual Violence.” In Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speaking Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane, 139–154. Leiden: Brill Sense. Binnie, Jon, and Christian Klesse. 2013. “Like a Bomb in the Gasoline Station: East-West Migration and Transnational Activism around Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Politics in Poland.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39(7): 1107–1124. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.778030. Blair, Kristine, Katherine Fredlund, Kerri Hauman, Em Hurford, Stacy Kastner, and Alison Witte. 2011. “Cyberfeminists at Play: Lessons on Literacy and Activism from a Girls’ Computer Camp.” Feminist Teacher 22(1): 43–59. https:// doi.org/10.5406/femteacher.22.1.0043. Brown, Lyn Mikel. 2016. Powered by Girl: A Field Guide for Supporting Youth Activists. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Burkholder, Casey. 2017. “Who’s Hong Kong? Cellphilming and Civic Engagement with Ethnic Minority Youth.” In Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Innovation, Policy and Practice, ed. Sarita Malik, Caroline Chapain, and Roberta Comunian, 45–59. New York: Routledge. Burkholder, Casey, and Katie MacEntee. 2016. “Exploring the Ethics of a Participant-Produced Cellphilm Archive: The Complexities of Dissemination.” In Ethics and Visual Research Methods: Theory, Methodology and Practice, ed. Deborah Warr, Marilys Guillemin, Susan Cox, and Jenny Waycott, 211–224. London: Palgrave Macmillan. De Lange, Naydene. 2008. “Visual Participatory Approaches to HIV and AIDS Research as Intervention in a Rural Community Setting.” Journal of Psychology in Africa 18(1): 179–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/14330237.2008.108 20184. Dockney, Jonathan, and Keyan Tomaselli. 2010. “Third Screens, Third Cinema, Third Worlds and Triadomania: Examining Cellphilm Aesthetics in Visual Culture.” Communistas 15(1): 97–111. http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/ com/article/view/959.

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Dockney, Jonathan, Keyan Tomaselli, and Thomas Bongani Hart. 2010. “Cellphilms, Mobile Platforms and Prodsumers: Hyper-individuality and Film.” In The Citizen in Communication: Revisiting Traditional, New and Community Media Practices in South Africa, ed. Nathalie Hyde-Clarke, 75–96. Cape Town: Juta Press. Eyre, Linda. 1999. “After Beijing: Women and Education and Training in New Brunswick.” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice 24(1): 79–91. http://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/1626. ———. 2010. “Whose Ethics? Whose Interests? The Tri-Council Policy and Feminist Research. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 26(3): 75–85. http:// journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/263. Jenkins, Henry. 2016. “Youth Voice, Media and Political Engagement.” In By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, ed. Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kilger-Vilenchik, and Arely Zimmerman, 1–60. New York: New York University Press. Kahne, Joseph, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen. 2014. “Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics.” In From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, ed. Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light, 35–58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keller, Jessalynn. 2015. Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016. “Making Activism Accessible: Exploring Girls’ Blogs as Sites of Contemporary Feminist Activism.” In Girlhood and the Politics of Place, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler, 261–278. New York: Berghahn Books. MacEntee, Katie. 2015. “Using Cellphones in Participatory Visual Research to Address Gender-based Violence in and around Rural South African Schools: Reflections on Research as Intervention.” Agenda 29 (3): 22–31. https://doi .org/10.1080/10130950.2015.1045339. MacEntee, Katie, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, eds. 2016. What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. MacEntee, Katie, and April Mandrona. 2015. “From Discomfort to Collaboration: Teachers Screening Cellphilms in a Rural South African School.” Perspectives in Education 33(4): 42–56. https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC185871. Mandrona, April. 2014. “‘What Can We Make with This?’ Creating Relevant Art Education Practices in Rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.” Ph.D. dissertation, Montreal: Concordia University. ———. 2016. “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9(3): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2016 .090302.

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Mitchell, Claudia, and Naydene de Lange. 2011. “Community-based Participatory Video and Social Action in Rural South Africa.” In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, ed. Luc Pauwels, 171–185. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 2013. “What Can a Teacher Do with a Cellphone? Using Participatory Visual Research to Speak Back in Addressing HIV&AIDS.” South African Journal of Education 33(4): 1–13. https://www.ajol.info/index.php/saje/ article/view/97294. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community and Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Moletsane, Relebohile, Claudia Mitchell, and Thandi Lewin. 2015. “Gender Violence, Teenage Pregnancy and Gender Equity Policy in South Africa: Privileging the Voices of Women and Girls through Participatory Visual Methods.” In Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts: The Educational Challenge, ed. Jenny Parkes, 290–314. London: Routledge. RAVEN Research Hub. 2018. “Defining Rurality in a New Brunswick Context.” Unpublished internal document. Rogers, Matt. 2017. “Participatory Filmmaking Pedagogies in Schools: Tensions between Critical Representation and Perpetuating Gendered and Heterosexist Discourses.” Studies in Social Justice 11(2): 195–220. https://doi .org/10.26522/ssj.v11i2.1522. Schleser, Max. 2011. Mobile-mentary. Mobile Documentaries in the Mediascape. Saarbrücken, DE: Lambert Academic Publishing. ———. 2014. “Connecting through Mobile Autobiographies: Self-reflexive Mobile Filmmaking, Self-representation, and Selfies.” In Mobile Media-making in an Age of Smartphones, ed. Marsha Berry and Max Schleser, 148–158. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schwab-Cartas, Joshua. 2016. “Living our Language: Zapotec Elders and Youth Fostering Intergenerational Dialogue through Cellphone Videos.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Arts Based Research and Activism, ed. Katie MacEntee, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, 51–66. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. ———. 2017. “Keeping Up with the Sun: Revitalizing Isthmus Zapotec and Ancestral Practices through Cellphilms.” Canadian Modern Language Review 74(3): 363–387. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.4056. Schwab-Cartas, Joshua, and Claudia Mitchell. 2014. “A Tale of Two Sites: Cellphones, Participatory Video and Indigeneity in Community-based Research.” McGill Journal of Education 49(3): 603–620. https://doi.org/10.3138/ cmlr.4056. Smith, Ann. 2019. “The Transnational Girl in the Text: Transnationalism Redefined?” In The Girl in the Text, ed. Ann Smith, 1–12. New York: Berghahn. 62

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Sultana, Farhana. 2007. “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6(3): 374–385. Taft, Jessica. 2010. Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change across the Americas. New York: New York University Press. Tarrow, Sidney. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014a. “R-words: Refusing Research.” In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn, 223–248. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, eds. 2014b. Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change. New York: Routledge. Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–132. https://doi.org/ 10.3167/ghs.2019.120209. Varma-Joshi, Manju, Cynthia Baker, and Connie Tanaka. 2004. “Names Will Never Hurt Me?” Harvard Educational Review 74(2): 175–208. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2010. Settler Colonialism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Watson, Caitlin Sarah. 2013. “Smaller Lens, Bigger Picture: Exploring Zulu Cultural Tourism Employees’ Identity by Using Cellphilms as a Medium for Participatory Filmmaking Methods.” Ph.D. dissertation. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal. Weems, Lisa. 2009. “MIA in the Global Youthscape: Rethinking Girls’ Resistance and Agency in Postcolonial Contexts.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2(2): 55–75. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2009.020205. Wilson, Sarah, and Elisabeth-Jane Milne. 2016. “Visual Activism and Social Justice: Using Visual Methods to Make Young People’s Complex Lives Visible across ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Spaces.” Current Sociology 64(1): 140–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392115592685. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/146235 20601056240.

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Doing Ethical Research with Girls in a Transnational Project Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane

In this chapter, we discuss our work as part of a six-year transnational interdisciplinary partnership project titled, “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” (hereafter, Networks for Change). This partnership is comprised of a number of projects across fourteen rural and urban research sites in South Africa and Canada. The work is positioned within the interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies, an area of study that is directly informed by girls and is carried out with girls, for girls, and by girls (see Greenwood and Levin 2006; Kirk et al. 2010; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2008). This approach challenges the longstanding view of children, and girls in particular, as passive, incompetent, and/or inherently vulnerable in research as Alison Clark and Peter Moss (2011) remind us. Inherent to this project is the notion of transnational girlhood, a strand of girlhood studies that is influenced by transnational feminism(s) (see Vanner 2019; Weems 2009, 2014).

Notes for this section can be found on page 83.

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Central to the concept of transnational girlhood is an emphasis on the meaningful involvement of girls at all levels of research, particularly girls from the Global South (Vanner 2019; see also Mitchell and Rentschler 2016). This emphasis on agency and the active involvement of girls in the Networks for Change is part of our international and transnational endeavor to engage in research with girls and young women, particularly those affected by “structural conditions such as poverty and marginalization as well as life disruptions such as violence, disaster and war” (D’Amico et al. 2016: 528). In these engagements, we draw increasingly on communitybased participatory research approaches, particularly participatory visual methodology (PVM), to support the participation of young people in research and to subvert the power dynamics that tend to arise between researchers who are, as Claudia Mitchell and Marni Sommer (2016) point out, typically outsiders, well-educated, and relatively privileged adults and participants who are usually less educated and underprivileged. Young participants often welcome the use of visual methods since they tend to make the research process more enjoyable (Carter and Ford 2013; Johnson et al. 2012). Since sexual violence is an issue that affects girls living in diverse settings, PVM can play an important role in supporting communication among girls across transnational contexts. Certainly, sharing images and videos can help girls transgress barriers of illiteracy, foreign languages, and topic sensitivity to address this global concern collectively (Gubrium et al. 2016; Mitchell and Sommer 2016; Theron et al. 2011). Nevertheless, as D’Amico and colleagues (2016) note, the increasing application of participatory visual methods in research has led to a growing need for further context-specific studies to inform the use of particular visual methods with youth facing different forms of adversity. Indeed, despite the perceived value of incorporating participatory visual methods into research, Gillian Black and colleagues (2018) have observed that these innovative approaches and their associated technologies can lead to new and unique ethical issues. Yet, as April Mandrona (2016a) points out, these remain under-researched. We see this gap as presenting us with an opportunity to engage in transnational research aimed at guiding the ethical use of participatory visual methods in diverse contexts. Ethical practice becomes particularly important when one involves people who have been deemed vulnerable because of reduced autonomy. Factors associated with vulnerability include extremities of age, low levels of education and literacy, chronic illness, extreme poverty, or poor access

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to healthcare (South African Department of Health [DoH] 2015; The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research 1979). In working with so-called vulnerable populations, a researcher’s primary obligation is to ensure that the research does not cause participants to become more vulnerable than they already are (Lange et al. 2013). Research Ethics Committees (REC) require scholars to apply protective measures to reduce the risk of harm to participants. However, while there is a broad understanding that vulnerable participants are in need of special protection, researchers have found it challenging to devise a satisfactory definition of vulnerable persons or populations (Hurst 2008). For Carol Levine and colleagues (2004), vulnerability remains one of the least examined notions in research ethics. A further challenge in the context of international and transnational research is that we have an obligation to respect participant autonomy and to protect those with developing, impaired, or diminished autonomy (DoH 2015). In our work, we grapple constantly with the need to strike a balance “between promoting girls’ agency and recognizing the structural and systemic influences that constrain it” (Vanner 2019; see also Jiwani et al. 2006), including the requirements of RECs. While scholarly discussions (Lange et al. 2013; Hurst 2008; Levine et al. 2004) about how participants who are deemed vulnerable can exercise agency in decisions related to research have taken place, there is a need for further research to define this complex term, and to explore how the research protocol and environment can present ethical challenges, as Levine and colleagues (2004) suggest. In the Networks for Change project, we attempt to address this gap by engaging actively with these ethical issues, and by making ethics a central and cross-cutting issue that is explored at our research sites as we consider ways to move toward an ethics of doing most good (Moletsane et al. 2009) in the context of PVM and digital technology. We seek to move beyond non-maleficence—doing no harm—to actively do good by making the research process directly beneficial and rewarding for those involved, as advocated by Shane Bush (2010), Munyaradzi Murove (2009), and Linda Theron, Jean Stuart, and Claudia Mitchell (2011). With its focus on sexual violence, the Networks for Change project works not only with vulnerable populations but with an extremely sensitive topic. Of global concern, sexual violence is a human rights violation that affects girls living in diverse contexts, particularly Indigenous girls and young women living in the post-colonial and socially stratified societies of Canada and South Africa. These nations have comparable histories 66

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of racialized colonization and segregation, evident in the treatment of Indigenous populations in Canada and the destructive and harmful legacy of apartheid in South Africa. In both settings, there are also stark contradictions between existing constitutional and legal frameworks and the realities of daily life for Indigenous girls and young women. For example, while the governments of both countries have attempted to confront past injustices through the establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, both continue to come under scrutiny by international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the United Nations for their failure to create safe and secure environments for girls and young women. In South Africa, despite a relatively strong legal framework and the recent launch of the National Council against Gender-Based Violence, rates of sexual violence in the country remain among the highest in the world. Particularly affected are girls and young women living in rural settings where poverty, unequal gender norms and values, geographic isolation, and disabling legal and cultural frameworks all intersect to regulate their lives and their bodies (Moletsane 2007). Like Canada, actual levels of violence are difficult to measure in South Africa because of the poor quality of data collected by police, underreporting, and a culture of silence that is driven by shame, fear, and a lack of faith in the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, it is clear from available statistics that sexual violence has reached epidemic proportions in South Africa (Joyner 2016). The most recent data from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child shows that the national femicide rate was 12.1 per 100,000 in 2016, which was almost five times higher than the global average. In the 2016 South African Demographic and Health Survey (SADHS) (Statistics South Africa [StatsSA] 2017), it was reported that 138 per 100,000 women were raped in 2017, which, according to available data, is the highest rate in the world. In addition, the 2016 SADHS established that in 2016, 17 percent of women between eighteen and twenty-four years of age had experienced violence from a partner in the twelve months prior to the survey, and that women living in resource-poor settings were significantly more likely to experience sexual violence. In what follows, we discuss our engagement with adolescent girls in two of the Networks for Change research sites in rural South Africa. We concentrate on our use of two visual methods: digital storytelling (DST) and cellphilms. DST is a blend of digital media production and oral storytelling. Over the past two decades, DST has been used in a variety of contexts, including education, health research, community engagement, 67

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violence prevention, and social advocacy (D’Amico et al. 2016). In structured workshops, participants create short video narratives that are illustrated with photographs, drawings, music, and text. The productions are valued for encouraging creative self-expression and fostering a sense of independence, agency, and ownership among participants. Further, as Jean Burgess (2006) points out, digital stories also help researchers to learn about communities from the perspective of the community members themselves. Cellphilming is a method that involves participants using cellphones or tablet computers (henceforth referred to as tablets) to create short films. As Mandrona (2016b) explains, the use of cellphilms aims to bring alternative experiences and perspectives to the fore through the production and dissemination of short videos, usually on a particular topic or in response to a prompt. Making cellphilms involves participants in planning, performing, and recording productions that address an aspect of the issue being investigated. We reflect on the ethical issues we have encountered in both the process of using participatory visual methods to create visual products about sexual violence, and the dissemination of these products to mobilize knowledge and girl-led policy change to address sexual violence nationally in this context, and transnationally beyond it. We explore how, in our work, we attempt to negotiate the tension between what we see as often conflicting ethical imperatives in PVR including the requirement to abide by the protocols of traditional, formal research ethics as stipulated by RECs when we engage with vulnerable groups, and the need to recognize and honor an ethics that is participatory, context-relevant, responsive, and that does most good.

Research Setting In South Africa, although our work is based in three rural sites—the small town of Paterson in the Eastern Cape province, and the rural communities of Loskop and Khethani in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN)—we focus here on our work in KZN. In Loskop, our work is located in a small village in the vast rural Injisuti valley, which lies at the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains. This sparsely populated region is situated 250 km inland from the coastal city of Durban. It falls under the Amangwe Traditional Area, and traditional cultural norms, practices, and values are widespread and dominant. Many families living in this rural village struggle daily 68

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with poverty, poor health, violence, inadequate infrastructure, and food insecurity. Since 2016, we have partnered with Thembalethu Care Organisation, a non-government organization based in Loskop that offers a number of important services to this community, including home-based care, psychosocial support, and HIV and tuberculosis awareness and prevention programs. The high rates of sexual violence in Loskop as reported by Thembalethu Care Organisation, our participants, local police, and other local stakeholders, reflect the rates across the country. The closest towns to Loskop are Estcourt (approximately 45 km) and Winterton (approximately 49 km). On the outskirts of Winterton lies our second research site in KZN, Khethani. Established in the late 1990s, this settlement is made up of low-cost government and informal housing. Khethani is home to approximately eleven thousand residents. This is a region of lucrative tourism because of its proximity to the MalotiDrakensberg Park, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. Despite this, life remains a struggle for the majority of Khethani households with many inhabitants living below the poverty line and facing daily challenges of HIV, tuberculosis, sexual violence, inadequate healthcare, illiteracy, poor service infrastructure, and high rates of unemployment (Okhahlamba Local Municipality 2015).

Participants and Recruitment In line with the ethos of girlhood studies, our workshops were (and are) open to all participants who “refer to themselves, or are referred to by others, as girls” (Vanner 2019: 120) regardless of their age or the sex assigned to them at birth (Kirk et al. 2010). In Loskop, we recruited fifteen girls and young women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, all of whom are first-language speakers of isiZulu, via the local high school with the help of Thembalethu Care Organisation. We had our first visual methods workshop with these girls, who call themselves the Social Ills Fighters (SIFs), in February 2017. The number of co-researcher participants in Loskop has decreased over the years due to girls moving away or leaving school, some because of forced and/or early marriage. We currently have eleven members who regularly engage in project activities. In Khethani, we recruited a group of girls and young women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen with the help of a teacher from the local secondary school who leads a peer education program that incorporates 69

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drama, individual peer-to-peer support, and poster campaigns to promote awareness about teenage pregnancy and HIV infection. We held our first visual methods workshop with the group, who call themselves the Leaders for Young Women’s Success (L4YWS), in June 2016. At the first workshop, we had seven participants, but by the second workshop in October 2016, the number had grown to twenty-one. Over our four years of engagement, these numbers have fluctuated as new people have joined the project, and others have left. However, we have a core group of ten girls who engage in project activities in Khethani regularly.

Consent We followed a similar multistage process of consent with each group. At our first meeting with each group, we introduced the project and invited interested girls to a second meeting. Over the next two meetings, we worked on building rapport with our potential participants and their parents and spent time obtaining assent and consent ahead of the first workshop. We distributed assent forms for the participants to sign, as well as Information and Consent Forms (translated into isiZulu) for parents and/ or guardians to sign for those under the age of eighteen. We explained the content of the forms carefully and encouraged the participants and their parents and/or guardians to ask questions about them before completing, signing, and returning them. The consent process was extended to cover the sharing of specific visual products that the adolescent girls created at workshops, with a release form being signed by each person before any visual product was shared. We discuss this in further detail below in our section on sharing visual media.

Production Processes: Creating Cellphilms and Digital Stories Since beginning our work in Loskop and Khethani in 2016, we have engaged the SIFs and the L4YWS in nine PVM workshops in each site. The aim of these workshops was to use participatory visual methods, including photovoice, drawing, cellphilms, and participatory asset mapping to explore with the girls the issues, including sexual violence, that have an impact on their lives, safety, and well-being. We planned to share the resulting visual material with girl participants in Canada and for the re70

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search team and the participants to analyze this data collaboratively to explore the transnational relevance of the issues raised. In this chapter, we focus specifically on cellphilms and digital storytelling. Cellphilms and digital stories can be made on a cellphone that has a camera. However, the primary technology used for both methods during the workshop was an entry-level tablet, which functions in much the same way as a smartphone. Cellphilm Production Process Our cellphilm workshops are generally held over one day. The process starts with a brainstorming session during which participants develop or respond to themes they have shared in previous workshops. Dominant themes in both communities have included sexual violence and substance abuse. In the brainstorming session, participants share experiences from their everyday lives and engage in debate and discussion about how these themes are relevant to their community. Having been divided into small groups, the participants are then given about thirty minutes to develop their narratives, and another fifteen minutes or so to map their stories onto a storyboard. We then give a short tutorial on how to use the tablets to film the cellphilm, including introducing participants to the No-EditingRequired (N-E-R) technique first devised by Monica Mak, Claudia Mitchell, and Jean Stuart (2005). This approach speeds up video production considerably and allows for the creation of a multi-scene video without the use of complicated editing software. Following the filming tutorial, the groups are given another twenty to thirty minutes to practice acting out their scenes, which they then film. Once the cellphilms are complete, each cellphilm is screened, with the permission of all members of each small group, to the larger group, and we engage in a post-screening discussion about the meaning and relevance of these visual stories. After the screening and discussion, each participant is asked to sign a release form for her cellphilm. The forms ask participants to select either yes or no in response to questions about where, when, and how their visual products could be shared or screened. This provides opportunities for screening or sharing the visual productions nationally within the project, as well as transnationally with outside audiences. Most importantly, this makes transnational exchanges between South African and Canadian girls possible. Digital Story Production Process Our DST workshops are held over three days in each community. On the first day, we introduce participants to the digital story production 71

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process as well as screen a number of examples of digital stories1 to give them some idea of what these might look like. While our tutorial is based on the process advanced by Joe Lambert (2013) for the Centre for Digital Storytelling, we modified the traditional DST process by creating group rather than individual narratives. Following a brainstorming session about key themes, participants work in small groups to develop a story that they share with the larger group during an interactive feedback session. After this, the groups create storyboards, which they use to visualize and plan their stories (see Illustration 3.1 below). On the second day of the workshop, after a tutorial on drawing and photography, we introduce the participants to key ethical issues that they need to consider when they are creating visual data, such as the importance of acquiring permission before filming or taking a photograph of another person, and the potential danger inherent in photographing children. We discuss the use of drawing for anonymous visual illustration and the use of photographic techniques to protect the identity of subjects. The group members then complete their drawings and take photographs for their stories. Once all the drawings and photographs are complete, we

Illustration 3.1. Storyboard by Social Ills Fighters. Photograph by Lisa Wiebesiek. 72

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offer a tutorial on how to use WeVideo, the free editing software that we had installed on the tablets ahead of the workshops. Then, each group goes into a quiet room and, with the assistance of one of the facilitators, makes an audio recording of the story using this software. Finally, the groups select and record a song to sing or hum in the background of their digital story. On the final day of the workshop, each group has an opportunity to view their story and make final changes. We then screen each of the digital stories, following each screening with a group discussion. After the screening, each participant is asked to sign a release form for their digital story.

Dissemination Processes: Sharing the Cellphilms and Digital Stories Nationally and Transnationally A central aim of Networks for Change is to use the visual outputs created by girls and young women as advocacy tools to drive girl-led social change in order to address sexual violence in their communities and transnationally. Consequently, in both Loskop and Khethani, we have held a number of meetings and community engagement activities to raise awareness of sexual violence. These events included marches and dialogues with community stakeholders, such as parents, representatives from local nonprofit organizations, health clinics, schools, and the police. On these occasions, we shared some of the visual outputs created by the girls, including cellphilms and digital stories, as a way to stimulate dialogue, challenge harmful traditional norms and practices, promote gender equality, and stimulate social action to address sexual violence. The visual media created by the SIFs and the L4YWS has also been shared beyond these two communities. For example, in 2018, the SIFs and the L4YWS traveled to Durban to attend the Networks for Change Girls Summit, where they shared various visual outputs with girls from the Paterson site, students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and project team members from South Africa and abroad. These outputs were used to spark dialogue about sexual violence more broadly, and the girls and students also engaged in further PVM work to respond to the impact of sexual violence on their lives. The work of the girls has also traveled transnationally. For example, in 2017, cellphilms made by the SIFs and L4YWS were entered into the International Cellphilm Festival hosted at McGill University in Canada. 73

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One Cellphilm, “Abuses Is the Crime” took third place, and another, “The Rape,” received an honorable mention. In addition, the cellphilms and digital stories created by the SIFs and L4YWS were shared at the Circles within Circles conference, a transnational event that took place in 2018 in Montebello, Quebec, and brought together more than seventy participants from South Africa, Canada, Sweden, and Russia, with remote participation from Ethiopia and Kenya.

Emerging Ethical Dilemmas Questions of Method and Technology PVM does not always require the use of high-tech tools. Drawing, for example, is an effective low-tech method, as Theron, Stuart, and Mitchell (2011) explain. However, technology does provide access to new and exciting ways to work with participants and to produce visual artifacts, such as cellphilms and digital stories, which are meaningful and powerful to them personally and are, at least potentially, tools for advancing advocacy and forming cross-border transnational connections. Further, in an increasingly digital world, the opportunity for young people to learn how to use technology such as tablets gives them valuable skills they will most likely need for further education and training and the workplace. While the ubiquity of the cellphone has led to digital media becoming more and more accessible to the general population, the question of how to select the visual methods and the equipment and software to use with participants remains important, particularly in contexts of high levels of poverty and unemployment. One of the criticisms of technology-based participatory visual research (PVR), particularly in resource-poor settings, is that researchers may dominate the participatory process through their possession of high-tech tools and their expertise in their usage (MacEntee et al. 2016; Wang 2000). When they return to their privileged lives, researchers often take the equipment with them, leaving participants with no access to the tools that were supposed to empower them. Some researchers have attempted to address issues related to the digital divide by leaving equipment in the field for participants to use after a project, either permanently or for a set time. But this solution is associated with different ethical issues since the possession of expensive equipment can disrupt existing power dynamics in the communities and cause harm by making participants targets of jealousy and even victims of violent crime (Mitch74

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ell et al. 2015; Schwab-Cartas and Mitchell 2014). Others, as noted by Vivian Lin (2016) and Caitlin Watson, Shanade Barnabas, and Keyan Tomaselli (2016), have opted to use participant-owned mobile phones. Again, this decision has ethical implications. For example, when they are being filmed or photographed by members of their social group in a private space, “participants may say and do things . . . that might be troublesome when viewed outside of that space” (Watson et al. 2016: 44). In addition, in transferring data from a participant’s cellphone to researchers’ devices other personal and private media may become mixed up with research data (Lin 2016). Working as we do with girls and young women in contexts of poverty and high rates of unemployment, asking our co-researcher participants to use their own cellphones for photography, cellphilms, and digital stories is not an option. In addition to the ethical challenges noted above, we cannot assume that all our participants own cellphones, or that they own cellphones with cameras, or have smartphones. It would be unethical to make access to a smartphone, or at least to a cellphone with a camera, a condition of participation because this would exclude many of the girls, thereby reinforcing economic inequality and marginalization. We consider carefully which technology we should bring to our work with participants and which software to use. Our decision to use entry-level tablets, in this case, the Samsung Galaxy Tab4, was partly based on the fact that it has the same functionality as an entry-level smartphone. While cellphilm production requires only the camera function, digital stories require some of the functions associated with more advanced technology, including voice recording and basic video editing software. We acknowledge that participants may not have access to this exact media device when the workshop closes, but they are likely to have access to similar tools personally or through their social networks. In addition, if the girls followed a similar group production model, they would need access to only one device per four to five girls. Had we chosen to use iPads, for example, we would have been faced with the costs of a significantly more expensive technology, as well as limited open-source software options. Using equipment that is more accessible, we believe, is likely to enable participants to use the skills that they have acquired beyond the scope of the project. Indeed, a “key feature of the use of mobile technology in PVM (and especially in participatory video) is its democratizing role that draws, in particular, on the ubiquity of the cellphone” (MacEntee et al. 2016: 15). 75

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To further reinforce this democratic approach in the DST process, we use open-source editing software. We show participants how to download this application from the Google play store onto smartphones. This is, of course, not a perfect solution to the issue of access, since, as noted above, many of the participants do not have access to such devices. Furthermore, internet access is a challenge in this context, and the high cost of data makes participatory media production and sharing prohibitively expensive. This limitation is one of the challenges of the digital divide since, although Information Communication Technologies can disrupt the traditional constraints of who can speak, these technologies remain accessible only to those with online connectivity (Balogun et al. 2020). While it is difficult for the girls to exchange their localized experiences across transnational contexts because of limited access to smartphones and the internet, in Networks for Change we have addressed this by, for example, disseminating the visual artifacts at international conferences and project meetings where the participating girls are in attendance, posting them on our project website, and writing about them in our quarterly newsletter. Can PVM Trigger Trauma? Going into PVM workshops, we are aware that participants are unlikely to have created a cellphilm or digital story before. We choose methods that will be enjoyable to them and also build on their existing interests and skills. For example, during the first PVM workshop in Khethani in June 2016, the L4YWS indicated that they were very keen to include drama in our future workshops. We, therefore, decided to include a cellphilm activity in the next workshop. The L4YWS embraced this activity and engaged in all aspects of the production process with enthusiasm, stating that they found it to be “fun and enjoyable.” Yet, from an ethical standpoint, we had some concerns about using this embodied methodology to address sexual violence with participants because of the possibility that this could result in re-traumatization for past or current victims of sexual abuse (see Gubrium et al. 2013; Lin 2016). Nevertheless, we wondered whether using cellphilms as a tool to create a safe space in which to talk about an issue that is so often silenced may be more beneficial than harmful. We believe that there is power in being able to tell a story, especially for girls and young women who do not often have the opportunity to do so. This ethical dilemma faced by both researchers and girls in different contexts

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and in different countries requires further exploration in our work and is a challenge with which we intend to engage in future workshops. While participants did not raise this issue in our formal and informal discussions, we have attempted to mitigate the risk of re-traumatization by asking the girls to create media productions that address sexual violence at a community level rather than focusing on individual accounts of personal disclosure. Following Lin (2016), we think that group stories may be more enjoyable and beneficial for participants since they are able to support each other through the production of stories about difficult issues rather than having to address these issues as individuals. In addition, we connected girls to psychosocial support services in each community through our community partner, who offers support to girls from both sites when required. Questions of Consent and Dissemination with Group Work We approached informed consent as a multistep process. Parents and individual participants were asked for their consent and assent a few weeks in advance of the workshops. In addition, after they had viewed their visual artifacts as a group, we asked participants to sign release forms for their visual productions to be screened publicly. All participants agreed to share their digital stories, and only two opted not to share their cellphilms. However, because both were created in groups, if any member of a group did not give permission for her cellphilm or digital story to be shared or screened, this refusal of permission took precedence over the permission granted by other members of the group. This is an ethical challenge associated with creating group productions because those members of the group who do give their permission for the production to be screened may view this as an infringement of their rights. Interestingly, at the screening of the cellphilms and digital stories at a community dialogue in Khethani, a number of participants who had refused permission were very disappointed that their cellphilms were not screened. It is possible that these participants changed their minds when they saw the work of the others being screened. However, their disappointment raised a further ethical concern about whether or not the participants had fully understood the release process. In response, to ensure such full understanding and to give them the opportunity to make changes in the forms and process should they wish to do so, we went over the release forms with individual participants at our subsequent meeting, and they were able to revisit their decision.

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Dissemination beyond Borders One of the aims of our transnational project is to connect girls across borders to mobilize knowledge and address the issue of sexual violence. Catherine Vanner notes that transnational girlhood “requires processes that connect localized experiences of girlhood to illuminate global structure. Girls in different countries must speak to each other, whether it be in person, through virtual networks, or by responding to each other’s work” (2019: 14). However, as mentioned above, the constraints of the digital divide in this resource-poor setting has made virtual networking difficult. In addition, the high cost of international travel, the difficulty with taking minors out of the country because of legitimate concerns about human trafficking, and the bureaucracy involved in applying for visas has made it challenging to bring girls from these two nations together. We have attempted to address this constraint by supporting the girls to travel locally to network with girls from the other South African sites, and by sharing the visual media the participants created on their behalf at international forums. This is transnationalism at one step removed. In February 2019, the South African Networks for Change participants met at a Girls’ Leadership Forum in Port Elizabeth. The forum was facilitated largely by Kari-Dawn Wuttunee, who works with a group of Indigenous girls called the The Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia (YIWU) from Treaty 6, Saskatchewan, Canada (see chapter 5, this volume). The theme of the forum was “Self-Love as Resistance to Violence,” a topic the YIWU has dealt with in their own context. During the forum, Wuttunee shared some of the visual products created by the YIWU, and facilitated a cellphilm workshop in which the South African groups created their own cellphilms on the theme. This transnational knowledge and skills exchange has enabled us to work with the difficulties of physically meeting across borders. We suggest that, through the dissemination of the girls’ visual products at transnational and international meetings and events, spaces are created in which their voices can be heard. This contributes, in a small way, toward challenging the silencing and marginalizing of the voices of girls from the Global South. Should We Share Media Productions That Portray Negative Stereotypes? Prevailing gender stereotypes have been evident in a number of the cellphilms created by the participants. For example, one of the original cell78

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philms created by the L4YWS in Khethani highlighted how pregnant girls are insolent and disruptive at school and suggested that they should be excluded from this space.2 In addition, in almost all the cellphilms, the trope of the crying female surfaces in response to abuse, assault, or harassment. In the digital stories, the theme of girls being blamed for the challenging issues facing communities, like sexual violence and unwanted pregnancy, dominated the narratives. While our intention in using PVM has been to enable the participants to describe sexual violence and other challenges they face from their own perspectives, leaving these negative stereotypes unchallenged would have been unethical and counterproductive, and may, in fact, have been read as agreement with them. Therefore, we engaged the participants in conversation about these stereotypes during the post-screening discussion, exploring the meaning and consequences of these stereotypes, and encouraging critical engagement with taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. Furthermore, in line with Claudia Mitchell, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane (2016) we encouraged the groups to respond to the stereotypes portrayed in their cellphilms by creating new cellphilms that “speak back” to the original ones from a more critical, gender-sensitive point of view (see also Mitchell and De Lange 2013; Mitchell et al. 2015). We have not yet had the opportunity to ask the SIFs and the L4YWS to engage in the lengthier process of creating new digital stories to speak back to the stereotypes in their digital stories, but these stereotypes in the girls’ visual products have highlighted the need to reflect carefully on whether and how we share these in national and transnational spaces. We are careful not to confirm dominant stereotypes, such as the girls-in-crisis narrative that frames girls (particularly those from the Global South) as being in a state of perpetual vulnerability and crisis and awaiting “rescue with limited hope of success” (Gilmore and Marshall 2010: 667). In order to challenge negative stereotypes and encourage debate about these issues in diverse contexts, where possible our approach has been to show these original visual products alongside the speaking back versions. Confidentiality: Sharing Productions Publicly and Ensuring Anonymity Protecting participant identities in the manner required by most RECs is a somewhat contentious issue in PVR, which views participants as coresearchers, co-authors, and co-creators of knowledge, and aims to sup-

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port their agency (Fink and Lomax 2016; Leavy 2014). Proud of their cellphilm and digital story productions, and seeking acknowledgement of their work, following cinematic tradition, our participants added their names as credits at the end of their productions. The tension emerging from this involves, on the one hand, the need to abide by the requirements for participant anonymity that are particularly strict when we are working with a young, vulnerable population group on a sensitive subject area like sexual violence while, on the other, recognizing and acknowledging our participants’ desire to be recognized as the creators of their visual products and our reluctance to render them invisible. Undeniably, there are valid arguments in support of ensuring that participants remain anonymous as required in the conditions of the ethical clearance granted by the Research Ethics Board at McGill University in Canada and the REC at University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. We took particular care to protect participant identity by removing the names of all participants for all public exhibitions and publications and by asking the participants to create group, rather than individual visual products. Both groups chose names for themselves, and using these group names in the acknowledgements allows our co-researcher participants to be recognized for their work to a certain extent while protecting the identity of individuals. Some participants were initially rather puzzled by our emphasis on anonymity in distributing digital media productions since they were proud of their involvement in the workshops and could not foresee any danger in telling fictional group narratives. Yet they most actively embraced the use of visual techniques, which, in some ways, enabled us to protect their identities while boosting their own artistic expression (see Lin 2016). For example, DST enabled the participants to use photographic techniques to create faceless images as well as drawings that allow for anonymity to illustrate their stories. Indeed, in comparison to the cellphilms in which participant identities are clearly visible, the anonymous nature of the digital stories makes them easier to share with community partners and beyond. This contributes positively to advancing the policy-change focus of our project and enables us to avoid the risk of causing harm to the participants. These measures notwithstanding, we acknowledge that it is not really possible to protect the anonymity of our research participants completely since theirs are small communities. In addition to recognizing participant voices and narratives in the digital stories, it is likely that community 80

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members would have heard who was participating in the workshops and may easily assume who created which story. Therefore, rather than having individuals present their own work, we asked them to nominate a spokesperson to present each production on behalf of their group. Moreover, we made it clear at public screenings and exhibitions that all visual materials (and follow-up recommendations) emerged from the work of the groups as a whole and did not represent the views of any one participant. In this way, we tried to protect individuals from receiving negative feedback, and at the same time, enable them to exercise their right to speak for themselves and have their voices heard. Dissemination in Policy Spaces: Are There Times When Participants Should Not Be Present? Informed by the need to strike a balance “between promoting girls’ agency and recognizing the structural and systemic influences that constrain it” (Vanner 2019: 121), we reflect on a decision that we made as a research team that the girls should not be present at meetings with the community leadership and other adult stakeholders. It is the goal of Networks for Change to stimulate and facilitate girl-led policy change to address sexual violence. To this end, our participants have created visual products that can be used as tools for raising awareness, advocacy, and stimulating dialogue. Our aim is for the girls to be actively and meaningfully involved in as much of the research process as possible. Nevertheless, there have been times when we have decided that the girls should not be physically present. It is crucial to the success of the project that we have the buy-in of the community leadership and other adult policymakers and implementers. Consequently, during our consultations with community leaders on strategies for addressing sexual violence, we decided that the girls should not be present, not only to avoid compromising their safety and/or well-being but also to avoid compromising the opportunity to get the buy-in of these important stakeholders in the policymaking and policy-change processes. In these spaces, women’s and children’s voices are rarely considered welcome or appropriate. Our concern was that the girls’ presence at these meetings might be viewed as impertinent or disrespectful of the norms of the community. However, even though the girls were not present at these meetings, we contend that they were able to speak for themselves through their visual work, specifically their digital stories, which we screened. Further, the girls presented their own work and participated in discussions at 81

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other less contentious community events such as community dialogues. This concern raises the importance of a team of researchers understanding and working with the participants within the parameters of the norms of a community; this is perhaps even more important when we are working transnationally.

Conclusion Practicing an everyday ethics of doing most good is a messy business in which we as researchers are often confronted with new and unique situations and circumstances that require us to make ethical decisions that we judge to be in the best interests of the people with whom we work. Engaging with this messiness, in this chapter we have reflected on some of our experiences and learnings about the ethical use of PVM in a transnational project aimed at stimulating girl-led policy change to address sexual violence. Using PVM to address sensitive issues with vulnerable population groups is complex and often requires striking a delicate balance between competing ethical imperatives such as recognizing and supporting girls’ agency and autonomy and, at the same time, ensuring their safety and well-being. For us, using PVM to negotiate this tension moves us closer to creating an ethical framework for transnational research with girls.

Acknowledgements In addition to the funding from the International Development Research Centre for the Networks for Change project (grant number 107777-00) through the IPaSS partnership grant, this research was supported by funding from the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) (grant number: SAMRC/FORTE-RFA-01-2016) through the SAMRC-FORTE Collaborative Research Programme—an initiative jointly funded by the SAMRC and Forte, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare. Astrid Treffry-Goatley is a South African researcher based at the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her areas of interest include gender and health, girlhood studies, film studies, and 82

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ethnomusicology. She has extensive experience using participatory methods to understand and address key health challenges, including HIV-drug adherence, healthcare systems, and gender-based violence. Lisa Wiebesiek is the Research Manager of the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her current work focuses on using participatory visual methodology to work with girls and young women to better understand and address gender-based violence in rural communities. Naydene de Lange is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Education at the Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Her research focuses on using participatory visual methodologies in addressing gender and HIV&AIDS issues using a “research as social change” framework. Relebohile Moletsane is Professor and the J. L. Dube Chair in Rural Education in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, with research interests in poverty alleviation, HIV, gender inequality, and GBV as barriers to education and development. She is co-PI with Claudia Mitchell, of an IPaSS grant: “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Approaches to Addressing Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa.”

Notes This chapter is adapted from an earlier article: Treffry-Goatley, Astrid, Lisa Wiebesiek, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. “Technologies of Nonviolence: Ethical Participatory Visual Research with Girls.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10(2): 45–61. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2017.100205. 1. These particular examples focus on food security/insecurity. 2. The South African Schools Act no. 84 of 1996 mandates that no girl should be excluded from school because of pregnancy or motherhood.

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Jiwani, Yasmin, Candis Steenbergen, and Claudia Mitchell. 2006. “Introduction: Surveying the Terrain.” Girlhood: Redefining the Limits, ed. Yasmin Jiwani, Candis Steenbergen and Claudia Mitchell, ix–xvi. Montreal, CA: Black Rose Books. Johnson, Ginger, Anne Pfister, and Cecilia Vindrola-Padros. 2012. “Drawings, Photos, and Performances: Using Visual Methods with Children.” Visual Anthropology Review 28(2): 164–178. https://doi.org/1111/j.1548-458.2012.01122. Joyner, Kate. 2016. “The Epidemic of Sexual Violence in South Africa.” South African Medical Journal 106(11): 1067. https://doi.org/10.7196/SAMJ.2016 .v106i11.12097. Kirk, Jackie, Claudia Mitchell, and Jaqueline Reid-Walsh. 2010. “Toward Political Agency for Girls: Mapping the Discourses of Girlhood Globally.” In Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vascolles, 14–30. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lambert, Joe. 2013. Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives Creating Community. 4th ed. Berkeley, CA: Digital Diner Press. Lange, Margaret, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. 2013. “Vulnerability in Research Ethics: A Way Forward.” Bioethics 27: 333–340. Leavy, Patricia. 2014. Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. New York: The Guilford Press. Levine, Carol, Ruth Faden, Christine Grady, Dale Hammerschmidt, Lisa Eckenwiler, and Jeremy Sugarman. 2004. “The Limitations of ‘Vulnerability’ as a Protection for Human Research Participants.” The American Journal of Bioethics 4: 44–49. Lin, Vivian. 2016. “Remaining Anonymous: Using Participatory Arts-Based Methods with Migrant Women Workers in the Age of the Smartphone.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism, ed. Katie MacEntee, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, 67–86. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. MacEntee, Katie, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas. 2016. “Introduction.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism, ed. Katie MacEntee, Casey Burkholder and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, 1–15. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Mak, Monica, Claudia Mitchell, and Jean Stuart. 2005. “Our Photos, Our Videos, Our Stories.” Documentary film. Montreal, Canada: Taffeta Production. Mandrona, April. 2016a. “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9(3): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.3167/ ghs.2016.090302. ———. 2016b. “Visual Culture, Aesthetics, and the Ethics of Cellphilming.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism, ed. Katie MacEntee, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, 183–198. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. 85

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Mitchell, Claudia, and Naydene de Lange. 2013. “What Can a Teacher Do with a Cellphone? Using Participatory Visual Research to Speak Back in Addressing HIV and AIDS.” South African Journal of Education 33(4): 1–13. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2015. “Me and My Cellphone: Constructing Change from the Inside through Cellphilms and Participatory Video in a Rural Community.” Area: 1–7. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/area.12142. ———. 2016. “Poetry in a Pocket: The Cellphilms of South African Rural Women Teachers and the Poetics of the Everyday.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism, ed. Katie MacEntee, Casey Burkholder and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, 19–34. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jaqueline Reid-Walsh. 2008. “Girl Method: Placing Girl-Centred Research Methodologies on the Map of Girlhood Studies.” In Roadblocks to Equality: Women Challenging Boundaries, ed. Jeffrey Klaehn, 214–233. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Mitchell, Claudia, and Carrie Rentschler, eds. 2016. Girlhood and the Politics of Place. New York: Berghahn. Mitchell, Claudia, and Marni Sommer. 2016. “Participatory Visual Methodologies in Global Public Health.” Global Public Health 11(5–6): 521–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2016.1170184. Moletsane, Relebohile. 2007. “South African Girlhood in the Age of AIDS: Towards Girlhood Studies?” Agenda 21(72): 155–165. Moletsane, Relebohile, Claudia Mitchell, Naydene de Lange, Jean Stuart, Thabsile Buthelezi, and Myra Taylor. 2009. “What Can a Woman Do with a Camera? Turning the Female Gaze on Poverty and HIV and AIDS in Rural South Africa.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22(3): 1–36. Murove, Munyaradzi. 2009. African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics. Scottsville, RSA: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Okhahlamba Local Municipality. 2015. Okhahlamba Local Municipality Language Policy. Pietermaritzburg, RSA. Schwab-Cartas, Joshua, and Claudia Mitchell. 2014. “Cellphones, Participatory Video and Indigeneity in Community-Based Research.” McGill Journal of Education 49(3): 603–620. South Africa President’s Office. 1996. The South African Schools Act no. 84. Pretoria, RSA. South African Department of Health (DoH). 2015. Ethics in Health Research: Principles, Processes and Structures. Pretoria: Department of Health Republic of South Africa. Statistics South Africa (StatsSA). 2017. South African Demographic and Health Survey 2016: Key Indicator Report. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa.

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Theron, Linda, Jean Stuart, and Claudia Mitchell. 2011. “A Positive, African Ethical Approach to Collecting and Interpreting Drawings: Some Considerations.” In Picturing Research: Drawing as Visual Methodology, ed. Linda Theron, Claudia Mitchell, Ann Smith, and Jean Stuart, 49–62. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–132. https://doi.org/ 10.3167/ghs.2019.120209. Wang, Caroline. 2000. “The Future of Health Promotion: Talkin’ Technology Blues.” Health Promotion Practice 1(1): 77–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524 83990000100112. Watson, Caitlin, Shanade Barnabas, and Keyan Tomaselli. 2016. “Smaller Lens, Bigger Picture: Exploring Self-Generated Cellphilms in Participatory Research.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism, ed. Katie MacEntee, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, 35–50. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Weems, Lisa. 2009. “Border Crossing with MIA and Transnational Girlhood Studies.” In Challenges in Postcolonial Education, ed. Roland Sintos Coloma, 178–194. New York: Peter Lang. Weems, Lisa. 2014. “Refuting ‘Refugee Chic’: Transnational Girl(hood)s and the Guerilla Pedagogy of M.I.A.” Feminist Formations 26(1): 115–142.

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Alternative Imaginings

Re-searching Sexualized Violence with Rural Indigenous Girls Anna Chadwick

High numbers of Indigenous girls in Canada and around the world are targeted for sexualized violence. Transformative change is essential and long overdue (de Finney 2016; Sikka 2009), but how might we take ethical action to ignite such change and establish safer spaces for Indigenous girls? Research provides one pathway, but more traditional approaches are often informed by colonial epistemologies and tend to focus on the lives of Indigenous girls in terms of risk and crisis. The danger of this damagecentered approach is that girls are seen as “problems to be solved and subjects to be rescued” (de Finney 2016: 21). Despite systemic barriers that undermine their agency and preclude community cultural continuity, Indigenous girls are not victims. For Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “There are . . . many indigenous families and communities who possess the ancient memories of another way of knowing that informs many of their contemporary practices” (2007: 115). She writes, “When the foundations of those memories are disturbed . . . space sometimes is created for alternative imaginings to be voiced, to be sung, and to be heard (again)” (2007: Notes for this section can be found on page 106.

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115). In my work as an art therapist, frontline service provider, artist, and child and youth advocate in a rural Indigenous community in Canada, I ask how spaces for Indigenous girls can be created for such “alternative imaginings.” In this chapter, I reflect on the theoretical and ethical foundations of conducting research about sexualized violence with Indigenous girls and young women in rural Indigenous communities in Canada as part of a research project called “Sisters Rising: Shape Shifting Settler Violence through Art and Land Retellings” (hereafter referred to as Sisters Rising). I use reflexivity with visual arts-based inquiry to unsettle my relationships with the communities with whom I work and the land on which I work, reaching beyond traditional research ethics, which are seldom informed by Indigenous ethics or community frameworks. After providing a brief background and describing the research context and the Sisters Rising project, I reflect on the ethics of my position as a witness, on the ethics of honoring refusal, on the tensions of disseminating visual stories of rural communities, and on the imperative to acknowledge Indigenous resistance. In the context of the volume’s focus on transnational girlhoods, I explore how traditional research ethics intersect with Indigenous girls who live in Canadian rural communities. This includes a consideration of how an ethical framework is influenced by Indigenous values and discussions by the girls themselves. Recognizing that stories about violence are sometimes unspeakable, how do researchers honor girls’ voices as well as their refusal to talk about sexualized violence on a global stage? How do I witness in a way that creates the possibility for safer conditions for Indigenous girls to be heard?

Background Sexualized violence against Indigenous girls in Canada is linked to centuries of colonial state violence of displacement and assimilation, patriarchy, and racial inequity (Clark 2016a; de Finney et al. 2018; Hunt and Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) 2011). As Julia Emberley reminds us, Indigenous female bodies “came to embody violence” (2014: 152) as a result of patriarchal and colonial representations and policies constructed by the state. These representations dishonor Indigenous young women by constructing them within doctrines of victimization (2014). As state-sponsored initiatives such as the National Inquiry into Missing 89

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and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls investigate an epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, the strengths, visions, and resistance of Indigenous youth and women are often co-opted and subsumed within ideals of settler benevolence and legitimacy (Clark 2016b; Hargreaves 2017). Representational violence embedded in state-sponsored research, inquiries, social change movements, media, and public discourse stifles the embodied vitality of Indigenous girls (Clark 2016a, 2016b; de Finney 2016, 2017). In a nation in which tropes of reconciliation have become entrenched, unsettling them requires researchers to engage in active reflexive spaces that upset hegemonic norms (Ahmed 2002) and address power inequities. These spaces may be circles of witnessing in which the stories of sexualized violence against Indigenous youth and their actions are supported through renaming, contesting, retelling, and advocacy. Sisters Rising is one such circle. Researcher Positionality In my writing, I reflect on the ethics of my position as a witness and use reflexivity with visual arts-based inquiry to unsettle my relationships with the communities with whom I work, and the land on which I work. I explore how my research collaborations with girls and communities are shaped by my position as a racialized diasporic researcher in a settler colonial country. My family immigrated to Canada from South Africa in the 1970s to escape the racial division of the inhumane apartheid system. My mother is of Indian ancestry and was born and raised in South Africa during the height of apartheid. My father and his family are from northern Britain. I bring these experiences of living in transnational margins to this writing (hooks 1989). I have been invited to witness the stories of women and girls by the community where I live and work. However, these relationships are intertwined with tensions created by privileges of settler presence, and imbalances of power. For example, my presence as a racialized settler in Canada is implicated in the ethical tensions of this research. In what might be seen as a neoliberal irony, I am a biracial immigrant spared from the injustices of apartheid in South Africa on land where the Canadian state was the architect of a similar system where I am undoubtedly privileged. For instance, Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, reflects on the tensions in her position as she witnesses the adversity of the people and communities she photographs, noting, “My privileges are located in the space and land I occupy . . . located on the same map as

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their suffering and may—in ways we cannot imagine—be linked to their suffering” (2003: 80). As I leave the reserves where I work and where I have come to witness stories of sexualized violence, I am reminded that I have the power to leave whenever I want—by virtue of not being rooted to the land ancestrally, as well as my social class.

Sisters Rising My ethics are integrated with those of the arts-based research project, Sisters Rising, an ongoing collaboration with Indigenous girls, youth of all genders, and community members from urban and rural Indigenous communities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. Sisters Rising is part of a larger Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded transnational partnership of Canadian and South African researchers and community groups entitled “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa.”1 The Sisters Rising project takes an Indigenous approach to community and land-based research “to ensure self-determination, consent, and dignity at every step, and to honor the connection between our stories and our relations” (de Finney et al. 2018: 26). This project “challenges the victimblaming climate of racialized gender violence by re-centering Indigenous values and linking body sovereignty to questions of decolonization and land sovereignty” (2018: 24). The vision of Sisters Rising is to create an ethical framework for Indigenous anti-violence movements that focus on kinship making, place interconnectedness, and self-determination. The ethical and methodological commitment to body and land sovereignty in Sisters Rising is informed by the researchers “working in a good way” (Wilson 2008: 24) to use their experiences “as mothers, aunties, cousins, community members, kin, and children of our homelands” (de Finney et al. 2018: 26). In this project, participants engaged in arts-based research workshops to explore topics such as dignity, safety, sexualized and gender violence, and land-based well-being. Multimedia methods are employed, and many of the artworks created (such as photographs, videos, and digital collages) are displayed on the project website.2 Participants were asked a number of questions:

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What do young women need to create safe space in their communities to talk about sexualized violence? What does dignity look like? What contributes to wellness? What do girls and youth need from their homelands, ancestors, families, and communities to support self-determination?

Research Context My analysis in this chapter focuses on my work with Indigenous girls and young women in rural northern British Columbia, where I hosted group and individual arts-based workshops in a rural Indigenous community as part of the Sisters Rising project in the region. Indigenous girls and young people in rural communities, “with the weight of colonial history at their backs” (de Finney et al. 2020), are affected by circumstances of geographic isolation that increase their risk of being targets of violence. Community organizations in isolated communities and so-called Indian reserves identify a lack of appropriate services that incorporate the specific needs of rural areas and Indigenous frameworks (Hunt 2007; National Aboriginal Circle against Family Violence 2006). This lack of services creates gaps in social support, making youth more vulnerable to violence (de Finney et al. 2018; Hunt 2007; Hunt and JIBC 2011). State-controlled justice systems are a glaring example of how these gaps emerge. Often, girls wait for months and sometimes years for justice to be carried out on perpetrators of violence against them. For example, one of my participants, a young woman, auntie, student, and artist, observed, “Some natives have to wait for court for almost a year. Things need to change.” Many additional factors increase the likelihood of girls being targets of violence. Poverty, resource-based economies, lack of transportation, and challenges related to gender-ascribed roles are all factors that increase the risk that girls will be targets of violence. A report by Sarah Hunt and JIBC (2011) on the sexual exploitation of Indigenous youth in rural BC communities also identified how denial and silence about sexualized violence in communities perpetuate cycles of abuse. Because sexual exploitation is often interconnected within community and family, it is frequently undisclosed; sexualized violence “is often a taboo subject that is difficult to address” (2011: 29). When these factors intersect, as they do in communi92

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ties along what has been named “The Highway of Tears”3 in northern BC, Indigenous girls are “targeted for violence” (2011: 21). Methodology Young people aged thirteen to eighteen who self-identified as on- or offreserve First Nations, Métis, or Indigenous were invited to participate in arts-based workshops. Recruitment was flexible and included any youth interested in taking part.4 Community leaders and family members were also invited to participate. Using land-based materials such as bark, stones, feathers, hide, and bones, participants explored their visions for wellbeing, leadership, connections to family and ancestors, and ideas about how to stop sexualized violence. My methodology was emergent: using methods of their choice, including sculpture, storytelling, painting, drawing, photography, and walks on the land, participants explored the research questions: What objects from the land do you connect to? How do you connect to culture? What do girls and young women need to talk about in relation to sexualized violence? Who are important supports in your community? What do girls and young women need to do to address the silencing that surrounds sexualized violence? Recognizing that shame and stigma often accompany sexualized violence, emergent methods, evolving consent, and the choice of anonymity allowed for participants to choose their level of engagement and safety in relation to the topic.

Theoretical Foundations: (Re)mapping Space, (Re)mapping Relationships I am interested in interrogating ethics using reflexive narratives and artsbased inquiry in a process of unsettling space and relationships through Indigenous and borderland feminisms. My work is informed by Toni Morrison, who wrote, “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the 93

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New World—without the mandate of conquest” (1992: 3). In my work, I seek to (re)map, open, and story space and relationships. As discussed above, my positionality is a borderland, an experience of living in-between geographical and metaphorical spaces. Influenced by diverse overarching global power structures and colonial legacies, I acknowledge how my position in this borderland relates to tenets of transnational feminism. My ancestors, who came from a mix of cultures and diasporas, were indentured laborers who moved from many homelands to resist divisions of race, class, and colonial policies. To honor what they have survived, I resist identity politics that renounce the inherent fluidity of our lives and, instead, I consider spaces of co-creation. On a global platform, I appreciate the theory and coalition-building across borders (Mohanty 2003) that transnationalism proposes. However, with my relationships with the Indigenous communities with whom I work, I carefully consider our threads of both difference and connection. To our differences, I bring an ethic of incommensurability (Tuck and Yang 2012) to what I intend as a project of decolonization, striving to recognize within it what is “distinct and what is sovereign” (2012: 1). Even under the tenets of transnationalism, which identifies the inherent intersectionality of social divisions, solidarity requires the acceptance that differences across borders are “unsettling” (2012: 7). To interrogate the ethical spaces that I have to negotiate in my work, I (re)map this research through Indigenous and borderland feminisms that incorporate values of refusal and resistance. Borderland feminist theorists create “radical spaces of possibility” (hooks 1989: 24) and challenge gendered and imperial violence to dislocate what Leslie Brown and Susan Strega name “the colonizing traversals of thresholds” (2005: 142). Inhabiting borderlands, bell hooks asserts, is akin to choosing margins to occupy where the “process of envisioning can occur” (1989: 145). To account for the complexities that imperialist borders create, borderland feminism and cultural transnationalism theorize spaces in which ambiguity and uncertainty are welcomed. Borderland feminism validates voices that have been silenced and bodies that have been regulated (Anzaldúa 1987; Cruz 2001; Elenes 1997). Like transnationalism, this framework incorporates the everyday lives and knowledge of people whose homelands have been dispossessed by colonial subjugation as vital sites of knowledge (Cruz 2001; Million 2009; Moraga and Anzaldúa 2002). Intending to resist discourses of traditional knowledge production, borderland theories “utilize creative methodologies to interweave [the] testimonials, interviews, narratives and visual arts” (Elenes 94

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1997: 366) of those who reject the imperial violence inflicted on their bodies, communities, and land. The intention of this interwoven knowledge is to create counter-discourses that embody spaces of resistance (Brown and Strega 2005) that connect to land. This intention is what I bring to my work of witnessing the stories of sexualized violence in Indigenous communities.

Ethical Foundations: Re-searching with Ethics of Land and Fire In my work, I look to decolonizing methodologies that re-evaluate what is represented in visual documentation and data. This approach involves “understanding art and expression as inextricably linked to spirit and land, and therefore to the need to use research as a process of re-searching” (de Finney et al. 2018: 31, emphasis in original). Anticipating Western-style theoretical conversations about the ethics of this research, I foreground the “life and form” Indigenous girls “bring to theory every day” (Clark 2016a: 47) through art. I center the words and art of a Sisters Rising participant (see Illustration 4.1) as a reminder to readers/witnesses that at

Illustration 4.1. I Have Fire! Mask and text by Sisters Rising participant. Photograph by Anna Chadwick. 95

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the heart of this research are Indigenous girls who experience sexualized violence and the families, communities, and Nations who honor them. To represent the culture and strength of women in her Nation, a young participant created this mask that has a ptarmigan wing nested in moose hide. For her, fire represents her strength to “stand our grounds and put our foot down when anything is not okay.” Foregrounding this image is a deliberate move away from Western theories that focus on facts and academic expertise as foundations of socalled truth. The purpose of this shift is not to invalidate the vital work of theorists but to (re)center the vital presence of Indigenous girls and their communities that has always existed independent of Western theories. For centuries, generations of Indigenous women, immobilized by nationalistic colonial policies that incarcerated them on reserves, were bound to racialized and gendered spaces. For Indigenous scholar Mishuana Goeman (2013), these enduring spatial structures, in geography and in constructed knowledge, constrict Indigenous vitality and pathologize Indigenous bodies. My foregrounding of the image above is intended not to re-mythologize space, but to (re)map knowledge that addresses “violent atrocities while defining Native futures” (2013: 13). Goeman defines (re)mapping as a means of continuing the stories described by Gerald Vizenor (1999) as “survivance.” Such stories sustain vibrant futures that look toward “geographies that do not limit, contain, or fix the various scales of space from the body to the nation in ways that limit definitions of self and community” (1999: 11).

Assemblages: Disrupting Irrefutable Truths in Research Ethics In this section of the chapter, I incorporate what I think of as assemblages, intended as aesthetic spaces of assembled knowledge. I integrate photographs, personal narratives, land-based materials, poetry, and the artwork of Sisters Rising participants with “an agenda for radical cultural practice” (hooks 1989: 19). These assemblages evoke a felt sense of the ethical tensions I encountered while conducting this research. They convey emotional knowledge of collective experience, a type of knowledge that is often undermined in scholarly and scientific literature (Million 2009). In presenting them, I aim to disrupt what Emberley refers to as “hardened irrefutable regimes of truth” in research ethics. These assemblages are “testimonial sites” where “contingencies between texts” refuse 96

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the fusion of ideas but, at the same time, “encourage proximities in order to further collaboration and, even, contestations” (2014: 9). I envision them as points of discussion to foster a fluidity of perceptions and lived experiences in relation to the ethics of researching sexualized violence in rural Indigenous communities. In this narrative,5 I reflect on the feelings I experienced as I left a reserve after conducting workshops on sexualized violence. As I went to return home, I took a picture at the border of the community (juxtaposed behind the text in Illustration 4.2), where the gravel of the reserve meets the asphalt of the highway. In the rural north, there are places on the land that are breathtaking and places that are “haunted” (Tuck and Ree 2013: 639) by history. As I conduct workshops and reflect on the words of participants, on the colonial history of reserves, and on my mother’s stories of forced resettlements in South Africa, the borders of this reserve emerge as specters of violence and embodied shame on the land where I work. As I cross these borders, I am forced to confront the destructive impacts of political divisions and global structures identified by the tenets of transnationalism. Although many communities create vitality on reserves, these borders seem to “collapse time, rendering empire’s foundational past impossible to erase from the national present metaphor of subordination”

Illustration 4.2. Uneven Borders. Text and photograph by Anna Chadwick. 97

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(2013: 629). As I create this assemblage, I feel the discomfort of these borders and consider the privilege of crossing them freely as I enter and leave. I experience this disquiet with a felt sense of lived knowledge that Dian Million thinks of as theory that is felt—a social discourse on how we “feel our histories as well as think of them” (2009: 54). Left to the whims of colonial and patriarchal policies, the ancestral matriarchs of the girls with whom I work were forced to abandon unbound territories to live in demarcated reserves where state laws diminished their power and presence. The Indian reserve in Canada was a zone of colonial incarceration where, as Emberley explains, “[t]he isolating spatiality of the reserve reified a racially encoded system of difference designed to install pure boundaries of noncontact” (2014: 248). Dehumanizing policies, such as the reserve system, bound women to state ownership that extinguished their land and body sovereignty and marked their bodies as objects of violence (Goeman 2013). The narrative in Illustration 4.2 above addresses how the ethics of this study require reflexivity if I am to consider felt theory and the larger historical and contemporary discursive connections to community and land that this research encompasses.

Approaching the Topic of Sexualized Violence in Indigenous Rural Communities Many research projects have used visual arts-based methods as effective tools to engage children and youth in reflection and change (Malchiodi 2015; Steele and Malchiodi 2012). As an art therapist, I routinely witness the transformative and positive influence of art on the lives of young people. However, given the complex historical foundations of sexualized violence in rural Indigenous communities, I looked to the girls with whom I work when I was formulating ethics for this arts-based project and followed their lead. Young people in rural Indigenous communities often discuss their fear of repercussions of talking about sexualized violence (Hunt and JIBC 2011)—they fear blame and sometimes further violence if sexualized violence is disclosed and perpetrators are identified. According to these authors, “abuse is often intergenerational and is a topic that is silenced” (2011: 31). As a frontline worker in an isolated community, I am aware of the “often serious repercussions of speaking out” (30) and the shame 98

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and stigma that envelop abuse. When I ask young people to participate in workshops, I respect their hesitance to engage publicly in research on sexualized violence, as the following exchange demonstrates.6 Sisters Rising participant (SRP): Will anyone hear my voice? Anna: Do you want anyone to hear your voice? SRP: (in a whisper) No. Is it okay if it’s just you [who hears my voice]? Anna: Yes, I won’t let anyone hear this. SSP: Okay, yeah, that’s what I want. I listened carefully to this young woman’s stories, concerns, and ideas for change as we walked on the land. It was evident that these stories and this request were for a private space that did not include the gaze and hearing of others. During interviews with community knowledge keepers and youth, a pattern of silence and stigma about sexualized violence in the community emerged. As a participant expressed, “The silence [about sexualized violence] is deafening.” There is a reason for this fear, this urge to protect. As I continued with the workshops, some participants did not want to reveal their names publicly. In closed circles, I heard many stories and witnessed many images created through art that related to sexualized violence. Outside closed circles, in public spaces of research, community members fear how research findings will affect their families and community. In addition, girls and community knowledge keepers informed me of their concerns about how their stories of violence included others. In a study by Marnina Gonick, Veronica Gore, and Lisa Christmas, a participant observed that telling one’s stories of violence “would also mean telling the stories of my family members—my parents and extended family—and these are stories that are not mine to tell” (2018: 244). The girls’ concerns evoke the values of their collective community in which the ripples of violence affect everyone, not just individuals. As a researcher in this project, I acknowledged how this fear and the concerns expressed require sensitivity and consideration. Transnational girlhood emphasizes the need for activism and voice, and for giving opportunities to girls to speak on a global stage. When girls have safe spaces and the words to speak openly about topics about which they are passionate, a tenet of transnational girlhood is enacted. However, as Indigenous girls articulated in this study, sexualized violence is layered with stigma, blame, and shame. How can a transnational girlhood thrive when girls do not feel safe or, worse still, do not have the words to speak about the 99

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sexualized violence they suffer? How can girls who request private spaces of witnessing or who do not have the safety to talk about violence be included in a transnational girlhood movement based on sharing spoken words? Honoring Refusal The pain that emerges from researching sexualized violence is steeped in shame that pillages dignity. Intimately aware, as a visual researcher and art therapist, of the power art holds to move and reveal places of intensity and vulnerability, I consider the ethics of publicly disseminating pain-filled discourses and images of sexualized violence on websites and in publications. Despite the emancipatory possibilities of visual research, arts-based methods are also influenced by legacies of colonial inquiry that is driven by a need “to traverse, to know, to translate, to own and exploit” (Garneu 2016: 23). Tuck and Yang encourage researchers to “take up a stance of objection, one that will interrogate power and privilege, and trace the legacies and enactments of settler colonialism in everyday life” (2014a: 814). In this project, I enact what they call an ethic of refusal, where refusal is not just a no but a starting place for other forms of qualitative research. The ethic of refusal requires researchers to challenge the motive of inquiry and ask different questions. For example, in an ethnographic study, Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson enacts an ethic of refusal in her community, asking, “What am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?” (2007: 77). My ethics of refusal in this project is not about silencing or hiding the traumatic experiences of violence of the girls with whom I work. Instead, the intention is to challenge my position as a researcher. How might my methodologies inadvertently reproduce stereotypes of marginalized Indigenous youth (like, for example, one-sided images of Indigenous girls as victims) and feed national myths that Indigenous girls and Nations are in need of rescue? An ethics of refusal also challenges theories of change that are embedded in colonial research and inquiries, including research that involves individuals or communities collecting evidence of damage to convince powerful organizations outside their communities to give up resources (Tuck and Yang 2014a). “Such a theory of change,” Tuck argues, “is flawed for at least three reasons: it requires individuals and communities to depict themselves in a one-dimensional way as damaged; it locates power completely outside of communities; it rarely actually works” (2009a: 119). 100

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Illustration 4.3. Blanketing Stories and Honoring Refusal. Photograph by Anna Chadwick. Here, I use art to think and feel through the theory of (honoring) refusal. The bowl in the photograph contains the art and words created by Sisters Rising participants who did not want their names or stories recorded, or their art displayed publicly. I covered the bowl with objects from the land from the girls’ territory. The art the girls created is powerful, painfully moving, and visually amazing. I honor their refusal to reveal their stories of sexualized violence to the public. Covering the bowl represents my refusal to reveal intimate stories to satisfy the curiosity of academia and the broader Canadian audience, including myself. As researchers, we want to know what is inside, to know about this violence. This desire to know 101

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creates an imperative for girls to voice their experiences, but who does this knowledge benefit? As Shawn Wilson asks, “What will this knowledge be used for?” (2008: 34). Speaking Pain As I discuss above, my ethical commitment in this project is not to silence or to hide traumatic experiences of violence. Girls in the community in which I work express their resistance to violence in many ways to witnesses they have chosen. The stories about sexualized violence I witness in community circles, art therapy sessions, and research workshops are painful, and this pain must be expressed. But, as hooks (1989) insists, speaking pain must be approached with careful awareness of who is asking to hear it. We know what it is like to be silenced. We know the forces that silence us because they never want us to speak, differ from the forces that say, speak, tell me your story. Only do not speak in the voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain. (1989: 24)

I am acutely aware that bringing these stories and images of violence into public spheres not only affects those who witness them but carries the risk of inviting victim-blaming and victimization. In the public sphere, Indigenous girls—and their communities—do not have control over who witnesses their stories; these are open to public scrutiny and hegemonic interpretation. For example, disseminating stories to a Canadian audience takes place within a discursive setting in which “the risks of co-option or suppression are high” (Hargreaves 2017: 132). As Million (2009) argues, mainstream Canadian society reads stories of Indigenous people through narratives thick with pathology. Such damage-centered research constructs spaces of knowledge that are “saturated in the fantasies of outsiders” (Tuck 2009b: 412). As I research sexualized violence in the community, I ask: What am I hearing? What am I asking girls to create to display to a public audience? Can systemic historical violence be changed by peering at the pain of others? According to Sontag, the pain-filled details of suffering are only meant for “those who can alleviate it . . . the rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be” (2003: 42). Métis artist David Gaertner (2016) insists that 102

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Indigenous wounds inflicted through systemic violence are not for public spheres of critique and theorizing; the pain of violence creates private spaces not meant for analysis by the general public. The knowledge that the girls share is powerful, but are public spaces the only places in which to speak about sexualized violence? What about the private space of kitchen table conversations (Simpson 2011), intimate spaces of witnessing (Clark 2016a), and places on the land (de Finney et al. 2018)? David Gaertner (2016) describes how Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore,7 in her video installation “Apparition,” conveys her refusal to display her pain to the audience and simultaneously refuses explanation or closure. The intention of her piece is to “refuse to speak, to translate, to provide an explanation; it refuses assimilation into a settler colonial narrative of reconciliation” in which “public display of private (Native) pain leads to individual and national healing” (Gaertner 2016: 149). Talking publicly about issues of violence that affect girls in their communities may not be an appropriate transnational girlhood practice under these circumstances. Binding pain in national tropes of reconciliation is ineffective in evoking change in communities because power imbalances remain. As Belmore’s work exemplifies, visual art has compelling potential to reveal inequities of power in violence, but the questions remain: What may be revealed and for whom? (Re)Mapping Resistance From an ethical perspective, (re)mapping resistance is required in an Indigenous context because the state refuses to see any Indigenous context as an effectual source of social change. Indigenous resistance challenges colonial stereotypes of Indigenous identity and draws on the strengths of community, family, and connections to land and culture (Anderson and Lawrence 2003; Brant 1994; de Finney 2017; L. Simpson 2011). In the following exchange, a Sisters Rising participant describes resistance as fire: SRP: We need to stand our grounds and put our foot down when anything’s not okay. Anna: What helps girls put their foot down? SRP: The fire! Anna: Tell me about the fire. SRP: Fire is my hope that girls recognize how to be treated and know that they are beautiful and strong, and they can do anything they want, and no man can bring you down. 103

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In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence, Leanne Simpson (2011) summarizes the teachings of Métis Elder Maria Campbell. Simpson notes that resistance is “the act of throwing a stone into the water” where “subtle waves of disruption echo out from where stones hit the water” (Simpson 2011: 145). Women and their communities have always enacted resistance, Simpson says, and often alongside violence. “As long as there has been colonialism on our lands, there has been resistance” (2011: 101). Clark conveys this resistance with the words of activist Beth Brant in saying, “Her voice echoes into me now. ‘We are not victims. We are organizers. We are freedom fighters. We are feminists. We are healers. This is not anything new, for centuries it has been so’” (quoted in Clark 2016a: 49, emphasis in original). Sisters Rising research acknowledges the ethical requirement to create space for dynamic resistance that allows for girls to connect to land and body sovereignty. According to Leanne Simpson, resistance includes “re/articulating legal systems, speaking traditional language, engaging in ceremonial and spiritual pursuits and creating performance-based traditions” (2011: 17). Liberal political movements often confine youth resistance in a public context to narrowly defined terms of measurable social change as Tuck and Yang (2014b) note. In contrast, these two scholars speak of resistance as profound acts of “deep participation, bone-deep participation, acts that would change the lives of participants and the lives of those around them” (2014b: 14). They define this participation as small movements created in the daily acts of living, independent of state-sponsored initiatives. In other words, “resistance is resisting even when we think it is not doing anything, even when we’re not looking” (2014b: 42). They assert that these forms of youth resistance “offers other forms of survivance, decolonial possibilities, agnosticism with progress, and desires for dignity that would enrich the currently paltry discussion on theories of change” (2014b: 47). Reminded by Tuck and Yang that resistance and change often happen “when we’re not looking” (2014b: 42), I have witnessed many forms of resistance in the Sisters Rising project that defy inconsequential discussions of liberal change. Whether it is on social media networks with close friends or in privacy with their Elders and aunties, I have also witnessed how girls in rural communities resist and assert change in settings of their choice. As Indigenous girls in rural communities throw stones in the water with their visions of change, how do these ripples expand?

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Conclusion The ethics of this research on sexualized violence goes beyond what is considered right or good. Understanding ethics in this study requires embodied reflexivity, often entangled in the margins of colonial histories. My reflections on the ethics of this project are offered as beginnings without endings, drops in the water, and a means to undo what I know. It is my hope as a Sisters Rising researcher that in witnessing girls’ stories of violence, however uncomfortable it makes me to do so, I leave behind my timelines, colonizing curiosities, and imperial benevolence to foreground the lives, relationships, and dignity of the girls with whom I work. Researching sexualized violence with Indigenous girls in rural communities in Canada requires encountering and (re)mapping my own relationships with land, however unsettling that might be. These encounters require connecting with the hauntings and the memories of land in which we and our participants are intimately entangled. As Million insists, “[t]hose whose subjective history this is must speak it, since the emotional resonance still lives through them; because we are who we are because of this history that continuously haunts our storied bodies and lands” (2009: 72). In my ethics, I leave the intimate, vital stories of the girls with whom I work to be witnessed in reciprocal spaces where the vitality of local traditional knowledge and the strengths of a collective community hold the potential to blanket youth in compassion and “relational and intimate spaces of witnessing” (Clark 2016a: 56). I express gratitude to the knowledge keepers and young people in Indigenous communities who contribute generously to the Sisters Rising project. With fire in their hearts, they resist violence that has been inflicted on their communities for centuries. Indigenous girls and their communities are powerful—in the words of a Sisters Rising participant, “My power is greater than what I’ve been through.” In their collective resistance, insight, and visions for change, they shatter outsider illusions that they are victims in need of rescue. It is my wish that girls create alternative spaces, as they always have, in their communities, and in the Sisters Rising project, where violence does not speak for them. This is where girls weave together their visions and the ancestral stories that blanket them, creating presence, emergence, and resistance. These visions are always in motion, (re)mapping spaces uninhabited by dispossession or concealment.

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Anna Chadwick works in British Columbia, Canada, as an art therapist and clinical counsellor with children and youth who have experienced sexualized violence. Anna completed her graduate degree in Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria and was a principal investigator of the project, Sisters Rising.

Notes 1. The SSHRC-funded “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” project is led by co-principal investigators, Dr. Claudia Mitchell from McGill University and Dr. Relebohile Moletsane from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (http:// www.networks4change.ca/). 2. Sisters Rising, “Welcome to Sisters Rising.” www.sistersrising.uvic.ca. 3. It is estimated that from 1969 to 2006, eighteen girls and women, many of whom were Indigenous, went missing and/or were murdered along Highway 97 and Highway 5. The latter is a 1,500 km section of highway in northern British Columbia, Canada, which stretches from Prince George to Prince Rupert. This section of the highway was named “The Highway of Tears” after a vigil held in Terrace, British Columbia, to commemorate six women who went missing from this area (Carrier Sakani Family Services 2019). 4. To maintain confidentiality, all participants in my research are anonymous in this chapter, including participants, Elders, knowledge holders, and other community members. 5. A version of the first paragraph of this narrative appears in Anna Chadwick (2019: 108). 6. The sample of this interview appears in Anna Chadwick (2019: 105). 7. Rebecca Belmore is a multidisciplinary artist from the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe). Belmore’s work is rooted in the social and political realities of Indigenous communities in North America.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2002. “The Contingency of Pain.” Parallax 8(1): 17–34. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534640110119597. Anderson, Kim, and Bonita Lawrence. 2003. Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival. Toronto: Sumach Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Brant, Beth. 1994. Writing as Witness: Essay and Talk. Toronto: Women’s Press. Brown, Leslie Allison, and Susan Strega. 2005. Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

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Carrier Sekani Family Services. 2019. “Highway of Tears: Preventing Violence Against Women.” Retrieved 18 June 2019 from https://www.highwayoftears .org. Chadwick, Anna. 2019. “Imagining Alternative Spaces.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(3): 99–115. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2019 .120309. Clark, Natalie. 2016a. “Red Intersectionality and Violence-Informed Witnessing Praxis with Indigenous Girls.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9 (2): 46–64. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2016.090205 ———. 2016b. “Shock and Awe: Trauma as the New Colonial Frontier.” Humanities 5(1): 14–29. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5010014. Cruz, Cindy. 2001. “Towards an Epistemology of the Brown Body.” Qualitative Studies in Education 14: 657–669. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518390110 059874. de Finney, Sandrina. 2016. “Under the Shadow of Empire: Indigenous Girls’ Presencing as Decolonizing Force.” In Girlhood and the Politics of Place, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler, 19–37. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2017. “Indigenous Girls’ Resilience in Settler States: Honouring Body and Land Sovereignty.” Agenda 31(2): 10–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1013 0950.2017.1366179. de Finney, Sandrina, Anna Chadwick, Chantal Adams, Shantelle Moreno, Angela Scott, and Shezell-Rae Sam. 2020. “Being Indigenous is Not a Risk Factor: A Sisters Rising Story of Resurgence and Sovereignty.” In Child & Youth Care across Sectors, vol. 2K, ed. Kiaras Gharabaghi and Grant Charles. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. de Finney, Sandrina, Shantelle Moreno, Anna Chadwick, Chantal Adams, ShezellRae Sam, Angela Scott, and Nicole Land. 2018. “Sisters Rising: Shape Shifting Settler Violence through Art and Land Retellings.” In Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane, 21–46. Boston: Brill Sense. Elenes, C. Alejandra. 1997. “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy. Educational Theory 47: 359–375. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.1997.00359.x. Emberley, Julia. 2014. The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices. Albany: SUNY Press. Gaertner, David. 2016. “‘Aboriginal Principles of Witnessing’ and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ed. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 135–156. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

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Garneau, David. 2016. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ed. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 21–42. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Goeman, Mishuana. 2013. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gonick, Marnina, Veronica Gore, and Lisa Christmas. 2018. “A Collective Triologue on Sexualized Violence and Indigenous Women.” In Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane, 21–46. Boston: Brill Sense. Hargreaves, Allison. 2017. Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press. Hunt, Sarah. 2007. Services for Aboriginal Victims in Rural and Isolated Communities: Innovative Models of Service Delivery. Vancouver: Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, Victim Services and Crime Prevention Division. Hunt, Sarah, and Justice Institute of British Columbia, School of Community and Social Justice Staff. 2011. Restoring the Honouring Circle: Taking a Stand against Youth Sexual Exploitation. Victoria: Government of British Columbia. Malchiodi, Cathy A. 2015. Creative Interventions with Traumatized Children. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press. Million, Dian. 2009. “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Wicazo Sa Review 24: 53–76. https://doi.org/10.1353/ wic.0.0043. Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 2002. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 3rd ed. Berkeley: Third Woman Press. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. National Aboriginal Circle against Family Violence. 2006. Ending Violence in Aboriginal Communities: Best Practices in Aboriginal Shelters and Communities. Ottawa: National Aboriginal Circle against Family Violence. Sikka, Anette. 2009. Trafficking of Aboriginal Women and Girls in Canada. Ottawa, ON: Institute on Governance. Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67–80.

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Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2007. “On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty.” In The Landscape of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, 113–143. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Sontag, Susan, 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Steele, William, and Cathy A. Malchiodi. 2012. Trauma-Informed Practices with Children and Adolescents. New York: Routledge. Tuck, Eve. 2009a. “Re-visioning Action: Participatory Action Research and Indigenous Theories of Change.” The Urban Review 41(1): 47–65. https://doi .org/10.1007/s11256-008-0094. ———. 2009b. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79(3): 409–427. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n00 16675661t3n15. Tuck, Eve, and C. Ree. 2013. “A Glossary of Haunting.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, ed. Stacy Linn Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 639–658. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. Decolonization is not a Metaphor. Decolonization 1(1): 1–40. Retrieved 25 August 2018 from https://jps.library .utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630. ———. 2014a. “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 20(6): 811–818. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077 800414530265. ———. 2014b. Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change. New York: Routledge. Vizenor, Gerald Robert.1999. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point, NS: Fernwood.

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Cellphilming and Consent

Young Indigenous Women Researching Gender-Based Violence The Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia with Katie MacEntee, Jennifer Altenberg, Sarah Flicker, and Kari-Dawn Wuttunee

There are multiple and sometimes conflicting principle and policy frameworks that influence research ethics practices. Policies governing Canadian research ethics with human participants stress three foundational principles: respect for human dignity, concern for welfare, and justice (CIHR et al. 2014). Other ethical considerations are also salient in work undertaken with diverse populations in community-based settings (Flicker et al. 2007). Research done in partnership with Indigenous communities may favor approaches that are decolonizing and culturally safe (Smith 1999). Research focused on addressing gender-based violence (GBV) may prioritize traumainformed practices. Diverse research teams, especially when they are made up of individuals who align themselves or are beholden to one set of principles or policies over others, must bridge institutional constraints involving values in order to conduct their research in an ethical fashion. In this chapter, we explore how ethical considerations intersect with cellphilming, a guided participatory visual research method wherein par-

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ticipants create short videos using mobile technology (see MacEntee et al. 2016). Four key questions guided our analysis. How do young Indigenous women negotiate ethics related to using cellphilms to research GBV? How do current best practices respect or inhibit their negotiation of self-representation and ownership? How can notions of transnational feminism and the idea of bordercrossing help us understand the implications of our work? What lessons can be learned from a consideration of young Indigenous women’s experiences about conducting research more ethically? We begin by introducing ourselves and offering an overview of current best practice ethical guidelines in relation to research with Indigenous communities and young people in Canada using visual methods. Next, we present a description of our research project and the cellphilms that participants produced. We highlight how consent, anonymity, and ownership were negotiated throughout the project. We use the notion of border-crossing, as described by transnational feminists Jennifer Bickham Mendez and Diane L. Wolfe (2001), to theorize the significance of these negotiations in relation to the development of a girl-centered and decolonizing participatory visual method for research on GBV. We conclude that, by engaging deeply with the ethics of cellphilm method, we were able to carve out opportunities for ongoing transnational conversations on Indigenous girlhood and GBV.

A Note on Authorship: Who Are We? As we embark on our examination of transnational girlhoods, we acknowledge that we are working across and attempting to bridge multiple borders, including (but not limited to) race, culture, and scholarship. This contributed to a negotiation of authorship that was fraught and emotional, and that changed over time. Following in the footsteps of other feminist collaborations (see Liboiron et al. 2017), we wanted to honor the unique contributions that different people brought to this work, and push back against the conventions of colonial hierarchal authorship. We have listed the Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia (YIWU) as first author to center this collective of young Indigenous women who are courageously 111

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resisting settler colonial oppression and GBV. Katie MacEntee (a white settler university-based scholar) did most of the writing. Community scholars Jennifer Altenberg (a Michif educator) and Kari-Dawn Wuttunee (a community health manager from Red Pheasant Cree Nation) are the founders of the group and the driving force behind the research activities on the ground. They consulted with the YIWU to ensure that the content of the chapter met with their approval. Sarah Flicker, (a white settler professor) provided support, facilitation, and editing. Consequently, we are MacEntee, Altenberg, Flicker, and Wuttunee. Although we brought this chapter into existence, YIWU and the individual girls who make up this group are at the heart of this work.

Canadian Colonialism in Health Research: Young Indigenous Women, Violence, and Surveillance The Canadian research community has a long history of violating the human rights of young Indigenous people. For instance, in 1948, approximately a thousand Indigenous children at six residential schools were enrolled as subjects (without their assent or their parents’ consent) in a five-year study of malnutrition (Mosby 2013). Researchers systematically deprived these children of their daily recommended nutrients for up to two years. In another example of gross injustice, the Federal Government funded many forced sterilizations of young Indigenous women held in residential schools in British Columbia and Alberta (Pegoraro 2015). As a result of these (and other) atrocities perpetrated in the name of so-called science, many Indigenous communities consider research a dirty word (Smith 1999) and have come to distrust the academy. Canada continues to engage in the colonial systemic oppression of Indigenous people (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015; Woolford and Benvenuto 2015). Billie Allan and Janet Smylie (2015) point out that, compared to non-Indigenous girls and women, Indigenous women experience disproportionately higher rates of ill-health and disease, incarceration, poverty, insecure housing, and violence. Indeed, the rates of policing, surveillance, and incarceration of Indigenous women stands in almost inconceivable contrast with the police’s disregard for the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Jaskiran Dhillon writes,

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[There] is an entire circulation of networked settler state power that targets Indigenous girls in egregious and insidious ways, where they are. Sometimes this is dressed up as “crime prevention” and sometimes it is camouflaged under the guise of “community policing.” Regardless of the way it is classified by the state . . . it is still abhorrent colonial gender violence. (2015: 2–3)

She argues that it is critical to listen to young Indigenous women as they speak back to the settler state’s history of ignorance and indifference toward the injustices perpetrated against Indigenous communities.

Ethics and Indigenous Research In a nod to reconciliation, research in Canada today involving people who identify as First Nations, Métis, or Inuit is recognized as distinct from research with the general public and requires special attention to protocol (Flicker and Worthington 2012). Chapter 9 of the Tri-Council Policy Statement (CIHR et al. 2014) emphasizes the collaboration, participation, and establishment of meaningful and ongoing relationships between researchers and Indigenous participants. While recognizing the importance of national policies and guidelines, an ethical research practice must also appreciate the heterogeneity of Indigenous communities and local practices. According to Indigenous scholar Willie Ermine, research ethics cannot be divorced from the context of relational Indigenous ways of knowing. Elders and the oral traditions provide us with the codes of conduct as human beings within our communities. Additionally, there are those ethical boundaries established by collective principles, such as our knowledge systems, the autonomy of our human communities, or our treaties. This is a heritage from our past that not only informs us of our roots to antiquity and the rights to traditions entrusted to our people, but it also reminds us of what is important in life as we collectively negotiate the future. (2007: 195)

Culturally appropriate protocol includes consulting local leaders and tribal authorities to ask for permission and guidance to conduct research. Local elders can become contextual ethical consultants who help ensure participants’ safety, as well as inform the research team on appropriate community engagement strategies (Flicker et al. 2015). Indigenous communities, scholars, and their allies have made great strides in the development of more appropriate and adaptable ethical practices for conducting

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research with Indigenous communities. Increasingly, as Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane (2018) observe, Indigenous communities are innovating locally and connecting across transnational borders to articulate their own ethical visions and practices.

Research Ethics and Children Children (under the age of legal consent) should not be excluded from research on account of their age but may be limited in their capacity to decide to participate in research (CIHR et al. 2014). Therefore, researchers regularly seek assent from the child participant and consent from a legal parent or guardian. However, an unquestioned requirement for guardian consent can conflict with ethical imperatives regarding rights and justice for young people. Sarah Flicker and Adrian Guta (2008) explain that requiring guardian consent can decrease young people’s willingness to participate, and their access to meaningful engagement with research. For example, two-spirited, gay, bisexual, and transgender young folk may avoid participating in research if it requires disclosing their sexual or gender identity to their parents in order to obtain consent. Youth-centered ethical practices may include, instead, adopting community-based research practices that support youth leadership in both the research and in the community and/or partnering with local, national, transnational, and international community programs that have existing relationships with young people. Indigenous peoples have long been concerned with protecting and empowering their children and young people, so consulting with local leaders may lead to new opportunities for their safer inclusion.

The Ethics of Participatory Visual Methods Flicker and colleagues (2013) note that participatory visual methods position participants as knowledge experts, artists, and cultural producers. This positioning challenges the necessity of the cloak of confidentiality often preferred by researchers operating in other paradigms. When they are engaged in PVM, some participants may choose anonymity; others want to be visible. Decisions about how young people want themselves and their work to be represented, shared, and credited are nuanced and sticky, but negotiable (Gubrium et al. 2014; Prosser et al. 2008; Wang and 114

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Redwood-Jones 2001). Aline Gubrium, Louis Graham, and Sarah Lowe (2017) express concern about the potential of reproducing damaging and/ or harmful narratives through visual media. For example, Sarah Flicker and Katie MacEntee describe a digital storytelling workshop during which a young Indigenous woman created a highly politicized piece about her community. She refrained from showing it outside of the community for fear that it would “paint her community in a negative light” (2020: 272). This risk is further articulated by Gillian Black and colleagues (2018), who note that it is impossible to predict the visual outputs participants will produce, and that unforeseen vulnerabilities may become visible only after audience feedback. When participatory visual methods are involved, consent cannot be reduced to one form that is signed in a single meeting. Maintaining prolonged contact with participants to revisit consent options allows everyone time to reflect on how visual work can be integrated productively into knowledge translation activities (MacEntee and Flicker 2019).

Intersectional and Transnational Framework We frame our analysis of research ethics within the concepts of feminist intersectionality and transnational girlhood. Feminist intersectional theory conceptualizes inequality and marginalization based on multiple, overlapping, and interlocking identities (Crenshaw 1991) that have an impact on the lived realities of girls and women. The oppression that women and girls suffer is heterogeneous and complex. For Catherine Vanner (2019), the notion of transnational girlhood draws on feminist intersectionality in highlighting the heterogeneity of girls’ experiences of oppression along with that of their social agency. Like Vanner, we understand girlhoods as being shaped by global, national, and local forces. Following transnational feminism, transnational girlhood requires a commitment to the kind of decolonization articulated by Chandra Mohanty (2003). This includes her critique of how Western feminist scholarship on non-Western women (and girls) has often overlooked the important contributions of these so-called Third World women. We are further influenced by Mendez and Wolf ’s (2001) use of border and border-crossing as a heuristic device to help illustrate “the complex dynamics that arose within the internal processes and activities” (2001: 724) of their research program. For Mendez and Wolf, the term border refers to limits of different types of power and connection. Power can be displayed in complex ways, including matron-like relation115

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ships developing between a participant and a member of the project team. While establishing a matron-like association might be well-intentioned, it also contributes to relationship building that can be neo-colonial in nature and can maintain hierarchies of Western-based imperialist knowledge over Indigenous and relational knowledge systems. In the context of the YIWU project, we consider borders of power associated with being a member of the research team in contrast and in collaboration with girls, guardians, and the community (while recognizing that these borders are far more fluid for some on our team than others). This fits well with the intersectional framework that drives a consideration of how gender, alongside race, class, and age, as well as settler colonialism with its privilege and the resultant oppressed nationhood, influence experience. Border-crossing, according to Mendez and Wolf, is the work of transnational feminism. We use the concept to help us theorize how Indigenous girls negotiate consent in cellphilm method that contributes to the development of girl-led networks of young people locally, nationally, and internationally speaking back to GBV.

Laying the Groundwork for the YIWU Project The YIWU project was developed with the support of the “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” project. The YIWU works closely with Indigenous girls, aged between twelve and eighteen, in Saskatoon. Also known as Treaty 6, these territories are the traditional homeland of the Métis. We aim to create an empowering environment where young women can express themselves freely. As part of our first initiative, MacEntee introduced cellphilm method to explore intersections of race, decolonization, and GBV. We soon realized the potential of cellphilms for helping the group build a local and a transnational community that challenges the injustices they face in a way that foregrounds their rights. Wuttunee and Flicker worked together to develop the original ethical protocol submitted to the York University Ethics Review Committee (ERC) and to York University’s Special Committee for Research Involving Indigenous Peoples. We constructed a protocol that tried to balance principles of, and guidelines on, conducting research with Indigenous communities and children while using participatory visual methods. Our goal 116

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was to give the girls a description of how they might or might not want to be identifiable in the research. We also wanted to highlight their ownership of the visual media they produced, as well as their right to determine how this visual media can be used by the research team. We created what we think of as a typical research consent form. It included a description of the research project and requirements of participation; it outlined the rights of research participants, any potential risks and benefits of participating, and the limitations on confidentiality and anonymity. In order to indicate their consent, and in light of the visual media that they were expected to produce during the research process, the girls needed to indicate their willingness to share their visual products through a series of yes/no statements (see Table 5.1). We developed this nuanced approach to give girls more control over how they would like to be identified in relation to the research, and also to respect their ownership of all cellphilms they created during the project. Table 5.1. Excerpt from the consent form. Yes

No

It is OK to take videos of me participating in the project that will be used internally for analysis. It is OK to take videos of me participating in the project that will be used externally (e.g., shared publically in reports, websites, publications, presentations). It is OK to audio-record my voice while participating in the project, so that info I provide gets used internally for analysis. It is OK to audio-record my voice while participating in the project, so that info I provide gets used externally (e.g., shared publically in reports, websites, publications, presentations). It is OK to for the project to publicly share (in reports, screenings, exhibitions, publications, presentations, etc.) pictures or movies or other art that I create in this project. 117

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York University approved the ethical protocol. Altenberg and Wuttunee explained the consent form to potential participants in detail at the first meeting with them. In accordance with the legal age of majority in Canada, guardian consent was required for all girls aged sixteen and younger. After the project information session, the girls took the forms home to discuss them with their parents or guardians. When the consent forms were returned with, when required, a parent or guardian’s signature, it was clear that there was some confusion about the form. In answer to some questions, both the Yes and the No boxes had been checked. Some people had missed or chosen not to respond to certain questions. Some had answered in an inconsistent manner, stating, for example, that the images could be shared publicly but not internally among members of the research team. To follow up, Wuttunee and Altenberg organized one-on-one meetings with the girls and their parents/ guardians to talk about the consent form and answer questions. At the meetings, the parents/guardians expressed happiness at their child’s participation in the project. In an ironic twist, we learned that the ERC consent form was perceived as a barrier to trust. While created with the best intentions, the consent form appeared to represent a border between these adults on the one hand and the settler colonial research practices that had violated the rights of Indigenous peoples and communities for generations on the other. The adults trusted Wuttunee and Altenberg and knew about the good work they do in the community as educators, leaders, and community scholars. It was this trust and community connection that bridged the border between the research project and the parents/guardians and allowed them to engage actively in the research consent process in a productive fashion. One of the participants, whom we will call Kanti, came to the project while in the care of the state. She was keen to participate in the workshop. Her social worker consented to her participation but was adamant that Kanti not be identified in any photographs or videos. Kanti, however, wanted to be photographed and videoed in ways that were identifiable. We worked with her to identify strategies for her to remain a part of the cellphilm-making process without being identifiable on camera. She took the initiative and used great creativity in developing scenes to allow her to participate fully in the cellphilm-making process while obscuring her identity. This case powerfully illuminates the ways the consent process can be undermined when guardians and young women are not in agreement about what is thought best for them. 118

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Setting Personal Borders in Front of the Camera The cellphilm workshop was held over two weekends. An introduction to cellphilm-making was co-facilitated by MacEntee with support from Altenberg and Wuttunee. iPads were distributed to the girls with a brief lesson on how to use them. Two sample cellphilms were screened, and some filming strategies were discussed, particularly in relation to protecting anonymity and asking for consent to film others. Then the facilitators turned the discussion to the topic of GBV. The girls brainstormed different understandings of gender, violence, and GBV. In groups of three or four, the girls took turns filming, interviewing, and being interviewed about their understandings of GBV. The interviews were an opportunity for the girls to negotiate their comfort both in front of and behind the camera. We also saw these videos as a way of gathering knowledge that could be shared in transnational forums by perhaps incorporating them into a composite video or other dissemination mechanisms. What we observed through this preliminary video-making workshop was the girls’ exploration of their personal borders in front of the camera as they worked out their comfort levels and negotiated their anonymity—a border between self and the camera/audience. In some videos, girls face the camera squarely as they answer questions. They enunciate their answers clearly. These personal borders are relatively transparent and porous in that they are more easily understood by different audiences. In others, the girls use body language cues or directly share their discomfort about being in front of the camera using different strategies. For example, they sit back further from the camera, or they crouch in their chairs with their heads hidden under their sweatshirt hoods as they mumble their responses to the interview questions. These personal borders are more opaque and less permeable. It is less clear what the girls are communicating. Given the personal borders that some of the girls erected during this activity, which showed their discomfort about the interview-style videos, we have never shown these videos publicly or integrated them into knowledge dissemination tools.

Making Cellphilms Later, the girls worked in small groups to create five cellphilms in response to the prompt Responding to gender-based violence: What do we have to say? 119

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Following cellphilm method (see Chan et al. 2016), the groups worked independently and with minimal technical support from the facilitators to storyboard their ideas (see Illustration 5.1). A storyboard is a drawing tool similar to a comic strip. It is the first step to visualizing a cellphilm narrative. The format of the cellphilms was more open than the previous interview-style videos that the girls were asked to make, leaving the girls to fashion their cellphilms as they wanted. The facilitators provided further support on how the girls could remain anonymous in their cellphilm (if they wanted to). This included reminding the girls to ask each other who was comfortable being filmed and who preferred to stay off camera, not filming identifying characteristics like faces, avoiding filming individuals altogether, and using narration, drawings, or signs to express their message. After this, the girls filmed, edited (if this was thought necessary), and viewed their cellphilms on the iPads.

Illustration 5.1. Participant negotiates anonymity while posing with a storyboard. Photograph by “Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia.”

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The Cellphilms The participants produced five cellphilms. The first four were made in small groups and after watching these, the group worked collaboratively together to film the fifth. Anonymity Strategies The cellphilm titles and strategies the girls used to remain anonymous are summarized in Table 5.2. In one of the videos, only one anonymity strategy was used; in another, no strategies were used. Other videos show several anonymity strategies being employed. Some strategies were more successful than others. Signs held in front of faces worked well inside, but outside the wind could bend a sign and a girl’s face might be partially revealed. A pulled-up hood was successful when the girl was filmed from a distance, but if she came too close to the camera she might be recognized. Identifying features are not all visually based. If, for example, a girl decided to record her voice in a cellphilm, she might be identified if it were screened to someone who knows her. Table 5.2. Cellphilms and anonymity strategies. Cellphilm Title

Anonymity Strategies

Help

Hands in front of face in opening credits, otherwise no anonymity strategies used

How to Make Friends

Drawings and no voice-over

My Video

No anonymity strategies used

Stereotypes of Indigenous Women

Hoods, dark glasses, filming from behind

Stop Bullying

Hair in front of face, filming from behind, hands in front of face, unfocused faces

Indigenous Women’s Utopia

Cue cards in front of faces, filming from behind, no bodies filmed, filming from a distance 121

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Consent Consent (or lack thereof ) is an overarching theme that is taken up in all the cellphilms that the group created. In “Help,” a girl is sent bullying messages over SMS, like “You’re such a slut.” and “Nobody likes you.” The girl reports this abuse to the principal of her school and is embraced by her friends. In “Stop Bullying,” a girl is jumped and beaten up by another girl in the school bathroom and a bystander goes for help. In “My Video” a girl is trailed by a man who attempts to sexually assault her; she narrowly evades his pursuit. In “Stereotypes of Indigenous Women” a girl confronts a store clerk after she is followed in a store because she is expected to steal something. These four pieces demonstrate the range of interpersonal violence that these girls regularly experience. They also show how the girls refuse to be pigeonholed as victims. In each case, the protagonist crosses a border to become an active agent of change. With each act of transnational activism, they seek out (and avail themselves of ) resources to prevent/stop the violence and find safety and support. In the final two films, the girls envision a world in which the seeking and granting (or perhaps refusing) of consent is a given. “How to Make Friends” is a series of drawings showing a girl asking someone to be friends with her and even seeking consent for a hug. The cellphilm makers offer an example of how consent at a most basic level might operate through dialogue in friendship. In “Young Indigenous Women’s Utopias” girls return intentionally to spaces in which they are made to feel unwelcome, like the bathroom, the streets, the mall, and the police station. In each location, they first portray their current realities of racism, sexism, and violence, and then film an alternative utopia in which they are safe, accepted, and celebrated as strong young Indigenous women. Here the girls literally and figuratively cross spatial and cultural borders to reclaim and reimagine transnational geopolitical spaces in which they can transcend their current realities.

Post-production The group reconvened six months after the cellphilm-making workshop to revisit discussions of participation, anonymity, and consent. This meeting included the girls and their guardians. “Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia” was screened to showcase the girl’s creative work. Parents were highly supportive of the group’s outputs and consented to their daugh122

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ters’ continued involvement. Kanti attended the follow-up meeting on her own. She assented to stay involved in the project and advocated for consent from her social worker to be photographed and filmed. With Kanti’s permission, Altenberg and Wuttunee called her social worker. This discussion shed light on the worker’s past decision, which was to protect Kanti’s whereabouts being passed along to family members who were not currently in her care plan. The social worker expressed gratitude for the workshops and the ongoing support and mentorship provided by Altenberg, Wuttunee, and all the girls. Since participating in the group, Kanti’s relationships with her peers and group home residents had improved, and she had started to participate in other extracurricular activities. Given the observed changes in her behavior at this six-month follow-up, her social worker consented to Kanti’s enactment of her ability to choose whether or not to be identified in the group’s future participatory visual products. The follow-up meetings with YIWU and their parents and/or guardians further highlighted to us the importance of bridging borders between the research project and the individuals and community involved in it in order to obtain consent. The group continues to meet regularly. We create poetry, photography, and cultural artifacts, including beadwork and ribbon skirts, to speak back to colonial violence in our lives (see Wuttunee et al. 2019). During this creative process, the girls continue to establish their personal borders through the creative process, and we have observed them learning a culture of consent. There have been several opportunities for the group to share their work and initiate transnational dialogue about their group and about GBV. Each time the group meets or shares creative work publicly, the conversations about consent and asking permission to share or discuss the work are re-opened. This ongoing checking-in is part of the interventionist and educational component of the research. It centers girls as active in determining and defining what consent means to them. Girls can change how they choose to share their work and if they want to be identified as part of the project. Moreover, through these public dialogues and sharing circles, the girls have been able to connect with, learn from, and engage with other Networks for Change girl groups who are doing similar work across Canada and South Africa. Through these transnational dialogues, we have both inspired the others’ activism and been affirmed in our local practices and protocols. Checking a box on a consent form once does not give the facilitators the right to share the girls’ words, faces, and work in perpetuity. The girls 123

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control what happens to the work they create. They can expect to be asked permission for its use. They can safely exercise their right of refusal. This modeling of consent as free, prior, informed, ongoing, and relational is foundational to many Indigenous cultures and to challenging cultures of violence. It is also strategic insofar as it challenges notions of Indigenous girls as vulnerable and in need of constant protection. It is a decolonizing practice that recognizes Indigenous girls as strong, beautiful, smart iskwew (the Cree word for woman).

Discussion We recount our learning process around establishing consent and assent during the research process to contribute to the development of girlcentered research practices that follow intersectional transnational principles that are decolonizing and anti-oppressive. This is offered, as Mohanty articulates, from “a belief in the local as specifying and illuminating the universal” (2003: 503). The process we adopted followed guidelines for ethical research with children and Indigenous people (see CIHR et al. 2014). It is the parents/guardians’ right to determine what is in the best interest of their child(ren) and to restrict their participation in research. The girls’ agency and capacities were recognized in the consent form that, we thought, offered nuanced choice around identity disclosure in an effort to conform to ERC requirements, make the project more accessible, and respect a diversity of involvement options. Inadvertently, the choices presented in this manner had the opposite effect. The form was confusing and alienating to some. Following Allan and Smylie (2015), we think that the history of disenfranchisement and violence that research has perpetrated upon Indigenous communities may have also made engaging with the consent forms uncomfortable for the girls and their parents/guardians. In line with Vanner’s (2019) definition of transnational girlhood that underscores the importance of contextualizing current realities in geopolitical histories and forces, we see this learning as part of an ongoing conversation about how we can decolonize research practices, including consent processes, in new and innovative ways. In future, we could use multiple, simplified forms distributed at different points in the research process. A first form could be used to garner assent/consent to participate in a workshop. Once visuals are created and can be viewed, a second form might ask how we can use these materials. 124

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We will pair this institutionalized approach with an Indigenous oral process of checking back and asking permission with participants and their families continually. In this context, conversations about consent need to be more iterative and ongoing with participants and communities. Using oral protocols will heighten community involvement and strengthen the community-based principals of the research process. The lessons we learned are significant to transnational and decolonizing feminist and girlhood practices because they integrate the institutional consent/assent principles of the settler state with local Indigenous protocols. By centering and returning (again and again) to consent protocols, we are trying to support the active navigation of cross-cultural and institutional bordercrossing in ways that feel agentic and safe. Kanti’s story brings into focus the intersectional experiences of oppression (see Mohanty 2003). It exemplifies how Indigenous youth can be excluded systematically from research participation through institutional ethical procedures. Indigenous communities experience disproportionate rates of violence and incarceration, and far more of their children relative to the total number of children in Canada live in the care of the state. This can all affect girls’ opportunities and capacities to participate in research. In order to do so, Indigenous children in state care need to cross many personal, interpersonal, and institutional borders whose policies and desires may conflict with each other. The visual components of the cellphilm process raised further safety concerns for girls who have experienced violence. Social workers need to weigh carefully the risks to their wards and the benefits. Kanti’s experience illustrates how extra support and capacitybuilding from the research team can help to ensure that girls in state care are able to traverse these borders and be given the same opportunity as other young people to set the terms of their research involvement. We celebrate Kanti’s ability to self-advocate because, to us, it represents a major achievement of the kind of intersecting border-crossing suggested by Mendez and Wolf (2001) that transnational girlhood is trying to support. We like to think that this stems in part from the emphasis we placed on encouraging the girls in the project to practice their consent-giving skills. In living out Vanner’s (2019) notion of transnational girlhood that focuses on centering girls’ agency, Kanti’s actions demonstrate how supporting the girls to adopt a culture of consent can help them negotiate the transnational intersections that they experience in their lives. For research consent and assent to be meaningful, girls must have the capacity to engage meaningfully with their choices in relation to anonym125

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ity and confidentiality. This is especially so with PVM given that visual identifications may be possible, and products can easily be shared publicly. The strategies the girls employed to maintain their anonymity illustrate the diversity of ways young people can negotiate visual consent. While some young people are wary of identifying themselves on camera, others want to be identified. It helped that this group had experience using mobile video technology. The method built on the skills, talents, and creativity of the group. Indeed, the research leveraged the girls’ individual and collective assets that come from their cultural and community involvement. However, the limited effectiveness of some of the strategies employed indicates that even more support may be required when girls are using visual and audio techniques to obscure their identity. Some recommendations include allowing more time during workshops for participants to explore their comfort levels in front of and behind the camera, having up-front conversations about how the cellphilms might be used in the future, and identifying potential audiences. Facilitators could suggest different strategies that participants could use to obscure their identity. We observed that the girls were more adept at anonymizing their images while they were filming the final collaborative cellphilm. This suggests that leaving time for trial and error, re-filming, and creating what Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange (2013) describe as speaking back cellphilms are important strategies to bolster participants’ rights and abilities to negotiate their anonymity. These more polished products are then more likely to lend themselves to be widely disseminated through shared networks of transnational girlhood scholars and activists. Participants’ decisions about self-representation are likely informed by the violence of the settler colonial context that works systematically to control and/or erase young Indigenous women’s agency. We argue that the first cellphilms that the girls made in small groups illustrate the absence of the right to consent in their lives. In contrast, “Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia”—made collaboratively and following reflection on the screening of the first four cellphilms—goes further and challenges this oppression through their depiction of poignant acts of resistance. The girls filmed themselves holding signs that state unequivocally their refusal to be surveilled and labeled as deviant (see Illustration 5.2). The making and the screening of this cellphilm is an act of transnational girlhood’s resistance to the capitalist oppression of Indigenous girls and their communities. Taking an intersectional approach informed our recognition of the trauma and injustices that research (and settler colonial society, more 126

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Illustration 5.2.  Cellphilm screenshot from “Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia.” generally) can inflict on Indigenous communities (Mosby 2013; Pegoraro 2015), and led us to recognize the potential of a border-crossing transnational girlhood that would emphasize collaboration and relationship building between the research team, the participants, and the community. Altenberg and Wuttunee’s connection with participants was central to the effectiveness of this strategy and the overall success of the project. Their deep commitment to YIWU rests on Indigenous practices that include patience, understanding, ceremony, mentorship, and reciprocity. Following Ermine (2007), they strove to enact an Indigenous community ethos by crossing various personal and cultural borders, including those of facilitators, researchers, aunties, and friends. In their capacity to cross borders they are constructing new pathways of transnational research practice.

Conclusion YIWU is using decolonizing research practices informed by relational interactions with family and community that can foster similar transnational 127

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girlhood initiatives. Two years have passed since the cellphilm workshop discussed in this chapter. The girls continue to meet regularly. A year post-production, with an eye to knowledge dissemination and building transnational networks of girlhood participants, researchers, and activists, the girls decided to submit their work to the International Cellphilm Festival. Before submission, Altenberg and Wuttunee facilitated another discussion about the potential risks of following the festival submission requirement to post their cellphilm online. The girls reflected on their personal borders and decided together that they were fine with these risks. The film placed second in the festival’s competition. The girls also agreed to have this cellphilm shown in dozens of conferences and classrooms across North America. They have physically crossed national and international borders to present their work. They have engaged in public events and facilitated their own cellphilm workshops with other Indigenous youth. In 2019, some members of the group were interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This sharing of their work is creating a literal border-crossing transnational girlhood movement. The girls’ personal and group borders are fluid and changing. The girls decide on a case-by-case basis, individually and as a group, about what they want to do. Sometimes this means that only one or two girls are publicly identifiable, while others support from behind the scenes. At other times, girls who consent to do something rescind their consent later. Outside the girls’ commitment to each other and their work, perhaps the greatest sign of communal support for the project is from the parents and guardians who have entrusted Wuttunee and Altenberg to chaperone their daughters to international conferences to present their work across many diverse countries and communities in true transnational girlhood spirit. In this project, the concept of participant consent was interlinked with our commitment to decolonizing transnational feminist girlhood research that aims to transform national legacies of oppressive institutional research practice. We conceptualize this consent work as transnational bordercrossing, in order to describe the operationalization at many levels the strengths of a relational Indigenous ethos alongside a research program’s ethical practice that is institutionally bound within academia. We have illustrated how groups of young people can negotiate their willingness to be on and off camera and how they can develop creative means to anonymize their visual products. We highlight how the girls think through and practice what meaningful consent looks like to them in order to draw attention to the importance of participant agency in exploring, choosing, 128

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and continually negotiating what personal borders they want to establish. By considering this process of consent through the lens of transnational border-crossing, we underscore how girls, and the YIWU as a group, enacted their power to self-advocate and control their visual productions in more nuanced and assertive ways that echo their own transnational girlhood ethos. Mendez and Wolfe (2001) note, and we agree, that the notion of transnationalism adds complexity to feminist-led social transformation. In celebrating the successes of the YIWU, we do not diminish the challenges of conducting this type of ethical practice. We have learned that the girls’ understanding comes from continually revisiting conversations about consent, choice, and boundaries. Even the most well-meaning institutionally approved consent forms can be alienating to young people and their parents/guardians. They can also be helpful engagement tools for facilitators to draw community and young people more meaningfully into conversations about research and learning. This type of community engagement, alongside the use of ceremonies, mentorship, and reciprocity, is dependent on committed team members like Wuttunee and Altenberg, who can traverse sometimes conflicting settler-based institutional borders and community protocols. While using the cellphilm method introduces unique ethical concerns into the research process, it also offers unique pedagogical possibilities for practicing cultures of consent in transnational girlhood initiatives and creating safer spaces for young Indigenous women to explore what this might mean to and for them.

Acknowledgments We thank all the girls involved in this project, their families, and communities. We are grateful to all the aunties, elders, and community members who have supported us along the way. This chapter was much improved as a result of the thoughtful, patient feedback and meticulous editing of Ann Smith. Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia is a girls group in Treaty 6 Territory (also known as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, or the traditional homelands of the Métis). As urban Indigenous teens, we come together from many different nations and communities to combat gender-based and colonial violence. We do this work by 129

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engaging in cultural reclamation, ceremony, storytelling and arts-based activism and research. We are part of a larger transnational project called Networks for Change. Katie MacEntee is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the use of participatory visual methodologies to address HIV and AIDS, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health, and inclusive education. Jennifer Altenberg is a Michif woman, mother, and educator in Homeland of The Métis, Treaty 6, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Anti-racist and resistance practices to colonial discourse inspires the work she does in the classroom and the Saskatoon community. Sarah Flicker is a full professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University (Toronto, Canada), where she holds a Research Chair in Community-Based Participatory Research. Her research focuses on adolescent health promotion, and engages youth and allied actors in environmental, sexual, and reproductive justice scholarship and activism. Kari-Dawn Wuttunee is nêhiyaw-iskwêw from Red Pheasant Cree Nation. As an Indigenous feminist, she is focused on the well-being of young women and their survival in neo-colonial environments.

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. “The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” Retrieved 11 September 2018 from http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final Reports/Surviv ors_Speak_English_Web.pdf. Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–132. https://doi .org/10.3167/ghs.2019.120209. Wang, Caroline, and Yanique Redwood-Jones. 2001. “Photovoice Ethics: Perspectives from Flint Photovoice.” Health Education & Behavior 28(5): 560– 572. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019810102800504. Woolford, Andres, and Jeff Benvenuto. 2015. “Canada and Colonial Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 17(4): 373–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623 528.2015.1096580. Wuttunee, Kari-Dawn, Jennifer Altenberg, and Sarah Flicker. 2019. “Red Ribbon Skirts and Cultural Resurgence.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 12(3): 63–79. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2019.120307.

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Reflecting Critically on Ethics in Research with Black South African Girls Tamlynn Jefferis and Sadiyya Haffejee

In 2018, at the age of fifteen, Greta Thunberg began her school strike for the climate advocacy campaign against climate change. This catalyzed a global movement of youth activism. Between August 2018 and May 2019, over a million young people joined her school strike and demanded action from leaders around the world. This lone adolescent girl did not seek permission from adult activists, researchers, or politicians. In prompting a global movement of youth activism, Thunberg exemplifies transnational activism that permeates boundaries traditionally set for youth and contributed to reconstructing existing narratives that see young people as being without voice and agency and in need of adults to advocate for them and on their behalf (Smith 2019; Vanner 2019). While Greta’s unwavering determination has propelled her onto the global stage—she was featured in Time magazine in 2019 and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—examples of girls advocating for change and shifting physical, social, and cultural barriers are also apparent in other communities, albeit with less attention being paid to them. What these girls teach us is that when they speak up and take action, and when important stakeholders reciprocate and Notes for this section can be found on page 148.

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acknowledge their agency, their voices and actions have powerful consequences. This capacity for representation and activism has been overlooked in traditional research since children tend to be automatically considered vulnerable and in need of protection by ethics review committees both in South Africa and internationally. This, of course, has serious consequences for any attempt to establish a transnational girlhood initiative. Our work as participatory visual researchers at our respective universities is guided by Research Ethics Committees (REC). Our experiences have pointed to the ways our work with girls, or the impact of this work, may be limited by these institutional structures. In this chapter, we discuss some of these limits and ethical tensions. We reference our participatory visual research project on the resilience processes of Sesotho-speaking adolescent girls from a rural town in South Africa and reflect on the ethical challenges that arose specifically in relation to enabling them to be heard by limiting their anonymity and the dissemination of findings. Our focus on the resilience processes of marginalized girls in South Africa disrupts the idea of passivity and victimhood that usually accompanies narratives of girls in the Global South. In this, the study echoes Catherine Vanner’s (2019) broader understanding of transnational girlhoods. As Yasmin Jiwani, Candis Steenbergen, and Claudia Mitchell (2006) point out, girlhood studies acknowledges and promotes girls’ agency while being mindful of economic, social, and political factors that constrain it. In prioritizing the experiences of girls from the Global South and recognizing girls as active agents, we shift and, at times, remove conceptual and cultural borders that constrain and limit girls. To do this, we situate our work with girls within a transformative paradigm and make use of participatory methods to disrupt power imbalances that usually accompany research studies with young girls. The ontological assumptions underlying Donna Mertens’s (2016) transformative paradigm are based on the idea that reality is comprised of various power relations and is shaped by social, historical, political, cultural, and racial factors. As Paula Flynn (2013) notes, social positioning has an impact on positions of power, and, therefore, on marginalization that is historically associated with gender, race, place, education, and socio-economic status. The experiences of Black South Africans can be used as an example here. More than two decades since the abolition of apartheid, many Black South African people continue to be challenged by structural violence and inequality (De Lange et al. 2015; Jewkes and Morell 2010), and, as Tlakale Phasha (2010) reminds us, Black girls are considered particularly 135

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vulnerable. Traditional and patriarchal values that promote gender inequality, normalize violence, limit access, and raise barriers to quality education, in addition to high rates of HIV and AIDS, position Black girls at the fringes of society (De Lange and Mitchell 2014; Jefferis and Theron 2017; Jewkes et al. 2014; Phasha 2010). This marginal positioning seeks to determine, and, to a large extent, dictate their place, presence, and capacity in society. The transformative paradigm prioritizes research methods that attempt to understand and address these historical and existing power structures that sustain social injustice (Biddle and Schafft 2014; Mertens 2016). Disrupting power relationships begins with the researcherparticipant relationship that is transactional, subjective, and dialectic in nature as Joseph Ponterotto (2005) notes, and, we would add, conducive to setting up, by example, a transnational girlhood movement between and among our groups of participants. As Naydene de Lange (this volume) points out, the transformative paradigm urges researchers to move beyond traditional positivistic methods toward participatory visual methods that create spaces, through dissemination, for researchers and co-researcher participants to promote better understandings of transnational life-worlds. Participatory visual methodology (PVM) is clearly aligned with the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the transformative paradigm. These methods of engaging with participants as partners in the research process create opportunities for otherwise marginalized groups, like girls, young people, and Indigenous communities, to share experiences and to generate culturally and contextually appropriate solutions to problems they encounter, as Linda Theron (2013) makes clear. PVM may be particularly useful in addressing the aim of social and transnational transformation. Through the decolonization of the research process and the co-generation of knowledge, PVM enhances the sustainability and impact of research (Aldridge 2012; Wood 2017). Unlike more traditional methods of qualitative data generation such as individual interviews and focus groups, PVM engages with participants in a more egalitarian manner, thus enabling them to guide the research process (Mitchell and De Lange 2011; Theron 2013). Farrah Jacquez, Lisa M. Vaughn, and Erin Wagner (2013) argue that partnerships with participants often lead to deeper insight into contextual factors that play a role in developing effective interventions. Partnering with participants as co-researchers makes room for the development and implementation of bottom-up solutions that are relevant to and for girls in addressing the various social issues with which they are confronted (Mertens 2012; Mistry et al. 2016; Shaw 136

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2016). Ultimately, bottom-up interventions are more likely to be relevant to the community as well as sustainable, and more likely to be useful in advocating for meaningful change, local and transnational. In South Africa, PVM has been used successfully in several studies focused on resilience (Haffejee 2018; Liebenberg 2009).

Ethics and PVM Despite the many significant benefits of PVM, it does present particular ethical challenges. Melanie Nind and colleagues (2013) note that there is potential tension between innovative social science research and ethics. Some of the ethical issues that are currently being debated by scholars include the limits to anonymity and confidentiality in PVM as a result of the visual content (such as videos and photographs), negotiating entry to communities, participant recruitment, and the role of community partners and institutional ethics committees (De Lange et al. 2015; Wood 2017). Scholars have also become more critical of the potential offered by PVM for actualizing social change, as well as its potential for advocacy and empowerment (Mistry et al. 2016; Mitchell et al. 2016; Shaw 2016). Claims that PVM gives voice to participants and that these methods provide a platform for their voices to be heard have also come under scrutiny. What needs to be interrogated, for Tiffany Fairey (2017) and Luc Pauwels (2010), is whether these voices are really listened to and by whom. Shannon Walsh (2016), in questioning the notion of what giving voice might mean, contends that the act of merely telling one’s story of injustice does not necessarily lead to social change or justice. She asserts that political and structural inequalities that constrain the potential of PVM to effect social change need to be interrogated to avoid our placing the responsibility for social change, local and/or transnational, on individuals and communities. Based on our experience, we add that even before we confront the broader societal and political obstacles to actualizing social change, we need to begin with the organizational structures in universities and, more specifically, with ethics review committees. Extending Pauwels’s (2010) and Fairey’s (2017) critique above, here we question who censors the voice and, by extension, the agency of co-researcher participants. Are the borders placed by adult and ethics review committee’s perceptions of vulnerability in effect silencing girls? If so, how do we eliminate these borders or, at least, make them porous enough to effect some kind of transnational change? 137

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Ethics review procedures are understandably strict in South Africa with their core focus on protecting vulnerable groups from possible physical or psychological harm. Many South African universities follow the guidelines of The Belmont Report:Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research (1979), the World Medical Association, Declaration of Helsinki-Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (2013), The National Health Act 61 of 2003, and the Department of Health Act of 2005. Lesley Wood (2017) notes that ethics procedures in South African universities do not include specific guidelines to accommodate the principles of PVM. According to ethics guidelines, researchers may have contact with participants, apart from an information session, only once informed consent has been obtained by an individual who is entirely independent of the research process. Also, participants’ anonymity must be maintained in both the reporting and dissemination of research findings. These strict regulations can be detrimental to the PVM process and require revision if PVM is to be used ethically and successfully (Walsh 2016; Yang 2015). Naydene de Lange, Relebohile Moletsane, and Claudia Mitchell (2015) argue that restrictions that apply to preserving the anonymity of co-researcher participants in participatory visual studies in disseminating results silences their voices and restricts their agency. While RECs at universities undoubtedly act in the best interest of vulnerable groups, they are not aware, seemingly, of how the strict procedures have a negative impact on participatory visual research (PVR) itself and, ultimately, on the very groups these procedures aim to protect. Moreover, we, as participatory visual researchers, must question our own position of power in the research process as representatives of our universities. While PVM aims to neutralize power imbalances, it does not negate the power we have and perhaps unintentionally use when we are making decisions on behalf of co-researcher participants. We return to this point later.

Methodology Location of the Study The study on which we reflect in this chapter focused on understanding resilience processes among Sesotho-speaking girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen in the Dihlabeng Municipal District in the Thabo Mofutsanyana District, in the Free State, a province in South Africa. This study flowed from the South African arm of the Pathways to Resilience Project (P2RP).1 Dihlabeng is a semi-rural area marked by poverty and 138

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structural disadvantage. The Thabo Mofutsanyana District has the highest rate of maternal, paternal, and double orphanhood in the Free State (Statistics SA 2016). The girls in this study faced significant chronic adversity that included orphanhood, sexual violence, social exclusion, and stigmatization arising from their living in a children’s home. Participants A local advisory panel (AP) was established by the P2RP that consisted of trusted local adults who worked with vulnerable youth every day.2 Throughout the study, the AP advised and assisted us with participant recruitment and approved the methods of data generation used. The AP introduced us to a social worker at a local children’s home from which a group of five girls was recruited (Group One). The girls had been placed in the children’s home because of orphanhood, their experience of sexual violence, and neglect. Another group of five girls was recruited from a school (Group Two) in the local township by a teacher at the school, also at the request of the AP who introduced us to the teacher. Eight of the ten girls on whose PVM process we reflect experienced sexual violence, which was self-reported during the research process. Two girls were orphaned, and three were removed from their homes as a result of sexual abuse, parental substance abuse, and neglect. The participants in this study were considered particularly vulnerable because of their status as minors, their placement in care, and their prior experiences of trauma, including sexual abuse. Extra precautions were taken to ensure that they were supported during the research process. This included working with a skilled counselor to provide debriefing sessions. We conducted this study with a social change agenda. We wanted to gain insight into resilience among Black Sesotho-speaking girls by using research methods that would enable and promote the girls’ resilience while simultaneously exploring it. Also, we expected the dissemination of the videos produced by the girls to motivate significant stakeholders in their environment to promote their resilience in ways that were meaningful to the girls. As our discussion highlights later, actualizing social change was challenging.

Methods of Data Generation The members of the research team engaged the girl-participants in two participatory visual methods of data generation: Draw-and-Talk and 139

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Community-based Participatory Video (CBPV) that were facilitated by the first author. The Draw-and-Talk activity, in line with the protocols suggested by Marilys Guillemin and Sarah Drew (2010), involved having the girls create individual drawings in response to the question: “What makes your life difficult?” We did this to help us understand the context of risk. Then each girl explained the meaning of her drawing to the research team and fellow girl-participants in a focus group or wrote an explanation if she felt more comfortable doing so. We then asked the girls to complete another drawing activity to respond to the question: “What helps you to be strong in life despite the things that make your life difficult?” Again, after the drawing activity, each girl offered a verbal or written explanation of the meaning of their drawings in a focus group. We did this to try to understand what promotes their resilience. (Although we were not concerned with any kind of transnational advocacy at the time, we see the potential in this data for effecting such change.) This format also allowed the research team to engage the girls in a discussion and to probe for more insights from them. Once we had completed the drawing activities, following the advice of Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange (2011), we facilitated the CBPV process with the girls and asked them to create and film a story that would demonstrate how they adjust well to adversity. In the planning of their videos, the girls first created storyboards (similar to cartoon-like sequences of scenes that would be filmed in the video). After creating their storyboards, the girls acted out their stories and filmed them on video cameras. We absented ourselves while the girls were filming so that they could feel more independent and less inhibited. We followed the “N-E-R (NoEditing-Required) Video Workshop notes” (Mitchell 2011: 74) first devised by Monica Mak and Claudia Mitchell, which meant that we did not alter the girls’ videos in any way after filming; we treated them as complete products, owned by the girls. The N-E-R approach allowed us to screen the videos with the girls the same afternoon, and this presented an opportunity for them to share their videos and to explain their meanings. We then engaged the girls in participatory reflective discussions that revolved around the CBPV process, the making of and meaning of their videos, as well as their overall reflections on the entire process. We also engaged the girls in discussions about their views on how to promote resilience in other vulnerable girls, and about how members of their social ecology can better support them. We held three CBPV workshops with Group One, and two with Group Two. Each workshop took place on a Saturday and 140

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lasted between six and seven hours with regular breaks and refreshments. Along with the research team, research psychology interns attended the workshops and assisted in language translation when necessary. The workshops were held in English, as agreed with the participants, but the research psychology interns assisted with translation when any of the girls needed assistance. In total, the girls made five videos. For the purpose of this chapter, we have chosen to focus on the video summarized in Table 6.1 below since the ethical dilemmas we discuss here centered on this video. Table 6.1. Summary of “Five Steps to Feeling Better.” Video

Number of Title of video girls in group

Essence of the video

Group 1

6

Girls portray various scenes that represent difficulties (death, bullying, verbally abusive house mother) and demonstrate what helps them to adjust well (faith and co-habiting peers).

Video 3

“Five Steps to Feeling Better”

Reflections on Ethical Challenges in the Dissemination of Video Media Products When we are making use of PVR methods in research, one of the aims is to disseminate the visual media outputs as advocacy tools for generating dialogue between participants and/or community members and key stakeholders in the community (Mitchell 2011). The purpose of this is to advocate for social change. However, how dissemination is managed is not always straightforward, and this presented us with two ethical challenges in our project with these girls. Protecting Participants during Dissemination In a video produced by girls in Group One, entitled “Five Steps to Feeling Better,” the girls included a scene in which the house mother bursts into the girls’ room yelling, “Come on, wake up. It’s school today. You already don’t have futures, but you just lie here.” 141

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Illustration 6.1. Girls portray a verbally abusive house mother. Photograph by Tamlynn Jefferis and the Pathways to Resilience Project team. In another scene from the same video, one girl approaches the same house mother to ask if she can go on an outing during the school holidays, something the girls said they often looked forward to doing as a break from the reality of residing in the children’s home. When the girl asks the house mother, she replies, “Of course not. You have been very rude. Why do you think I will let you go out? You’re going to stay here. How do you expect me to let you go out? Your family doesn’t care about you. You have absolutely no future. You are going nowhere.” Then the house mother taps her on the shoulder and says, sarcastically, “Sorry darling,” as she walks away.

Illustration 6.2. A girl cries after her house mother is verbally abusive. Photograph by Tamlynn Jefferis and the Pathways to Resilience Project team. 142

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We deliberated about showing this video during the screening. While it shows a powerful demonstration of the verbal abuse the girls experience, we were concerned that screening the video would place the girls at risk for further victimization, so we decided not to do so at a dissemination event at which the house mothers were present. Identifying Appropriate Dissemination Platforms In “Five Steps to Feeling Better,” which focuses primarily on how music aided emotional regulation for the girls, the group sang a song. The girls were very proud of the outcome and asked us to upload their video onto YouTube in the hope of its being seen by talent scouts. Since we did not have ethical clearance to disseminate the videos on public social media platforms, we had to tell the girls that this was not possible. The girls were visibly disappointed. We took time to discuss the ethical reasons behind the restriction of uploading their video with the girls and were empathetic to their pride in how their video showcased their talents. Although the girls understood why we could not upload their video onto YouTube, their disappointment remained apparent. They were proud of their video, and they desired acknowledgement, not only of their message but also of their talent. In “Five Steps to Feeling Better,” the girls depicted an unpleasantly harsh reality of their lives. This meant that we had to acknowledge the output produced by the girls, but, at the same time, we had to protect them from future retaliation from the housemother at the center. Addressing issues like this and advocating for change is one of the primary objectives of PVM. How could this be done, though, while maintaining the girls’ anonymity and protecting them? A reality in the semi-rural town where the girls live is that financial resources are limited, and so house mothers/parents are often not qualified individuals, but rather those who may be desperate for the financial income. While we had a duty to highlight the conditions, the reality of the context was a deterrent. Would outing the current house parents result in them being replaced by more qualified, less abusive house parents, or would they be left in place and the girls subjected to further unpleasantness and verbal violence? With hindsight, we wondered if the decision not to screen “Five Steps to Feeling Better” was best for the girls. We did not include them in the discussions about whether or not to screen their video. At the time, we believed that we made the best decision on their behalf and considered that they might not be aware of the potential risk of screening a video 143

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that exposes a perpetrator of victimization. A reviewer of the PVM study commented that in making that decision, we had, in fact, silenced the girls. This spurred a reflective discussion that led to numerous questions. While we raised the issue of verbal abuse portrayed in the video with the management of the children’s home, was that enough? We wondered if not screening the video meant that the verbal abuse could continue unaddressed thus negating the social change aspects of PVM. Did our decision prevent harm in any way? Did our decision do most good? And was our decision in the best interest of the girls? With regards to being unable to upload the girls’ video to YouTube, strict ethical guidelines meant that we could not accede to the wishes of the girls, and, again, we made a decision on their behalf. With greater advancement of media technologies and the accessibility of these media, people of all ages share videos, photographs, and stories on various online platforms, so was our censoring necessary to protect the girls? In a research process aimed at amplifying girls’ agency, not allowing their videos to be visible goes against the very aim of the process. (Here we recognize that the implications for an online transnational network of girls sharing YouTube videos are evident.) And so, we as researchers must be critical of our own positions of power, and our decision-making processes and actively work toward doing most good with our co-researcher participants. We must be acutely aware of the positivistic notion of the researcher as the expert and work critically toward decolonization of the research process.

Practical Suggestions on Prioritizing Girls’ Voices in Dissemination with a Social Change Agenda Including Girls as Co-researchers in Girlhood Studies Here we offer some practical suggestions based on our experience in this study for both novice and experienced participatory visual researchers. Engaging girls as co-researchers and recognizing their expertise and agency forms the basis of participatory research on girlhood, as Jo Aldridge (2012) makes clear. In girlhood studies, the girl is at the center of the research and advocacy efforts; research is for girls, conducted with girls, and is about girls (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2009). Within the confines of academic research, however, this requires some negotiation. Although girls are increasingly being recognized as social actors who are experts on

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the subject of their own lives, prevailing protectionist discourses continue to see girls as vulnerable, fragile, passive, and in need of protection. This is particularly relevant for girls in the Global South. However, evidence suggests that girls in the Global South are not all passive recipients of social injustice, abuse, or circumstance. For example, research conducted with girls in Sierra Leone (Denov and Maclure 2006), Nepal, Ethiopia, Bulgaria (Gilligan et al. 2014), and South Africa (Haffejee 2018; Phasha 2010) highlights girls’ ability to adjust positively, and, in some instances, thrive following experiences of sexual violence. In seeing girls as more than victims, we disrupt the restrictive boundaries placed on their agency in acts of transnational significance. These contradictory discourses create an ethical tension in PVM in that the nature of the research process attempts to affirm girls’ agency while the protectionist view of girls as vulnerable victims seems to guide ethical requirements in relation to how researchers should engage with them. In recognizing girls as experts in their own lives, we suggest actively creating opportunities for girls to participate in advisory panels as community advisors. As knowledge holders and experts, girls will be in a position to determine what is and what is not in their best interest. In this way, the possibilities for effecting a powerful transnational girlhood are obvious. Traditional research has not prioritized children’s voices (Aldridge 2012; Cowie and Khoo 2017). A recent study on resilience by Linda Theron (2017) shows that adolescents and adults identified similar enabling resources, yet the value they placed on these resources differed. This has implications for understanding which resources or social issues matter most to adolescents. The inclusion of adult-only advisory panels in research with young people results in a misalignment of values and potentially irrelevant and inappropriate decisions being made on their behalf as Annamaria Pinter and Samaneh Zandian (2015) point out. Collaborating with and listening to girls in advisory panels will enable appropriate and meaningful dissemination of their products thereby eliciting richer insight to guide key advocacy initiatives with and for girls. As participatory visual researchers working from a transnational perspective, we need to ensure that we involve girls as true partners throughout the research process in prioritizing their needs alongside or above our needs, as adult researchers, and the needs of institutional regulatory bodies or decision makers as Vanner (2019) observes.

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Negotiate Anonymity with Girls and Trusted Members of Their Communities to Foreground Girls’ Voices Traditional ethical guidelines in research require researchers to anonymize data and use pseudonyms when they are quoting participants in qualitative research to protect their identities. However, in PVR that makes use of participatory video, full anonymity is not possible even if steps are taken to protect participants’ identities, for example, blurring faces, or using masks or wigs. Participants may still be identifiable in the visual products of which they are part. Furthermore, as was our experience, participants may want to be recognized for their contributions with their real names instead of hiding their identities in their visual products. If the screening of video media products with vulnerable girls is limited by anonymity, then so, too, is girls’ agency and the opportunity for them to open dialogue on issues that are relevant to them. This then renders PVR no different from traditional research, and this has implications for any attempt at establishing a transnational girlhood movement. Insistence on protecting girls’ anonymity in traditional ways because they are perceived as vulnerable could be experienced by girls as silencing their voices, as Kyung-Hwa Yang (2015) contends. We question whether ensuring anonymity is always in the best interest of the participant. Does it cause more harm than good, especially when various social issues that affect the lives of girls negatively need to be exposed and addressed? We suggest negotiating these issues with girls and community members who are trusted by girls because in South Africa, and in many other countries, not all adults can be trusted to act with girls’ best interests in mind. In light of this, we recommend working with girls longitudinally to establish partnerships with key stakeholders they trust. We urge participatory visual researchers focused on transnational girlhood studies to take this participatory approach forward with communities and to explore issues around long-term sustainability of meaningful social change. This will also create opportunities for researchers from around the world who work with girls to learn from and shape one another in transnational exchanges, as De Lange (this volume) envisages. Negotiate Anonymity and Dissemination Platforms with Research Ethics Committees When sensitive content, such as in “Five Steps to Feeling Better” is not displayed, we silence girls and could even be held responsible for sustaining social injustices. We, therefore, emphasize the need to open dialogue with ethics committees around anonymity and the emancipatory 146

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local and transnational potential of PVR. As researchers engaged in PVR, we must advocate to limit anonymity when videos and other visual tools have the potential to connect girls globally, open dialogue to address social issues relevant to girls, decolonize the research process, and promote girls’ agency in what would amount to a powerful transnational girlhood initiative. It is imperative to engage with girls, trusted members of their communities, and our institutional RECs to explore a range of possible platforms for disseminating videos and other visual products such as social media platforms, local community halls, local schools and universities, and other spaces of importance to girls and their communities. Currently, social media platforms for the dissemination of girl- and youth-generated videos are underexplored (Yang 2015). Even in marginalized communities, young people are aware of and manage to access social media platforms, often in libraries or areas where there is free Wi-Fi access. They could easily upload their video products onto various social media platforms without the researchers’ knowledge because we give them copies of their videos. While there are risks involved in doing this, for example, the content uploaded by the girls evoking a negative response could lead to possible harassment and abuse, social media does offer a powerful medium to the work of transnational activism. Making use of social media can raise awareness of various social issues on a global scale with the potential to transform vulnerable girls’ lives. How best to collaborate with girl coresearchers so as to be mindful of their wish to share outputs in ways that optimize advocacy and mitigate potential threats requires further attention (Yang 2015). Effective use of dissemination platforms, like social media that have global reach, is in line with a transnational agenda. As Vanner (2019) suggests, girls from different countries need to speak and respond to each other, either in person or virtually. These conversations and shared spaces and experiences connect girls from the Global South to other global structures. Our suggestion here is that participatory visual researchers engage actively with their RECs to discuss the potential harm anonymity can cause, as well as how to proceed with dissemination through various platforms that show the identities of the girl co-researchers.

Conclusion The advocacy of Greta Thunberg from the Global North and Malala Yousafzai from the Global South has spurred transnational discussions 147

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that have transcended age, gender, and physical boundaries. Their experiences, however, have not been the same; Yousafzai encountered threats and danger unimaginable to Thunberg. This highlights the tensions and the difficulties inherent in working equitably with girls. While understanding local context and responding appropriately is essential in participatory work with girls, we need, also, to engage in transnational initiatives that benefit other girls. While we have critiqued traditional ethical review processes that are not in alignment with PVR, we acknowledge that these processes are grounded in ensuring the best interests of participants. Balancing this with the understanding of girls as experts and knowers with agency requires negotiation. In the same way Thunberg and Yousafzai have challenged existing narratives, as advocates for a transnational girlhood movement, we are tasked with challenging traditional institutional norms that limit girls’ agency and working toward the decolonization of the research process that could help lead to such transnationalism. Tamlynn Jefferis is a registered Research Psychologist, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, and researcher at the Optentia Research Focus Area at the NorthWest University in South Africa. She is a collaborator in multiple international research projects focused on understanding resilience among youth, as well as community resilience. Sadiyya Haffejee is a mental health practitioner, researcher and psycho-social trainer and is currently a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg. She enjoys working at the interface of research, practice, and policy. Her focus areas are child and youth with adverse childhood experiences, mental health, and resilience.

Notes 1. Resilience Research Centre. resilienceresearch.org. 2. For more information, see Theron 2013.

References Aldridge, Jo. 2012. “The Participation of Vulnerable Children in Photographic Research.” Visual Studies 27(1): 48–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725 86X.2012.642957. 148

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The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. 1979. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Bethesda, MD: Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Biddle, Catherine, and Kai A. Shaft. 2014. “Axiology and Anomaly in the Practice of Mixed Methods Work: Pragmatism, Valuation, and the Transformative Paradigm.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 9(4): 320–324. https://doi .org/10.1177/1558689814533157. Cowie, Bronwen, and Elaine Khoo. 2017. “Accountability through Access, Authenticity and Advocacy when Researching with Young Children.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 21(3): 234–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13603116.2016.1260821. De Lange, Naydene, and Claudia Mitchell. 2014. “Building a Future without Gender Violence: Rural Teachers and Youth in Rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Leading Community Dialogue.” Gender and Education 26(5): 584– 599. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2014.942257. De Lange, Naydene, Relebohile Moletsane, and Claudia Mitchell. 2015. “Seeing How It Works: A Visual Essay about Critical and Transformative Research in Education.” Perspectives in Education 33(4): 151–176. Denov, Myriam, and Richard Maclure. 2006. “Engaging the Voices of Girls in the Aftermath of Sierra Leone’s Conflict: Experiences and Perspectives in a Culture of Violence.” Anthropologica 48(1): 73–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 25605298. Fairey, Tiffany. 2017. “Whose Photo? Whose Voice? Who Listens? ‘Giving,’ Silencing and Listening to Voice in Participatory Visual Projects.” Visual Studies 33(2): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2017.1389301. Flynn, Paula. 2013. “The Transformative Potential in Student Voice Research for Young People Identified with Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties.” In A Special Edition of the Trinity Education Papers Series, Arising from a Oneday Conference in the School of Education, Trinity College Dublin, ed. Fiona Smith and Michael Shevlin, 70–91. Dublin: Custodian Ltd. Gilligan, Robbie, Elizabeth P. De Castro, Stefan Vanistendael, and Jane Warburton. 2014. “Learning from Children Exposed to Sexual Abuse and Sexual Exploitation: Synthesis Report of the Bamboo Project Study on Child Resilience.” Geneva, CH: Oak Foundation. https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/269112371_Learning_from_Children_Exposed_to_Sexual_ Abuse_and_Sexual_Exploitation_Synthesis_Report_of_the_Bamboo_Proje ct_Study_on_Child_Resilience_A_report_commissioned_by_Oak_Foundati on_Child_Abuse_Programme. Guillemin, Marilys, and Sarah Drew. 2010. “Questions of Process in ParticipantGenerated Visual Methodologies.” Visual Studies 25(2): 175–188. https://doi .org/10.1080/1472586X.2010.502676. 149

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Haffejee, Sadiyya. 2018. “A Visual Participatory Exploration of the Resilience Processes of Black African Girls Who Have Been Sexually Abused.” Ph.D. dissertation. Potchefstroom: North-West University Jacquez, Farrah, Lisa M. Vaughn, and Erin Wagner. 2013. “Youth as Partners, Participants or Passive Recipients: A Review of Children and Adolescents in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR).” American Journal of Community Psychology 51(1–2): 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464012-9533-7. Jefferis, Tamlynn C., and Linda C. Theron. 2017. “Promoting Resilience among Sesotho-Speaking Adolescent Girls: Lessons for South African Teachers.” South African Journal of Education 37(3): 1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.15700/ saje.v37n3a1391. Jewkes, Rachel, Andrew Gibbs, Nwabisa Jama-Shai, Samantha Willan, Alison Misselhorn, Mildred Mushinga, Laura Washington, Nompumelelo Mbatha, and Yandisa Skiweyiya. 2014. “Stepping Stones and Creating Futures Intervention: Shortened Interrupted Time Series Evaluation of a Behavioural and Structural Health Promotion and Violence Prevention Intervention for Young People in Informal Settlements in Durban, South Africa.” BMC Public Health 14(1): 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-1325. Jewkes, Rachel, and Robert Morell. 2010. “Gender and Sexuality: Emerging Perspectives from the Heterosexual Epidemic in South Africa and Implications for HIV Risk and Prevention.” Journal of the International AIDS Society 13(1): 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2652-13-6. Jiwani, Yasmin, Candis Steenbergen, and Claudia Mitchell. 2006. “Introduction: Surveying the Terrain.” In Girlhood: Redefining the Limits, ed. Yasmin Jiwani, Candis Steenbergen, and Claudia Mitchell, ix–xvi. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Liebenberg, Linda. 2009. “The Visual Image as Discussion Point: Increasing Validity in Boundary Crossing Research.” Qualitative Research 9(4): 441–467. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794109337877. Mertens, Donna M. 2012. “Transformative Mixed Methods: Addressing Inequities.” American Behavioral Scientist 56(6): 802–813. https://doi.org/10 .1177/0002764211433797. ———. 2016. “Assumptions at the Philosophical and Programmatic Levels in Evaluation.” Evaluation and Program Planning 59: 102–108. https://doi .org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2016.05.010. Mistry, Jayalaxshmi, Elisa Bignante, and Andrea Berardi. 2016. “Why Are We Doing It? Exploring Participant Motivations within a Participatory Video Project.” Area 48(4): 412–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12105. Mitchell, Claudia. 2011. Doing Visual Research. London: SAGE. Mitchell, Claudia, and Naydene de Lange. 2011. “Community-Based Participa-

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tory Video and Social Action in Rural South Africa.” In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, ed. Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels, 171–185. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2016. “Me and My Cellphone: Constructing Change from the Inside through Cellphilms and Participatory Video in a Rural Community.” Area 48(4): 435–441. https:// doi.org/10.1111/area.12142. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. 2009. “Girl Method: Placing Girl-Centred Research Methodologies on the Map of Girlhood Studies.” In Roadblocks to Equality: Women Challenging Boundaries, ed. Jeffrey Klaehn, 214–233. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Nind, Melanie, Rose Wiles, Andrew Bengry-Howell, and Graham Crow. 2013. “Methodological Innovation and Research Ethics: Forces in Tension or Forces in Harmony?” Qualitative Research 13(6): 650–667. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1468794112455042. Pauwels, Luc. 2010. “Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and Cultural Research.” Sociological Methods & Research 38(4): 545–581. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124110366233. Phasha, Tlakale Nareadi. 2010. “Educational Resilience among African Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse in South Africa.” Journal of Black Studies 40(6): 1234–1253. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934708327693. Pinter, Annamaria, and Samaneh Zandian. 2015. “‘I Thought It Would Be Tiny Little One Phrase that We Said, in a Huge Big Pile of Papers’: Children’s Reflections on their Involvement in Participatory Research.” Qualitative Research 15(2): 235–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112465637. Ponterotto, Joseph G. 2005. “Qualitative Research in Counselling Psychology: A Primer on Research Paradigms and Philosophy of Science.” Journal of Counselling Psychology 52(2): 126–136. Shaw, Jacqueline. 2016. “Emergent Ethics in Participatory Video: Negotiating the Inherent Tensions as Group Processes Evolve.” Area 48(4): 419–426. https:// doi.org/10.1111/area.12167. Smith, Ann. 2019. “The Transnational Girl in the Text: Transnationalism Redefined?” In The Girl in the Text, ed. Ann Smith, 1–12. New York: Berghahn. Statistics SA. 2016. “Local Municipality Dihlabeng.” Retrieved 20 September 2018 from http://www.statssa.gov.za/?page_id=4286&id=7172. Theron, Linda C. 2013. “Community-Researcher Liaisons: The Pathways to Resilience Project Advisory Panel.” South African Journal of Education 33(4): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.15700/201412171324. ———. 2017. “Adolescent versus Adult Explanations of Resilience Enablers: A South African Study.” Youth & Society 49(6): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0044118X17731032.

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Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–130. https://doi.org/ 10.3167/ghs.2019.120209. Walsh, Shannon. 2016. “Critiquing the Politics of Participatory Video and the Dangerous Romance of Liberalism.” Area 48(4): 405–411. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/area.12104. World Medical Association. 2013. World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki. Ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. https:// www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principlesfor-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/. Wood, Lesley. 2017. “The Ethical Implications of Community-Based Research: A Call to Rethink Current Review Board Requirements.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917748276. Yang, Kyung-Hwa. 2015. “Voice, Authenticity and Ethical Challenges: The Participatory Dissemination of Youth-Generated Visual Data over Social Media.” Visual Studies 30(3): 309–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X .2015.1017364.

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Using Photovoice for Ethical Research with Teenage Mothers in Kenya Milka Nyariro

Participatory visual methods, such as photovoice and participatory video, continue to break barriers as collaborative research techniques that foreground the voices of participants and have the ability to reach a wide audience (MacEntee et al. 2016; Mitchell and De Lange 2011). Yet, as Andrew Clark (2012) reminds us, participatory visual researchers can encounter ethical dilemmas that threaten to undermine the core principles of participatory visual research (PVR). Specifically, researchers who use participatory visual methodology (PVM) acknowledge that conflict can arise between current ethical guidelines and the key principles of this research methodology. This conflict complicates researchers’ negotiations for ethical approval from Research Ethics Boards (REB) when they are working with participants who are considered vulnerable. For example, while REBs require that researchers ensure participants’ confidentiality, anonymity, and privacy during and after the research process, not only do visual tools often make this impossible, but these REB requirements also undermine the methodological principle of retaining the participatory research environment as a democratic space (Clark 2013). Notes for this section can be found on page 170.

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In this chapter, I delineate the process of seeking ethical approval for a participatory visual study with young mothers and pregnant girls and young women in Korogocho, an informal urban slum in Nairobi, Kenya (see Nyariro 2018). I offer reflections on the ethical dilemmas, or what Clark refers to as “ethical moments” (Clark 2013: 68), that I encountered while using photovoice to explore the challenges faced by these young participants who attempt to re-enter school and complete their education, and with whom I conducted fieldwork between July 2017 and September 2019. Following Larry Gant and colleagues (2009), I argue that by over-policing PVR, REBs can inhibit its use as an effective tool for civic engagement and activism in relation to urgent local and transnational issues that impact on girls and young women. I begin by providing some theorizations on PVR and its use in social science research. Following this, I draw on the literature to discuss the ethical dilemmas visual researchers are likely to face when using PVM and the common ethical concerns they contend with in balancing ethical and professional principles of PVR. I then offer my reflections on the process of obtaining ethical approval for the photovoice study I conducted with the young mothers to deepen the understanding of ethical tensions experienced by participatory visual researchers. In the discussion that follows, I explore the tensions of using visual images in PVR after which I draw from my photovoice study with the young pregnant girls and mothers in Korogocho slums to highlight some implications for a dynamic approach to an ethical stance in PVR, especially work with girls and young women. As I conclude the chapter, I deliberately raise more questions than answers to continue the discussion about the ethical challenges that arise in the use of PVMs, especially as it relates to vulnerable populations like the young pregnant girls and mothers in this impoverished urban slum.

Understanding Girlhood in Sub-Saharan Africa As Marnina Gonick and Susanne Gannon write, “Girlhood Studies . . . is interested in girls, but also in what we mean by girls and how the concepts of girls and girlhood signify in the broader society” (2014: 1). What it means to be a girl or the qualification behind being considered a girl, is fluid and dependent on time and place. Historically, in most sub-Saharan African societies, a female was considered a girl before menarche. Despite her age, once a girl reached menarche, she was automatically considered 154

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a woman and was expected to engage in activities associated with womanhood, including marriage, childbearing, and childrearing. Further, to a great extent in many African communities, even allowing for postcolonial change, a girl was (and continues to be) identified by her race and socioeconomic status. For example, older women who worked as servants in white and Indian households were considered girls, often referred to their domestic employers as “house-girls” to indicate their subordinate role in the household. In contemporary African contexts, including in Kenya, the definition of girl and what qualifies her to be called a girl has shifted. This is determined by her age, social class, schooling status, and life events such as childbirth and marriage. Young female children from poor backgrounds are likely to leave school prematurely, get married, and bear children at a very young age. They are also likely to work as housemaids in middle- to upper-class households both as young girls and as older women, and are thus caught between the shifting parameters that mark the definition of a girl. As young girls serving as housemaids entrusted with adult responsibilities such as meal preparation and taking care of the household, in spite of being called girls, they are considered women. In contrast, the daughters of their employers, often in the same age group as the housemaids, continue to be regarded as girls until they are married. Because of this fluidity and the unstable definition of who counts as a girl, females from low-income and marginalized places like urban slums are often denied the experiences and processes of girlhood. Instead, societal expectations and the demands put on these girls propel them to quickly transition from childhood to womanhood. The pregnant teenage girls and young mothers from the Korogocho slum with whom I worked, whose ages ranged from thirteen to nineteen, fell into this category.

Problematizing Unplanned Teenage Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Schooling Unplanned teenage pregnancy is a global health problem, but countries in sub-Saharan Africa are disproportionately affected (Birungi et al. 2015; Undie et al. 2015). Specifically, studies show that in the Global South, unplanned adolescent pregnancy is one of the major contributing factors to girls dropping out of school (King and Winthrop 2015; Leach et al. 2007; Leach and Mitchell 2006; Onyango et al. 2015). According 155

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to George Onyango, Felix Ngunzo Kioli, and Erick Nyambedha (2015), unplanned pregnancy among adolescent girls accounts for about 23 percent of the teenage girls who drop out of school annually the world over, with the majority coming from sub-Saharan Africa. In most societies in sub-Saharan Africa, teenage pregnancy and motherhood are seen to be incompatible with schooling; thus, many girls drop out of school when they become pregnant (see Onyango et al. 2015). School-age girls in this part of the world face unique intersecting challenges that contribute to girls dropping out of school and failing to re-enter, a factor in the perpetuation of the persistent gender gap between girls and boys in school (and educated men and women). These girls are usually in marginalized and relatively inaccessible places and are, therefore, hard to reach (Hawke 2015; King and Winthrop 2015; Leach et al. 2007; Leach and Mitchell 2006). In Kenya, 59 percent of girls aged fifteen to nineteen are affected by teenage pregnancy. My study explored the barriers to school re-entry for such young mothers in a poor urban slum of Nairobi. The aim of the study was to offer a contextualized, evidence-based understanding of why teenage mothers continue to drop out of school and fail to return despite the school re-entry policy that has been in place in Kenya since 1994 (see Birungi et al. 2015; Undie et al. 2015).

Overarching Principles of Participatory Visual Research PVR, as part of arts-based community research, is considered to be a dynamic approach that draws from various methodological frameworks, some based on feminism(s), such as participatory action research and community-based participatory research (see Acker 1987; MacKinnon 1989; Minkler 2004; Nyariro 2018). These frameworks highlight the value of generating grassroots knowledge to help shift decision-making from top-down to bottom-up, thus upholding the value of locally constructed knowledge (De Lange et al. 2015; Moletsane et al. 2015; Shamrock 2013) and making this knowledge available through transnational activism. Using PVM with historically marginalized populations can be a way of centering their lived experiences and voices in decision-making (Mitchell and Sommer 2016). The visual artifacts, including photovoice exhibitions, digital stories, participatory videos, and cellphilms, produced by marginalized groups in particular contexts can be used to highlight participants’ 156

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voices and agency as vital components for social transformation in communities (Goodhart et al. 2006; Mitchell and Sommer 2016; Plush 2013). In addition, while PVR effectively helps to generate evidence that is context-specific, because of the ability of the visual artifacts developed to move beyond geographical and political borders, these artifacts developed locally can also be used for transnational engagement and activism (Eisner 1995; Weber 2014), particularly for girls and young women in remote areas. This enables them to participate, through the artifacts that they create, in transnational conversations in which their voices can be heard in ways that may not have been otherwise possible. The images and productions created by participants can promote transnational learning and networking at a global level for transnational girlhood solidarity and feminist movements. Such transnational collaboration was recently illustrated by an event organized by the “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” project1 that took place at Montebello, Quebec, in July 2018. The transnational event, “Circles within Circles,” used visual work created by girls and young women from Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sweden to understand the impacts of sexual violence against marginalized girls and young women and how this violence might be addressed in different national contexts. The photovoice narratives created by the young mothers and pregnant girls in Korogocho on barriers to school re-entry formed part of an exhibition of visual artifacts produced by girls and young women that addressed sexual and gender-based violence affecting girls and young women in various contexts. In their photo narratives, the young mothers identified poverty, an unsupportive social and physical environment, sexual violence, and the lack of affordable and efficient daycare as some of the barriers to their school re-entry after unplanned pregnancy and motherhood. Given the geographic distance between Canada and other countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa, some girls and young women from these southern countries were not able to attend the event in person because of factors such as poverty and the (often related) inability to secure travel visas. However, the researchers who work with these girls in their home countries came up with creative ways to facilitate their remote participation, including screening pre-recorded messages from girls who were unable to attend the event. Here was transnational girlhood in action as their voices were made to count in the presentations of their visual products. 157

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The “Circles within Circles” event also included a series of participatory visual and digital activities in which the participants (girls, young women, and adult researchers and stakeholders) together produced artifacts that focused on the experiences of girls and young women, particularly their experiences of sexual violence, in various communities. This enabled the girls and young women to participate in a transnational analysis of the issues and to engage in dialogue to envision ameliorative action needed at the local and the global level—a rare opportunity for those who are usually excluded from such conversations due to their age and other factors

Current Ethical Dilemmas in Participatory Visual Research While PVM can be used by historically silenced girls and young women as tools to engage in transnational activism and advocacy against social injustice, as stated above, researchers using these tools, particularly with vulnerable populations, often encounter resistance from REBs. In seeking to protect participants from systems that produce, reproduce, and perpetuate oppression, REBs require participatory visual researchers to provide a detailed justification for choosing a visual methodology that will likely make the identities of research participants public or fail to ensure their anonymity, rather than conventional qualitative methodologies. As Sarah Flicker and colleagues (2007) and Päivi Löfman et al. (2004) remind us, the current ethical principles and guidelines adopted by many REBs emerged as a result of abuses experienced by and harm caused to research participants largely by the unethical approaches taken by some studies involving human subjects. As these authors point out, this led to the formulation of the Nuremberg Code in 1947 (see Flicker et al. 2007) that created strict ethical guidelines and principles to protect human research participants from potential harm and exploitation. Despite their benevolent intent, these ethical guidelines can act as barriers to the potential benefits of PVM, such as promoting participants’ agency and voice in highlighting their experiences and perspectives through the visual artifacts they create. The guidelines can be counterproductive and can undervalue participants’ agency as well as silence their voices, the very challenge participatory research seeks to address (Clark 2013; Flicker et al. 2007). Further, the REB guidelines tend to contradict the methodological principles of PVR, a situation exacerbated by 158

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the non- and under-representation of participatory visual researchers on REBs (Flicker et al. 2007; Wiles et al. 2011, cited in Miller 2018). Consequently, studies that employ PVM with populations that are considered vulnerable are subjected to deeper scrutiny and called upon to justify the use of such methodologies, with conventional qualitative methods being the yardstick against which they are measured. Given the principles of the Nuremberg Code (see Flicker et al. 2007), there have been advancements in the social sciences to implement more progressive and democratic methodologies, like PVM, that promote democratic research processes (Flicker et al. 2007). Despite the shared power between researchers and research participants in participatory research, REBs continue to apply stringent ethical regulations to safeguard participants’ confidentiality, privacy, and anonymity, which may be impossible to ensure in such work. This can cause conflict for the researcher in relation to maintaining a balance between the principles of PVR and the ethical regulations demanded by REBs. While such ethical governance strives to protect participants from harm, it can also act to limit the potential benefits that come with progressive and democratic research methodologies such as PVM on breaking the silence on issues that are rarely talked about (Miller 2018). For this reason, Clark (2012, 2013) argues that instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach, REBs should evaluate each study by analyzing its methodological principles and investigate whether the benefits of using such methodologies outweigh any potential harm. Clark does, however, caution that “situated ethical approaches are not a panacea to the ethical issues raised by visual researchers” (2013: 2), and reiterates that a situated ethics helps only to resolve some of the ethical dilemmas experienced in participatory visual studies in the contexts in which they occur. For Clark, what is needed is situational reflexivity on the part of researchers to enable them to offer a more ethically appropriate visual methodological approach.

Photovoice: A Tool for Young Mothers and Pregnant Girls to Speak Up and Speak Out Photovoice is a community-based feminist participatory visual method commonly used to explore issues affecting vulnerable populations such as girls and young women (see Gant et al. 2009; Johnson et al. 2012; Wang et al. 2004). As Ben Boog (2003) and colleagues note, photovoice is 159

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widely embraced as a feminist and community-based participatory research technique to minimize power imbalances between researchers and participants, particularly where researchers are working with marginalized girls and women. Photovoice enables participants to have ownership and control over their own narratives in the research process. Photovoice can also serve as a tool for transnational understanding, activism, and advocacy against common social ills that affect girls and women globally. Due to their mobility, the visual images, and the accompanying messages girls and young women create to understand and address the daily challenges they face can reach policymakers and audiences locally as well nationally and internationally. The photovoice exhibition produced by the pregnant girls and young mothers in my study has been viewed in Kenya and far beyond its borders. As a feminist researcher involved in transnational girlhood work, I have facilitated the dissemination of these photovoice findings to different national and international audiences. As an educator, I have also used the visual artifacts to demonstrate to my students the ways in which participatory visual approaches can be used to expose and address human rights violations and social injustices.2

Using Photovoice with Young Mothers and Pregnant Girls As mentioned above, the study discussed in this chapter used participatory visual methods, largely photovoice, to explore the experiences of pregnant girls and teenage mothers as they negotiated their re-entry or re-enrollment in schools. The project offers the opportunity for an examination of the contradictions and reflexivity to which Clark (2012, 2013) draws our attention. My application for ethical approval by the REB of my university raised concerns about my use of participatory research with this group. In particular, my plan, informed by the principles of participatory research, to have the young mothers and pregnant girls present/disseminate their findings during the community photovoice exhibition, was questioned. The REB argued that this would lead to further stigmatization of the young women and their further marginalization in the community. However, my rationale for having the young Kenyan women present their findings to the community was, true to the principles of participatory research, to privilege their perspectives by not speaking or presenting on their behalf. I also hoped that hearing from the girls and young women themselves presenting their own narratives would help address the stigma 160

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surrounding teenage pregnancy and motherhood in relation to schooling and that this would encourage the community, together with these participants, to explore ways of addressing the barriers they encounter. While a participatory visual researcher can experience many different ethical challenges in the field, it is also true that these vary in relation to the contexts and the biographical backgrounds of the participants with whom one is working. Here, I give an overview of what I call the “Ethical Cycle” in an attempt to describe the ethical dilemmas I experienced at various stages of my research, from the conceptualization of the study to my application for ethical approval, and data generation, analysis, and dissemination. These ethical dilemmas included negotiating ethical clearance with the REB, deciding on the sampling frame, negotiating informed consent and assent, balancing researcher guidance and facilitation during the photovoice activities while allowing for participants’ individual responses, centering the voices of the participants while ensuring their anonymity and privacy, and balancing my role and the roles of the participants in the dissemination of the findings. Ethical Application and Approval The process of applying and acquiring ethical clearance is the gateway to ethically sound fieldwork that involves humans (Clark 2013). For the participatory visual researcher, in particular, this can mark the beginning of a complicated and conflicted personal, ethical, and professional self. Normally, REBs expect researchers to look ahead to possible ethical issues that may arise during fieldwork and develop, beforehand, prescribed mitigation to the anticipated ethical problems. But researchers who have conducted social science fieldwork are well aware that, more often than not, some unforeseen ethical issues arise during fieldwork (see Clark 2012). In participatory research, some of these ethical challenges can be resolved only through collaborative reflections that result in mutually acceptable action by the researcher and the participants. However unintentionally, the REB’s objective to protect the participants assumes that they are passive research subjects who lack agency and the ability and will to speak up and speak out. Because ethical reviews and approval processes are not neutral, factors such as historical or current examples of the exploitation of participants in a particular field or context, individual committee members’ previous experiences in similar research contexts, and poor understanding of the proposed research methodology and the context of the study can influence ethical review processes (Flicker et al. 2007). 161

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Recruitment of Participants Participants are at the center of any research process. My initial proposal was to draw my sample of participants from the African Population and Health Research Center’s (APHRC 2002) Nairobi Urban Demographic and Health Surveillance System (NUDHSS). However, from this database, there was only one girl who had dropped out of school because of teenage pregnancy. Yet available literature confirms that unplanned teenage pregnancy is one of the major causes of girls dropping out of school in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in low-income and marginalized contexts such as the Korogocho slum. Therefore, using my networks in the local community to identify and recruit pregnant teenagers and young mothers who had dropped out of school as a result of an unplanned teenage pregnancy, I changed my sampling strategy to snowballing. The eligibility criteria were that a participant had to be pregnant or a mother between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, be out of school at the time of the study, and had lived in Korogocho during the three years preceding data generation (see Nyariro 2018). In total, I recruited fifteen pregnant girls and young mothers to participate in the study. Negotiating Consent with the Young Mothers and Pregnant Girls The process of obtaining consent in research based in PVM is not linear but involves a back-and-forth negotiation between the researcher and the participants. As required by my REB, I informed the participants in detail about the benefits and implications of taking part in the study, their autonomy to withdraw from the study, and their right to choose not to participate in some activities without penalty. Despite some participants’ lack of active participation during discussions in the sessions we had together, I followed feminist and anti-oppressive practices that lessen exclusion by embracing varied ways of participation, including silence. To do this, I encouraged participants to contribute in ways that they found comfortable, including taking photographs, selecting images to photograph, or choosing which pictures to include in the photo narratives. Taking the Photographs In the first phase of the study, participants were engaged in a photovoice activity. After being informed about visual ethics, which included asking for permission to take pictures of people and/or their property, not taking pictures of people’s faces, not taking pictures of young children, the fifteen 162

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participants formed four groups of three or four. In their small groups, they practiced taking pictures with the digital cameras I provided. Each group was given two cameras with labels identifying their group number and the function of the camera. All cameras labeled “1” were designated for participants’ use to take photographs of what they considered to be barriers to their continued schooling, while the cameras labeled “2” were to be used to take process photographs of the participants in action. I trained the participants on how to rotate the cameras within their groups to ensure that everyone took four photographs in response to the prompt that guided the photovoice activity: What challenges do you face in this community as pregnant girls and young mothers? Working in their small groups, participants discussed what the prompt meant to them and where in the community they wanted to take their pictures. On their walks around the community to take their photographs, each group was accompanied by two community security officers recommended by the young mothers themselves. In total, in response to the prompt, the participants took over a hundred photographs. Because of the high migration rates in and out of slums like Korogocho, studies have shown that sustained participation in longitudinal studies can be challenging. By the second phase of my study, most of the participants from phase one had migrated out of Korogocho, thereby falling out of the study area. I, therefore, recruited a new cohort of participants following the same selection criteria described above. As a result, of the thirteen participants recruited to participate in the second phase of the study—the exhibition of the photovoice products created by the fifteen girls and young mothers who participated in phase one—only two had participated in the first phase of the study. The aim of the photovoice exhibition was to gather audience responses to the photo narratives that would generate community conversations about how to support teenage mothers to continue and complete their education. First, the thirteen participants from the second cohort participated in viewing, validating, and responding to the photovoice exhibition. I introduced the participants to the purpose of the study and the research questions, and, together, we discussed the photovoice prompt that had been used. We then proceeded to validate the findings presented in the photovoice exhibition. Following the same procedures with participants in the second cohort as I had with participants from the first, I asked the participants about their daily struggles as young mothers in their community and took notes on what they identified as their daily challenges. I then proceeded to unveil the exhibition for the young women to view. This was followed by 163

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a discussion about which images they could relate to. In the discussions that followed, each of the participants identified three photographs in the exhibition to which she could relate and that directly reflected aspects of her lived experience. As part of their response to the exhibition, the participants from the second cohort took part in a second photovoice activity. The prompt that guided the second photovoice activity was Picture solutions to the challenges presented in the photovoice exhibition that you just viewed. Again, the participants divided themselves and worked in groups of three or four. As I had done with the first cohort of participants, I trained them on the basic use and operation of cameras, including how to focus and shoot good quality photographs, how to view the photographs taken using the review and forward buttons, how to delete unwanted photographs and, finally, how to select their photographs for printing, analysis, and presentation. After this training session, the participants went to different parts of the community in their smaller groups. Some of the locations in which the participants took their pictures included the local community market, the nearby river, alleys, and the streets (see Illustrations 7.1 and 7.2 below).

Illustration 7.1. A polluted river in the community where women wash sacks for recycling. Photograph by the project participants. 164

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Illustration 7.2. An isolated alley where girls and women risk being sexually assaulted. Photograph by the project participants. The thirteen participants took 132 photographs in response to the prompt. Each participant chose four photographs she wanted to use to create her photo narrative. Following the advice of Claudia Mitchell (2011) and Ginger A. Johnson, Anne E. Pfister, and Cecilia VindrolaPadros (2012) on working with visual images, I asked each participant to write a short account of what each photograph meant to her (see Illustration 7.3 below). Working with the Photographs Like any research methodology, PVM is informed by particular methodological guidelines and principles that must be upheld for the research to be considered ethical. Despite the democratic nature of PVM, power imbalances may still be present because the researchers have professional and technological knowledge and the obligation to ensure that the research meets the threshold of both ethical and methodological standards (Johnson et al. 2012). As a Kenyan scholar residing in Canada and working with pregnant girls and young mothers in Kenya, I remained con165

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Illustration 7.3. A photo narrative with captions of the meaning of each photograph selected by the participants. Photograph by Milka Nyariro. scious of the power imbalance that my position could introduce into the research process. I, therefore, constantly checked the extent of my guidance, taking precautions not to take total control of the research process. For example, aside from training the participants on operating the cameras and the portable printer, I had the participants form their own working groups and decide which part of the community they wanted to photograph. Once each participant had chosen the photographs that were important to her and printed them out, they discussed the photographs they had selected in small groups. Following Mitchell (2011) and to respect the anonymity and autonomy of people, I ensured that the participants excluded photographs of identifiable people who were not part of the research team. Participants also reflected on the photographs and were free to withdraw any that they did not want to have included in the photo narratives for public viewing. Each of the smaller groups then presented their findings to the larger group, following which we engaged in a discussion to identify the common themes that emerged in these findings (see Nyariro 2018).

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Confronting Some Ethical Dilemmas of Participatory Visual Research Juxtaposing the ethical tensions against the standard ethical requirements of the REB, in this section, I outline some of the ethical dilemmas I encountered and how I attempted to mitigate them. By so doing, I aim to contribute to the ongoing conversation on strategies for identifying and addressing some of the ethical dilemmas in PVR, particularly for feminist scholars located in the Global North who work with girls and young women in the Global South. Ownership of the Photographs Since PVR results in tangible material products or artifacts, questions of ownership are likely to emerge as an ethical dilemma: Who owns the artifacts? (Clark 2013; MacEntee et al. 2016; Mitchell 2011). The products and by-products of participatory research such as photographs, photo narratives, and photo exhibitions present ethical questions regarding who keeps them, who gets to choose the audience to which the images are shown, who decides where the images should be shown and for what purposes they should be used, where the images should be stored, and who can access them and when this may happen (MacEntee et al. 2016; Clark 2013). In this study, an ethical dilemma related to ownership of the artifacts was related to how I would uphold the PVM principle that participants have the right to ownership of their creative work while adhering to the REB requirement that research data be used strictly for research purposes. To address this, ownership of the research products was discussed with the participants before, during, and after the photovoice activity. After these discussions, the participants and I analyzed the photographs collectively and destroyed all those that had identifiable faces of other people in them. As part of our agreement, participants took with them photographs in which they appeared. Ensuring Privacy, Anonymity, and Confidentiality while Centering Participants’ Voices Considering the high levels of crime in this urban slum, I was concerned about the safety of the participants and of the cameras, given that they contained data. In response to this, as mentioned above, through the rec-

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ommendation of the young women, I recruited security persons in the community to ensure their safety. While using local security personnel known to the participants was a reliable strategy for ensuring their safety (see Illustration 7.4 below), it made ensuring their privacy and anonymity difficult. Hiring security personnel from outside of the community was not an option as this decision would have been met with hostility from community gatekeepers. Ensuring total privacy and the complete anonymity and confidentiality of participants while working with the images was not possible. Some participants appeared in the images intentionally while acting out social phenomena that they wanted to represent. Furthermore, complete anonymity in PVR may counteract the very intention of doing the work, which includes breaking the silence around problematic or controversial issues that are not openly discussed in the community. This speaking out requires the participants to assume an advocacy role as activists in creating awareness in a wider audience either in person or through the public display of their visual work (see Gant et al. 2009).

Illustration 7.4. A local security person accompanying a young mother to take pictures. Photograph by the project participants. 168

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Clark has argued that “anonymizing data in PVR defeats the very purpose of collecting the visual data, and that disguising the images that are produced by participants can dehumanize those represented in them” (2013: 71). Informed by this, I believe that preventing the young mothers in my study from participating in the community exhibition (as required by the REB) would perpetuate the silencing of their voices and would serve to reinforce their stigmatization as bodies of shame not worthy of appearing in public spaces such as schools. In spite of the REB’s reluctance to have the young mothers participate in the community exhibition, since their status as pregnant girls or as young mothers was no longer private, engaging in these conversations with the community and other stakeholders, I believe, served to address the stigma of teenage pregnancy and motherhood and foster ways to support these girls and young women in going back to school. Dissemination of the Findings One of the ethical obligations in social science research is to contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge and social change by making research public and sharing research findings with a variety of audiences. Such dissemination can take place very shortly after the data is generated, thereby enabling the researcher to go back to the field to fill in any gaps that may be identified. In PVR, dissemination is an interactive process that involves both the active involvement of participants in communicating the meaning of their images to an audience, and engaged viewing as the audience interacts with both the images and the producers and reflects on what the images mean to them. The findings from my photovoice study with the young mothers and pregnant girls were first disseminated to the Korogocho community at a local exhibition. Subsequently, the findings were disseminated to a much wider audience, including local policymakers, educators, and education practitioners. For the reasons discussed above, disseminating the findings at the community level was done in collaboration with the young participants. Although desirable, this kind of collaborative dissemination is seldom possible in national, international, and transnational forums like conferences because of logistics and financial constraints. However, I have been able to represent my findings on behalf of the participants at such forums. Despite the ethical debate that surrounds representation, participatory visual work allows transnational researchers, including those working with girls and young women in the Global South, to use participants’ own 169

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work to represent their voices at international and transnational forums in which they would otherwise not participate. For example, as stated above, the photovoice posters were also exhibited for an international audience at the “Circles within Circles” event.

Conclusion It is commendable that both participatory visual researchers and REBs are taking steps to protect vulnerable groups and communities from harm and exploitation in research processes. However, since there has been exponential growth in creative research methodologies, it is time to expand the current standard ethical guidelines to embrace the principles of these newer methodologies, including PVM. As proposed by Clark (2013), REBs need to adapt and apply a situated and negotiated ethics that will consider the methodological principles and rationale for the newer methodologies. This means that ethical guidelines cannot be applied uniformly to all studies during the review and approval process (Clark 2012, 2013; Flicker et al. 2007). Rather, REBs should acknowledge contextual variance and recognize that working ethically is not a stable, linear, or static process but a series of ongoing negotiations, reflections, interpretations, and experimentations (Clark 2013) that should be allowed to evolve with the emergence of new research methodologies. REBs can further benefit by expanding their review committees to include the representation of researchers using a variety of newer methodologies like PVM to provide detailed and expert understanding during review processes (Flicker et al., 2007). Milka Nyariro was born and raised in Kenya and currently lives in Canada where she is doing her PhD in Educational Studies at McGill University. Her research focuses on addressing gender-based and sexual violence in and around schools.

Notes 1. As noted in the Introduction, “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa” is an international and interdisciplinary partnership that brings together re170

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searchers, government, and community-based organizations focusing on girls and young women (Co-PIs: Claudia Mitchell, McGill University, Canada, and Relebohile Moletsane, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa). This international initiative aims to study the co-creation of knowledge about sexual violence in institutional settings as informed by girls and young women themselves, using innovative approaches that aim to shift the boundaries of knowledge production and policy change. 2. This was an undergraduate level class on Human Rights and Ethics I taught at McGill University in 2018. The course objectives were to introduce students to the field of human rights, to the intersection of education and human rights, and to human rights education as a scholarly field and an educational practice. My pedagogical approach was participatory and based on critical pedagogy that encouraged the teacher trainees to apply the use of participatory visual methodology (PVM) in interrogating social injustices and human rights violations in schools and educational systems and explain how this feeds back to the larger society. I conducted two photovoice training workshops with the students and applied the use of participatory visual approaches in the students’ group projects. The prompt that guided the photovoice class group project was: Picture what makes you feel safe and not so safe on campus.

References Acker, Sandra. 1987. “Feminist Theory and the Study of Gender and Education.” International Review of Education 33(4): 419–435. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF00615157. African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC). 2002. Population and Health Dynamics in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements: Report of the Nairobi Cross-Sectional Slums Survey (NCSS) 2000. Nairobi: African Population and Health Research Center. Birungi, Harriet, Chi-Chi Undie, Ian MacKenzie, Anne Katahoire, Francis Obare, and Patricia Machawira. 2015. “Education Sector Response to Early and Unintended Pregnancy: A Review of Country Experiences in sub-Saharan Africa.” STEP UP Research Report. Nairobi: Population Council. Boog, Ben WM. 2003. “The Emancipatory Character of Action Research, Its History and the Present State of the Art.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 13(6): 426–438. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.748. Clark, Andrew. 2012. “Visual Ethics in a Contemporary Landscape.” In Advances in Visual Methodology, ed. Sarah Pink, 17–35. London: Sage Publications. ———. 2013. “Haunted by Images? Ethical Moments and Anxieties in Visual Research.” Methodological Innovations Online 8 (2): 68–81. https://doi .org/10.4256/mio.2013.014. De Lange, Naydene, Claudia Mitchell, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2015. “GirlLed Strategies to Address Campus Safety: Creating Action Briefs for Dialogue with Policy Makers.” Agenda 29(3): 118–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/1013 0950.2015.1072300. 171

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Eisner, Elliot W. 1995. “What Artistically Crafted Research Can Help Us to Understand about Schools.” Educational Theory 45(1): 1–6. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00001.x. Flicker, Sarah, Robb Travers, Adrian Guta, Sean McDonald, and Aileen Meagher. 2007. “Ethical Dilemmas in Community-Based Participatory Research: Recommendations for Institutional Review Boards.” Journal of Urban Health 84(4): 478–493. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-007-9165-7. Gant, Larry M., Kate Shimshock, Paula Allen-Meares, Leigh Smith, Patricia Miller, Leslie A. Hollingsworth, and Trina Shanks. 2009. “Effects of Photovoice: Civic Engagement among Older Youth in Urban Communities.” Journal of Community Practice 17(4): 358–376. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705420903300074. Goodhart, Fern Walter, Joanne Hsu, Ji H. Baek, Adrienne L. Coleman, Francesca M. Maresca, and Marilyn B. Miller. 2006. “A View through a Different Lens: Photovoice as a Tool for Student Advocacy.” Journal of American College Health 55(1): 53–56. https://doi.org/10.3200/JACH.55.1.53-56. Gonick, Marnina, and Susanne Gannon. 2014. “Girlhood Studies and Collective Biography.” In Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood, ed. Marnina Gonick and Susanne Gannon, 1–16. Toronto, ON: Women’s Press. Hawke, Angela. 2015. Fixing the Broken Promise of Education for All: Findings from the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children. New York: UNICEF. Johnson, Ginger A., Anne E. Pfister, and Cecilia Vindrola-Padros. 2012. “Drawings, Photos, and Performances: Using Visual Methods with Children.” Visual Anthropology Review 28(2): 164–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15487458.2012.01122.x. King, M. Elizabeth, and Rebecca Winthrop. 2015. “Today’s Challenges for Girls’ Education.” Global Economy and Development Working Paper 90. Washington, DC: Brookings Global Working Paper Series. Leach, Fiona, and Claudia Mitchell. 2006. “Situating the Study of Gender Violence in and Around Schools.” In Combating Gender Violence in and around Schools, ed. Fiona Leach and Claudia Mitchell, 1–12. Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham Books Limited. Leach, Fiona, Claudia Mitchell, and Amanda Gouws. 2007. “Combating Gender Violence in and around Schools.” Agenda 21(74):154–156. https://doi .org/10.1080/10130950.2007.9674891. Löfman, Päivi, Marjaana Pelkonen, and Anna-Maija Pietilä. 2004. “Ethical Issues in Participatory Action Research.” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 18(3): 333–340. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6712.2004.00277.x. MacEntee, Katie, Casey Burkholder, and Joshua Schwab-Cartas. 2016. “What’s a Cellphilm? An Introduction.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism, ed. Katie

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MacEntee, Casey Burkholder and Joshua Schwab-Cartas, 1–15. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, Kyle. 2018. “The Ethics of Visual Research and Participant Empowerment.” In Participant Empowerment through Photo-elicitation in Ethnographic Education Research, ed. Michael Lee Boucher, 25–44. Cham, CH: Springer. Minkler, Meredith. 2004. “Ethical Challenges for the ‘Outside’ Researcher in Community-Based Participatory Research.” Health Education & Behavior 31(6): 684–697. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198104269566. Mitchell, Claudia. 2011. Doing Visual Research. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Mitchell, Claudia, and Naydene de Lange. 2011. “Community-Based Participatory Video and Social Action in Rural South Africa.” In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, ed. Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels, 71–185. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Mitchell, Claudia M., and Marni Sommer. 2016. “Participatory Visual Methodologies in Global Public Health.” Global Public Health 11(5–6): 521–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2016.1170184. Moletsane, Relebohile, Claudia Mitchell, and Thandi Lewin. 2015. “Gender Violence, Teenage Pregnancy and Gender Equity Policy in South Africa.” In Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts: The Educational Challenge, ed. Jenny Parkes, 183–196. London: Routledge. Nyariro, Milka Perez. 2018. “Re-Conceptualizing School Continuation & Re-Entry Policy for Young Mothers Living in an Urban Slum Context in Nairobi, Kenya: A Participatory Approach.” Studies in Social Justice 12(2): 310– 328. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v12i2.1624. Onyango, George, Felix Ngunzo Kioli, and Erick Nyambedha. 2015. “Challenges of School Re-Entry among Teenage Mothers in Primary Schools in Muhoroni District, Western Kenya.” Retrieved 1 February 2017 from https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2546761. Plush, Tamara. 2013. “Fostering Social Change through Participatory Video: A Conceptual Framework.” In Development Bulletin: Challenges for Participatory Development in Contemporary Development Practise, ed. Pamela Thomas, 55–58. The Development Network Studies Network. Canberra: Australian National University. Shamrock, Jane. 2013. “The Power of Pictures: Using Photovoice to Investigate the Lived Experience of People with Disability in Timor-Leste.” In Development Bulletin: Challenges for Participatory Development in Contemporary Development Practise, ed. Pamela Thomas, 63–65. The Development Network Studies Network. Canberra: Australian National University. Undie, Chi-Chi, Harriet Birungi, George Odwe, and Francis Obare. 2015. “Expanding Access to Secondary School Education for Teenage Mothers in 173

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Kenya: A Baseline Study Report.” STEP UP Research Report. Nairobi: Population Council. Wang, Caroline C., Susan Morrel-Samuels, Peter M. Hutchison, Lee Bell, and Robert M. Pestronk. 2004. “Flint Photovoice: Community Building among Youths, Adults, and Policy-makers.” American Journal of Public Health 94(6): 911–913. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.94.6.911. Weber, Sandra. 2014. “Arts-Based Self-Study: Documenting the Ripple Effect.” Perspectives in Education 32(2): 8–20. https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC15 8211. Wiles, Rose, Andrew Clark, and Jon Prosser. 2011. “Visual Research Ethics at Crossroads.” In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, ed. Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels, 71–185. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

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“Yu Ai Tron!” (Your Eye Is Strong!) Gender, Language, and Ethics in Cameroon

Jennifer A. Thompson

Participatory visual methods such as photovoice and participatory video encourage participants to voice their stories, identify and analyze the critical issues in their lives, and speak back to dominant or (mis)representations of their lives (Mitchell et al. 2017). Participatory research also includes the critical component of listening (Low et al. 2016). While language is clearly integral to the dialogue that these methods seek, remarkably little research investigates the methodological implications of language. Given efforts to reach marginalized groups in order to broaden access to knowledge production as well as to identify, challenge, and transform power structures, language offers a way to explore the complicated enactments of power in participatory visual research (PVR). The use of participatory visual methods often entails working in multilingual contexts, navigating participatory processes across two or more languages, and sometimes working with translators. In the visual research I have conducted across various contexts in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in Canada, the language abilities of researchers, participants, and potential audiences have been a key consideration. Multilingual interactions Notes for this section can be found on page 193.

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and considerations are important in the context of increasing scholarly attention to transnational movements of peoples, cultures, ideas, and languages. That researchers and participants negotiate multiple languages is, I suggest, not an exception but a norm. However, despite these normalized practices in PVR, the complexities of language are not often addressed. Adding to work about Indigenous language revitalization through PVR (Schwab-Cartas 2016), with a focus on how to work safely and ethically with girls and young women, I explore language as a critical and transnational site through which power is mediated in PVR. I consider the politics of language and participation that emerged through my doctoral research into gender and water in the context of Southwest (SW) Cameroon. After positioning my analysis within feminist and post-colonial frameworks, I introduce an overview of the study design. I then contextualize the gendered politics of language in SW Cameroon as well as my positionality within these dynamics. I present some challenges that my collaborators and I faced in reaching the most vulnerable household members and then discuss the language dynamics in a video produced by a group of young women. To conclude, I discuss questions related to gender and language in PVR, with specific attention to the transgressive potential of Pidgin to connect girls and young women transnationally across literal as well as figurative national borders.

Framing Overlapping traditions concerned with ethical research practice frame this inquiry. Feminist calls to situate the partiality of research consider how knowledge is constructed by embodied and situated “views from somewhere” (Haraway 1988: 590). Attention to researcher positionality and subjectivity is a necessary criterion for doing ethical, rigorous, and more reflexive research that means moving beyond static insider/outsider binaries, tokenistic claims about similarities and differences, and narcissistic personal biographies (Pillow 2003). I address the relationships between power and knowledge production by situating how my social location and subjectivity affect the research process. I draw on postcolonial concerns about interpretation and representation in the production of texts and, relatedly, how translation constructs meaning (Muller 2007; F. Smith 1996). Jacques Derrida (1985) theorized translation as necessary but impossible, and always partial and contested. In particu176

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lar, I adopt Fiona Smith’s “hybrid spaces of uncertainty” as “conceptual places where one need not accept the dominant structures of one or other position but instead can find ways of challenging and questioning these positions” (1996: 165). She suggests that researchers can act purposefully to decenter how meaning is constructed by examining tensions as important spaces of negotiation. Working with the feminist concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989), I take up gender, race, class, age, nation, and language as intersecting forms of discrimination, and consider how both privilege and oppression can coexist simultaneously. Specifically, I work with an intersectional approach to transnational girlhood, as Catherine Vanner (2019) suggests, by prioritizing the voices of girls and young women from the Global South and exploring ideas about border-crossing in relation to girls’ and young women’s agencies and lived experiences with respect to structural constraints such as patriarchy and colonialism. Building on links between positionality, interpretation, and language (Twyman et al. 1999), I reflexively examine shifting power relations in moments when the politics of speaking Pidgin surfaced. I position differences, tensions, and conflicts “not as problems, but as spaces of conceptual and indeed political opportunities and negotiation” (F. Smith 1996: 165) to explore how language mediated fieldwork. In this analysis, I consider the transnational potential of Pidgin, which transgresses national borders and identities in ways that are both mobile and emplaced (Dunn 2010).

Study Design: Picturing Gender and Water in Cameroon Drawing on literature investigating the social and political relationships between gender and water (Coles and Wallace 2005; Lahiri-Dutt 2011), it is clear that gendered divisions of labor position women in Cameroon with primary responsibilities in the daily use, collection, and management of water. Women have specific roles, needs, and interests in relation to water and are most affected by water-access challenges. However, women are seldom included in research on water and related policymaking. Persistent views about water as a technical issue and the aggregation of households as basic units of analysis produce water policies and management decisions that appear to be gender-neutral but are incomplete because they lack women’s knowledge about the practices of water use. This exclusion leads to poorly informed decisions that affect the efficiency and sustainabil177

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ity of water management. Additionally, men often prioritize their needs and concerns, and this gender bias creates disproportionate burdens for women and exacerbates gender inequality. Yet, gendered divisions of labor and unreliable water access have become embedded, routine aspects of everyday life. Research with young people also indicated concerns about girls’ experiences in relation to water collection (Thompson et al. 2011). In unsettling normalized practices through the use of PVM, I explore the experiences and concerns of women and girls in Cameroon in order to make gendered differences in the use, access, and control of water more visible. My research in Cameroon stems from my interest in collaborative transnational models and my involvement with the Buea Water Resources Research Group (BWRRG), an interdisciplinary collective involving Canadian and Cameroonian scholars and NGOs. Despite abundant fresh water in Cameroon’s SW Region, water services are chronically unreliable and, at the time of my research, partially privatized in urban areas. Fidelis Folifac (2012) developed multi-stakeholder platforms to improve dialogue and participation among key actors in the water sector in Buea. Wanting to contribute meaningfully to this initiative and include a gender component, I collaborated with a local women’s civil society organization (CSO), “Changing Mentalities and Empowering Groups” (CHAMEG), to co-produce research with women and girls in a way that was culturally appropriate, responsive to local initiatives, and integrated possibilities for transnational reciprocity and sustainability (Thompson 2017). The fieldwork brought together the concerns of 130 participants— mostly women and some men—across two cities (Buea and Kumba) and two villages (Bwitingi and Mudeka) in the SW Region. Working with local facilitators, I co-facilitated photovoice and participatory video workshops in each community and had participants use digital cameras to produce 233 photographs and 27 short videos in response to the prompt: What are the challenges you face with water? What are some solutions? At a subsequent analysis workshop, community representatives interpreted the corpus of images, determined some key themes, selected representative images, and identified which community leaders they thought should see their work. The study culminated in a decision-maker forum that involved traditional leaders, NGO leaders, and representatives from municipal councils, ministries, and district offices in discussions about the implications of the findings.

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Pidgin in Cameroon To contextualize language in this study, I interrogate the historical, political, and social dynamics of power related to language in SW Cameroon, as well as in relation to my positionality as a white woman from Canada conducting gender research. What does it mean to conduct research in Pidgin? What does it mean for me to conduct research in Pidgin? Cameroon has immense ethnic and cultural diversity, with an estimated 280 Indigenous languages, making it one of the most linguistically diverse countries in Africa (Schröder 2003). German, French, and British colonial strategies have significantly shaped the contemporary social, political, and linguistic landscape of Cameroon, characterized by eight Francophone and two Anglophone regions, French and English as official languages, and a strong stance promoting national unity (Republic of Cameroon 2009). Yet, these Anglo-Franco demarcations fuel ongoing imbalances of power and questions of belonging in relation to Anglophone and Francophone identity politics. With the central government based in the majority Francophone region, many Anglophones critique the uneven flow of power and resources to the minority Northwest and Southwest Regions (Konings and Nyamnjoh 1997; Nkwi 1997) and point to abuses of human rights (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2018). Given these linguistic tensions across English and French, I focus here on how Cameroonian Pidgin English (Pidgin) is also spoken widely as a lingua franca across Cameroon (Schröder 2003). Pidgin is similar to other English-based pidgins and creoles that developed as trade languages, as well as on slave ships and in plantations in the coastal regions of West Africa prior to the Scramble for Africa. The use of Pidgin preceded formal colonial rule in Cameroon and was already established as a lingua franca when the German colonial administration arrived in 1884 (Orosz 2011). Linguists now consider Cameroonian Pidgin a distinct language spoken as a first language by over 30 percent of populations in the Anglophone cities of Buea and Bamenda, as well as in the Francophone capital of Yaoundé (Anchimbe 2013). Not linked to a particular ethnic group, Pidgin, often associated with “playfulness, informality, vulgarity, transgression, trade, celebration, and family” (Nfah-Abbenyi, cited in Tande 2006: n.p.), offers a bridge across Cameroon’s hundreds of Indigenous languages and is known for its predominant use in the home, marketplace, and street. Its use often engenders closeness and familiarity; it plays an important role

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in everyday household and informal negotiations in ways that resist and transcend discourses about national bilingualism across the colonial languages of English and French. During my fieldwork, my French language skills offered points of connection in my encounters with government officials. Serendipitously, the Krio that I had learned earlier through working in Sierra Leone was also compatible with Pidgin. In SW Cameroon, I could adapt my Krio and carry out much of my fieldwork in Pidgin. In certain areas, my Pidgin is limited; slang, song lyrics, and speaking in large groups are challenging. I was teased sometimes when my Krio emerged and told that my accent sounded Nigerian. But, when immersed, I could communicate effectively in Pidgin. This ability was an asset for my work with communities, particularly given how language mediates embodied and cultural relationships with water, as Margaret Somerville (2013) reminds us. My colleagues and I facilitated all of the community-based workshops in Pidgin, and most participants worked together, discussed their photographs, and acted their films predominantly in this language. Our explorations of gender-water relations were grounded in local expressions of culture, identity, and sociality. Pidgin offered an entry point into, and a bridge linking meaningful relationships. This helped me build trust and enhanced my credibility as an individual, as well as adding to the credibility of the study as being grounded in participants’ everyday realities and experiences. Presumably because few white people speak Pidgin, my speaking it often surprised people, provoking disbelief, laughter, and curiosity. My initial greeting was followed often with the question, “So yu di tok Pidgin?” (So, you speak Pidgin?), and comments such as “Wait wuman di tok Pidgin?” (A white woman speaks Pidgin?). My speaking Pidgin often generated a positive rapport, and many participants celebrated this as an indication that I cared. Hesitantly negotiating my whiteness and role as an outsider, I was encouraged by these responses. They suggested to me that I might be doing something differently, and, I hoped, countering the types of colonial relations that I was concerned about perpetuating, however inadvertently. Despite its widespread and popular use, Pidgin is also marginalized and explicitly discouraged in Cameroon, particularly among the elite (Neba et al. 2006; Tande 2006). A predominantly oral language, Pidgin is associated with illiteracy. The colonial languages of English and French dominate formal institutions such as politics and education. Anti-Pidgin 180

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campaign signboards on school campuses warn, “Leave your Pidgin at home!” While Pidgin is spoken by many people, including the elite, its use marks a lower class and status. Given these discriminatory politics, I was sometimes scolded because speaking Pidgin was considered bad, backward, and leading to the ruin of local English. My defenses—that I liked speaking it or that I wanted to try—were often rebuked. Yet as I learned how and when to use Pidgin more carefully when navigating social hierarchies, my work with women justified its use. Widely spoken among women, Pidgin is not only classed, but also gendered. A weekly national radio show, “Global Voices for Women,” is broadcast entirely in Pidgin specifically in order to reach women; and the women with whom I worked renamed our study “Women, Water, and Weather” to include the Pidgin word wahala (problems or trouble) and it became “Women and Water Wahala.” These exchanges shaped my everyday life in Cameroon, prompting me to think more deeply about how language affects my social position and desire to work transnationally, and the politics of language in PVR more generally. Working with the idea that transnationalism represents the permeability of both literal and figurative borders of nation-states (A. Smith 2019), I sought to better understand the origins of Pidgin, and, following Loreto Todd (1990), how pidgins and creoles trace histories of exploration, slavery, and colonialism in coastal areas around the world. I was, however, skeptical about the term contact language, which implies a coming together on ships and plantations on neutral or equal terms. These situations reflect colonial intentions to exploit, dominate, and assimilate— expanding and extending particular national visions. Many pidgins and creoles were once understood as lesser versions of colonial languages, a legacy that shapes Pidgin’s low status in Cameroon today. I suggest that Pidgin continues to be racialized in today’s global language context in which colonial languages tend to dominate, which is, in part, why a white person speaking Pidgin is unexpected. At the same time, Pidgin facilitates communication across linguistic difference and (trans)national identities. Many Indigenous groups have claimed, maintained, and remade pidgins and creoles over hundreds of years in ways that resist nationalism. Distinct but mutually intelligible varieties of English-based pidgins are spoken across West and Central Africa, as well as among members of African diaspora communities. When I meet people from Cameroon, Nigeria, or Sierra Leone where Pidgin and Krio are spoken widely, we sometimes speak in our different varieties of 181

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these lingua francas, regardless of where we meet. This can also happen when I meet people from other areas of sub-Saharan Africa where Pidgin is not as commonly spoken (for example, Benin and Kenya) because of how Nigerian films in Pidgin have influenced popular culture. Among the mobilities of people and of arts and culture, the linguistic border-crossing of Pidgin shows its transnational reach. In 2017, the British Broadcasting Corporation launched a web-based news service entirely in Pidgin, connecting Pidgin speakers across the globe. In this sense, Pidgin also constructs a dominant space, particularly given the need to protect and revitalize Indigenous languages. Even so, as a contested lingua franca, Pidgin’s ambiguous status at the intersection of colonial and Indigenous languages suggests a transgressive potential in resisting colonial languages, shifting away from nationalist discourses, and building cross-cultural connections. From an intersectional perspective, Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi point out how little research examines the linguistic factors that intersect with gendered identities, and how language is a “circulating resource” (2010: 2) that moves and is mobilized in uneven ways in transnational contexts. If Pidgin could be considered a hybrid space, it could also be considered a transnational resource and space of resistance. Doing PVR in Pidgin offers a critical cross-linguistic hybrid space for doing gender research in Cameroon, and for working safely and ethically with girls and young women who have social, cultural, and linguistic connections with other sub-Saharan African contexts where varieties of English-based Pidgin are spoken. Doing research in Pidgin can offer more inclusive forms of meaning-making, opportunities for change and new meaning, and a way of subverting dominant power structures at the intersection of gender, race, class, and nationality. Doing research in Pidgin certainly does not absolve me from considering questions about power in the research process and how many missionaries, colonial administrations, and researchers have used local languages in exploitative ways. If I slipped Pidgin strategically into my conversations in Cameroon, I gained access, credibility, and leverage. Is my use of Pidgin a form of cultural appropriation, or could it be said to be a transnational action? What does it mean that I learned Krio in Sierra Leone when, after years of French immersion schooling in Canada, I continue to struggle to speak French? What is the significance of the fact that several facilitators—students from Francophone regions of Cameroon who attended the University of Buea—struggled to speak Pidgin? The facilitators insisted that my Pidgin language skills were stronger than theirs for facilitating 182

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our workshops in this language. What does it mean that I discovered new parts of my personality when I learned a new language? Learning Krio and then Pidgin has helped me to decenter English, unlearn (or, at least, unsettle) the culture in which I grew up, and transform how I understand myself, all of which is helpful for building connections, working across difference and (trans)national contexts, and attending more closely to the lived particularities of participants. Yet, despite these benefits of working in Pidgin in Cameroon, attention to language alone is not enough; I need, also, to take up what it means to work ethically with vulnerable girls and young women in this context.

On Reaching and Recruiting Vulnerable Populations Here I reflect on ethical questions in relation to inclusion and exclusion in PVR that is designed as a relatively public community-oriented process. In training and hiring local facilitators and working within community structures to recruit research participants, I aimed to build on and respond to local initiatives and concerns. This meant adapting the study design that I had initially developed for the purpose of a funding application prior to traveling to Cameroon. While I had proposed working with women and girls alone, the facilitators disagreed. They felt that while the study should focus on women’s experiences, some men should also be at the workshops to observe, hear women’s perspectives, and participate in image production. But men should not, as the women said, dominate. Therefore, our recruitment targeted mostly women and some men. The facilitators recruited participants through their professional, friend, and family networks. In urban Kumba, participants reflected a fairly high social status through connections to various CSOs and government institutions. In Buea, participants were predominantly young women and men attending college, university, or secondary school. In Bwitingi village, the facilitators recruited women only—elders, university students, and vocational students. Mudeka village’s traditional council selected participants at a town meeting with a fifty-fifty gender split based on community members’ interest, availability with respect to seasonal labor, and, for women, their husbands’ permission. Overall, the participants constituted a diverse cross-section of social groups with a range of positions and occupations, including women and men from eighteen to seventy years of age who identified as teachers, farmers, journalists, business women, 183

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students, laborers, mothers, NGO workers, nurses, municipal council staff, and elders. Working with these groups allowed for nuanced complexities of experience, and, as I describe below, to illustrate how language use was embedded within everyday negotiations and power relations. In a sense, working through existing social networks replicated approaches to participation that overlook or exclude lower status members of communities (Cornwall 2003). Girls and domestic workers (frequently called “house help” in Cameroon)—often the most vulnerable members of households who do much of the daily work with water—did not participate in the study. I was interested explicitly in the perspectives of girls alongside those of women. Before recruitment, I expressed my concern about how to recruit girls and whether weekday workshops would conflict with schooling schedules. The facilitators assured me that girls would come. However, girls under eighteen years of age did not attend our workshops. My colleagues also found the informed consent requirement of signed guardian consent forms to be burdensome in what were already perceived as excessively comprehensive consent protocols. In addition, upon arriving in Cameroon, I realized the extent to which domestic workers play important roles in daily water management, particularly in urban households. When discussing this with my collaborators, I was alerted to the relatively precarious status of many domestic workers who include workers earning intermittent wages or room and board, younger and often female relatives from rural areas coming to the city for schooling, and migrant workers from other countries with varying documented and undocumented citizenship status. Given the public and advocacy-oriented nature of our study design, the involvement of domestic workers would have put them, at least potentially, at risk; the domestic workers whom I knew were uncomfortable with the idea of joining our workshops. Privileged spaces that reflect a particular NGO culture, many workshops that I attended in SW Cameroon attracted a relatively small group of middle-class activists and members of CSOs. Many workshop attendees relied on the labor of their house help in order to engage in the type of activism and non-profit work that they did. Clearly, the issue of domestic workers was beyond what I could safely address in this particular study. The experiences of domestic workers remain virtually unreported in Cameroon and also reflect a significant silence in literature on gender and water. These exclusions, although unintentional, indicated that our study design and recruitment methods might be dangerous for girls and domes184

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tic workers. My collaborators and co-facilitators strategically prioritized women’s voices, so I was unsure about whether or not to push for the inclusion of the more vulnerable girls and domestic workers. I could see that working safely with girls and house helpers required a different methodology and higher levels of anonymity. This would have taken more time and trust to implement carefully, so the water experiences of these specific populations were not included in the study. While PVR often targets marginalized groups, this study focused on the voices of women with relatively privileged age and class status, but who were nonetheless often excluded from formal decision-making spheres based on their being women. Given the strongly patriarchal nature of this research context, asking and valuing women’s perspectives was subversive still, and met with explicit resistance by some men. Patriarchal traditions that privilege men’s voices also infiltrated many aspects of the research implicitly. For example, in the facilitator training and community workshops, many women chose to have the few male participants speak on behalf of their groups. Older women and those with a stronger command of English or higher levels of formal education also tended to speak more, despite our running the workshops in Pidgin. The facilitators and I learned to restructure activities by including smaller group discussions and facilitating a go-around to create more space for all women to speak. Wanting to work safely and ethically with girls and young women, I considered my advisory committee, CHAMEG collaborators, and cofacilitators essential sounding boards in thinking through ethical questions. As we negotiated the study design, was it my responsibility to advocate and make a stronger case for the involvement of girls and domestic workers? Should I have pushed for what was needed to achieve greater involvement of vulnerable populations? A stronger request from me might have created a situation of greater risk for girls and domestic workers. And what ethic of care is required to avoid positioning my collaborators as perpetuating social exclusion but, rather, as facing their own struggles to be heard within formal structures of power? With all of us embedded in structures of power that are often difficult to see in everyday interactions, what was I missing? I wondered if my intention to work with women and girls together in a community-based setting risked merging diverse experiences within what Jackie Kirk, Claudia Mitchell, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh term “womenandgirls” approaches that risk “blurring the specificity of girls’ experiences” (2010: 14). I followed up these workshops the following year with a series of photovoice and participatory video 185

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workshops at a secondary school that involved teenagers—a recruitment strategy that seemed much more appropriate, or at least socially acceptable, for reaching young people. These recruitment trends suggested to me that it might be important to distinguish between working with girls when embedded within a community process and working with cohorts of girls on their own in, for example, school contexts. In this study, I did not push for the inclusion of girls and domestic workers. The exclusion of these more vulnerable groups exposed the bias in our recruitment strategies, but it might also have operated as a protective factor. Perhaps I was not equipped to work safely with these groups in the context of explicitly advocacy-oriented participatory visual methods. Perhaps my collaborators were also not equipped to work safely with these groups, given our use of methodologies that were unfamiliar to them. The more I learned about the precarious nature of democracy in Cameroon and the government repression of public voice, specifically in order to maintain a particular national ideal, the more I realized the significance of our work which invited forms of participation that challenge nationalist state hierarchies. Critically, despite the non-participation of girls, many women frequently acted out the roles of girls in their videos anyway, reinforcing girls’ central role in navigating water access, thus demonstrating that household water challenges cannot be understood without attention to the roles of girls.

Girls and Grammar: Language and the Negotiation of Household Labor Linguistic tensions in everyday interactions influence how water access and use are negotiated. The video “Women in Trouble” produced by five young women and one young man (all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five),1 contains dialogue across English and Pidgin.2 The video and related discussions express the nuances of the gendered social complexities of intrahousehold bargaining about water collection. Cile stands in front of her outdoor kitchen hut, having run out of water while cooking rice. As the pot turns black on the fire, Cile mutters to herself, “Ma pikin no kari wata” (My child did not collect water). She calls to her daughter, Pentacost, points to two water containers, and tasks her daughter with the fetching of water, “A wan wata fo de. A se, a wan wata!” (I want water here. I said, I want water!) 186

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Pentacost arrives but does not want to fetch water. She complains to her mother, “I’m just home from school.” Cile balks at this excuse, “A se, my momi neva sen mi fo skul! Yu wan tel mi grama? Kontena de emti!” (My mother never sent me to school! You want to speak in English? These containers are empty!) Pentacost relents, albeit in a huff, and takes the containers, one in each hand, to the nearby tap in her compound. She meets her elderly neighbor, Rosa, sitting on a stool and leaning her head against the wall. Rosa greets Pentacost, “Ma pikin, na wetin, eh?” (My child, what is it?) Pentacost says, “Momi, a don taya! Momi, a jus komot skul. A don taya!” (Mummy, I’m tired! Mummy, I just got home from school. I’m tired!) Rosa is exasperated, “Yu don taya fo kam kari smol wata?! A komot na bush!” (You are tired about having to come and carry a little bit of water?! I have just come from [farming in] the bush!) At that moment, a young woman, Paula, dressed in jeans and a shirt with a collar interrupts, “Mama, good morning.” Rosa replies, “Gut monin, ma pikin” (Good morning, my child.) Paula continues, “Well, Mummy . . . excuse me, I am having classes. I have lectures this morning . . .” Again, Rosa is exasperated, “Wata no de! Wata no de! Sef yu grama . . . wata no de! Si my fut? A komot na bush!” (There is no water! There is no water! Save your educated English . . . there is no water! See my feet? I’m coming from the bush!) Rosa gestures to the mud on her bare feet from working on her farm. Frustrated with the situation, Pentacost vents to herself, “This is what I hate! This is what I hate! I am not going [to collect water] . . . whether [my mother] cooks or whether she does not cook. Whether she shouts or whether she does not shout, I am sick and tired of all this! I am sick and tired . . .” Despite her outburst, Pentacost persists and continues her search for water. She weaves her way through the family compound with her containers in hand—around corners, in between buildings, under clotheslines. Along the way, Pentacost stops repeatedly to put her containers down because she is tired, “Di wan na stres. Di wan na STRES!” (This is stressful. This is really stressful!) She eventually runs down into a gulley to fetch water from a stream. Pentacost returns to her family compound, carrying the water on her head, to find her parents arguing. Her father is upset because his meal is not ready, and he chastises Cile for sending their daughter for water. He pays for Pentacost’s school fees and wants her to rest after school, so she can better focus on doing well in her studies. Among the string of defenses that Cile yells at her husband, she argues that even though she has no water, she still has to cook dinner and wash plates. And that her mother never sent her to school.

In this video, Cile’s feisty and sharp-tongued performance had many audiences dissolve into fits of laughter. Many participants related to her challenges in managing her household work with unreliable water access and how water wahala affects women more. The video also shows how 187

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these burdens cross social difference among women, as portrayed by a grandmother, a university student, and a secondary school student who meet at a dry tap. Participants also interpreted the relevance of this video for married women. Cile faced water challenges alongside the expectations of her husband, whose marital status and salaried job served to absolve him of household work. As Faith observed, The mother was quarreling with the father because she sent the daughter to fetch water. So, there you have double point—marital issues and women considered as slaves in the house. Because the man was, like, why does the wife have to send the daughter to fetch water? . . . [If ] they had a tap in the house, or the tap was flowing, maybe the mother wouldn’t have sent her [daughter] to go and fetch water and to even provoke her to go to the wrong source.

These comments aligned with other participants’ photos and videos about how water shortages strain relationships in families, fueling conflict between wives and husbands. Unreliable water access intensifies gender inequalities in households; many participants portrayed how women face domestic violence around their struggles in completing household work when water is not flowing or is flowing unreliably. This video also prompted me to think about the experiences of girls. I saw Pentacost as the main character; the camera followed her around on her search for water. In the analysis workshop, I wanted to draw attention to what I saw as her animated resistance. For me, what I am seeing in this film is vexation . . . frustration . . . anger . . . [It] is [a girl’s] job to fain wata but wata no de (find water but there isn’t any water). So, what I see is that the load is on this girl’s shoulders. She is being asked to do something that is very difficult because she has to go to this side [here] and then she has to go that side [there] and then she has to go [somewhere else]. She goes to many different sides [places] to find water. Then she comes to the house and if she doesn’t have enough water, she gets in trouble. Or, if the water is not clean, maybe she gets in trouble for going to the wrong place.

I was concerned about the troubles of girls. Many elders, however, interpreted Pentacost’s performance as bad behavior, suggesting that she was strong-headed, lazy, and undisciplined. While some acknowledged her fatigue, others chastised her for fetching water from a stream known by participants to be polluted. This illustrated for me the complexity of a transnational approach. My response was based on being a white Canadian and shows the limits, as Catherine Vanner (2019) suggests, of Western conceptualizations of girlhoods. The elders’ responses, far from being unfair, 188

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arose from their own cultural imperatives. At the same time, the young woman developed Pentacost’s character to portray the specific troubles of how girls negotiate their schooling and household water responsibilities. In the disaggregation of the gendered dynamics related to intrahousehold bargaining, women are responsible for water and often assign girls to collect it. When water access is unreliable, girls need to travel farther into their communities and carry water longer distances. Participants expressed concern that this work takes time away from education and exposes girls to sexual violence along the road or in the secluded areas around taps, springs, and streams. “Women in Trouble” also further expresses the nuances of the gendered social complexities of power and privilege. In the video, both young women, Pentacost and Paula, were chided by their elders for speaking in English, “You want to speak to me in English?” and “Save your grammar!” Here, “grammar” signals a privileged and nationalist class status related to attending school and speaking English. Yet, from a transnational perspective, “grammar” can also be used as a subversive insult when people use English to assert a higher social status. In what ways is it significant that both girls negotiated water access and use in English in the particular household spaces where Pidgin is normally spoken? Access to schooling provided these girls with social and linguistic capital through access to formal education and colonial languages that their mothers and grandmothers might not have. Speaking in English, itself a dominant transnational global language, might also offer a way for girls to resist traditional divisions of labor. These questions and ambiguities position girls in contradictory ways in household hierarchies, and illustrate how power works in complex and nuanced ways. One elder asked what happens in the urban university environment shared housing where students live away from home in student apartment buildings. Several young women described their experiences negotiating water labor with their brothers and boyfriends and switched from English to Pidgin to explain demands such as, “A bek, mai gelfren. Du ya kari wata” (I am begging you, my girlfriend. Please carry water) and “A no di yus wata! A no di kuk! . . . A onli drink, A no di wash” (I don’t use water! I don’t cook! . . . I only drink, I don’t wash). The specific familiar closeness achieved through the use of Pidgin nuances the nature and operationalization of coercion, which is critical for understanding the gendered expectations that young women face in relation to water. In English, these expressions would represent more formal requests and decontextualize the informal nature of young men’s demands. 189

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To explain these experiences, many articulated how they navigate cultural (and national) norms. Hope exclaimed, “You don’t see the guys going around with containers. . . . You don’t see the boys, just the girls. . . . You see? You see the culture? After all, it is not a man’s job. . . . Even if it is not a girlfriend, it is a sister [or] a niece living there.” Faith remarked that many young women fetch water for their boyfriends who sit and watch Nigerian films. Grace accepts her brother’s attitude and just gets on with it, “Yes . . . I fetch water [for him]. It is just like that . . . I just know that I have to get up and fetch [it].” Faith described how she challenges these gender norms discreetly. Sometimes I pretend as if I don’t know if the tap is flowing. [My brother] goes and fetches water [laughing] . . . I just, like, share the work without me telling him. I just know he is going to fetch water. Because obviously I have to go to the kitchen and look for what he will eat before leaving the house. So, I cannot be fetching water [at the same time] . . . It all depends on how you [plan] it.

Faith chooses her battles and focuses on cooking while strategically avoiding water collection. Many participants commented on Faith’s confidence. Hope commented, “Yu ai tron!” (Your eye is strong!), a Pidgin expression that refers to bold, stubborn, or disrespectful behavior related to looking an elder in the eye. Yet Hope also celebrated Faith’s calculated resistance as a form of empowerment that depends not only on her subversive strategies but on her brother’s acceptance of them, “This woman has been emancipated! And her brother knows!” I suggest that this Pidgin expression, “Yu ai tron!”—and the subtle tension between challenging and disrespecting hierarchies and norms—offers a sociolinguistic space for interrogating power in this context. Pidgin played a critical role in participants’ representations and analysis of the gendered social dynamics related to intrahousehold bargaining regarding water labor, as well as what resistance and empowerment might look like. Unreliable access to safe water creates stress and sometimes physical and emotional violence within the intimacies and politics of interpersonal and household relations, ultimately obscuring the systemic nature of inequalities related to water access.

Problematizing Language Thinking through Smith’s (2006) hybrid spaces of uncertainty as a way to attend to but also unsettle dominant power relations demonstrates that 190

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language is clearly more than a logistical consideration in PVR. Being able to work across languages may be a critical feature of visual media, which offers an inclusive space for multilingual and transnational engagement and interaction. Photographs can be interpreted in any language. Video also offers opportunities for multilingual expression, including through direct speech, how different actors interact or interject in different languages, and the possibilities of having a voice-over in one language and written signboards in another. The video “Women in Trouble” portrays how the complexities of the relationships between English and Pidgin play a central role in the negotiation of gendered power relations related to water and points to the linguistic implications in understanding the specific experiences of girls and young women. Bill Cooke’s suggestion that participatory researchers “work only in languages [they] understand as well as [their] first” (2004: 48) leaves questions around positionality, context, and language unanswered. What happens when researchers learn the languages of the communities with whom they work? What is the role of any lingua franca, such as Pidgin, in democratizing PVR? I found that a little bit of language can go a long way in building connections, decentering colonial English in an act of political transnationalism, and teasing out the partiality of research. I was nevertheless left wondering how my use of Pidgin might be tokenistic, colonizing, or appropriating rather than transnationalist. In what ways are multilingual researchers already negotiating the politics of multiple languages in participatory research? Pidgins and creoles often did not emerge around particular nation-states and therefore offer important, although overlooked, intersectional and transnational linguistic spaces for considering how girls and young women negotiate multilingual, and transnational gender relations. All of this raises questions about how to better support gender-sensitive multilingual and transnational research teams. Further, there are questions about writing an oral language, particularly given the global dominance of English in academic writing. Considering how Pidgin was marginalized during fieldwork, I wanted to recognize and value the critical role of Pidgin in participatory knowledge production, and particularly in academic writing. In order to do so, I faced the methodological challenge of how to write it. Cameroonian Pidgin is not commonly written in formal spheres such as education or government, and research publications rarely include written text in Pidgin. The sociolinguistic significance of Pidgin is removed from knowledge production and formal decision-making. When written in informal platforms such as 191

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text messages, email, or social media, Pidgin is not standardized; multiple different spellings are used. Many colleagues thought it was hilarious that I asked how to spell in Pidgin since there is no singular accepted spelling. In my writing, I chose to use Jean-Paul Kouega’s (2008) Pidgin dictionary, which I consider a critical contribution in legitimatizing Cameroonian Pidgin English. However, I also wonder how this formal lexicon risks detracting from Pidgin’s flexible multiplicity, which, in its relative unavailability to transnational translation, is arguably a key feature of its accessibility, mutual intelligibility, and transgressive potential. Is writing Pidgin a form of colonial transnationalism, however well-intentioned? Greater attention to translation and discourse analysis in visual research (Rose 2012) might offer insights into the development of ethical practice in relation to gender, language, and transnationalism. In what ways does language offer forms of resistance for girls and young women? What are the ways in which girls and young women use and work across different languages in transnational contexts? What do girls and young women say, and how are these expressions perceived by different audiences? These gendered, intergenerational dynamics are critical in understanding the transnational struggles that involve agency, empowerment, and social change.

Conclusion Given how language use is never neutral but always political and historically situated, much can be learned by looking more closely at language in PVR. In the context of Cameroon, exploring the gendered politics of what it means to work with participatory visual methods in Pidgin offers an important entry point for understanding and positioning the gendered nature of everyday water-access challenges and for interrogating the ethical considerations of working with girls and young women. If participatory researchers aim to reach groups that are marginalized at the intersection of gender, race, class, age, ability, and ethnicity, for example, then language also needs to be of central concern in understanding social exclusion, in positioning researchers, and in ascertaining pathways for social change. In multilingual contexts, language considerations need to inform participatory processes that seek to find ways of working across social, cultural, and linguistic differences as well as across national identities. While doing research in one language or another cannot ensure the participation of vul192

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nerable groups, the complexities of language frame important questions about ethical engagement and power in different local and transnational contexts. Jennifer A. Thompson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal with Myriagone, the McConnell-UdeM Chair in Youth and Knowledge Mobilization. Jennifer’s interests include gender, water, and participatory visual research. Her book with Casey Burkholder Fieldnotes in Qualitative Education and Social Science Research: Approaches, Practices, and Ethical Considerations was published by Routledge in 2020.

Notes 1. All names are pseudonyms or character names selected by participants. 2. The dialogue in this video is fast. Family members speak loudly and quickly and over one another as they argue, making it difficult to tease out every line and word uttered. While the written narrative works to capture the gist of these exchanges, I also acknowledge the limitations of this written piece in capturing the tone and heated nature of the interactions portrayed in the video.

References Anchimbe, Eric A. 2013. Language Policy and Identity Construction: The Dynamics of Cameroon’s Multilingualism. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Coles, Anne, and Tina Wallace, eds. 2005. Gender, Water, and Development. New York: Berg. Cooke, Bill. 2004. “Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents.” In Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development, ed. Samuel Hickey and Giles Mohan, 42–55. London: Zed Books. Cornwall, Andrea. 2003. “Whose Voices? Whose Choices? Reflections on Gender and Participatory Development.” World Development 31(8): 1325–1342. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(03)00086-X. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–168. Retrieved 2 July 2019 from http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein .journals/uchclf1989&div=10&g_sent=1&collection=journals. 193

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Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Des Tours de Babel.” Trans Joseph F. Graham. In Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham, 165–207. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dunn, K. 2010. “Embodied Transnationalism: Bodies in Transnational Spaces.” Population, Space and Place 16(1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.593. Folifac, Fidelis. 2012. “Towards Improving Knowledge Management and Collaborative Action in Potable Water Delivery at the Local Level: Case of Buea, Cameroon.” Ph.D. dissertation. Montreal: McGill University. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575– 599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. Kirk, Jackie, Claudia Mitchell, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. 2010. “Toward Political Agency for Girls: Mapping the Discourses of Girlhood Globally.” In Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vasconcellos, 14–29. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. Konings, Piet, and Francis B. Nyamnjoh. 1997. “The Anglophone Problem in Cameroon.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 35(2): 207–229. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X97002401. Kouega, Jean-Paul. 2008. A Dictionary of Cameroon Pidgin English Usage: Pronunciation, Grammar, and Vocabulary. Munich: Lincom Europa. Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala, ed. 2011. Fluid Bonds: Views on Gender and Water. 2nd ed. Kolkata: STREE. Low, Bronwen, Chloe Brushwood Rose, and Paula Salvio. 2016. Communitybased Media Pedagogies: Relational Listening in the Commons. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community and Policy. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Muller, Martin. 2007. “What’s in a Word? Problematizing Translation between Languages.” Area 39(2): 206–213. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40346027. Neba, Ayu’nwi N., Evelyn Fogwe Chibaka, and Gratien G. Atindogbe. 2006. “Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) as a Tool for Empowerment and National Development.” African Study Monographs 27(2): 39–61. https://doi.org/10 .14989/68249. Nkwi, Paul Nchoji. 1997. “Rethinking the Role of Elites in Rural Development: A Case Study from Cameroon.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 15(1): 67–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589009708729603. Orosz, Kenneth J. 2011. “An African Kulturkampf: Religious Conflict and Language Policy in German Cameroon, 1885–1914.” Sociolinguistica 25: 81–93. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110236262.81. Piller, Ingrid, and Kimie Takahashi. 2010. “At the Intersection of Gender, Lan-

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guage and Transnationalism.” In The Handbook of Language and Globalization, ed. Nikolas Coupland, 540–554. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Pillow, Wanda. 2003. “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure? Rethinking the Uses of Reflexivity as Methodological Power in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16(2): 175–196. https://doi.org/10 .1080/0951839032000060635. Republic of Cameroon. 2009. “Cameroon Vision 2035.” Retrieved 15 September 2012 from http://www.platform2035.com/images/pdf/Cameroon_VIS ION_2035.pdf. Rose, Gillian. 2012. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. 3rd ed. London: Sage. Schröder, Anne. 2003. “Cameroon Pidgin English: A Means of Bridging the Anglophone-Francophone Division in Cameroon?” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28(2): 305–327. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43025705. Schwab-Cartas, Josh. 2016. “Living our Language: Zapotec Elders and Youth Fostering Intergenerational Dialogue through Cellphone Videos.” In What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual Research and Activism, ed. Katie MacEntee, Casey Burkholder, and Josh Schwab-Cartas, 51–66. Rotterdam: Sense. Smith, Ann. 2019. “The Transnational Girl in the Text: Transnationalism Redefined?” In The Girl in the Text, ed. Ann Smith, 1–12. New York: Berghahn. Smith, Fiona M. 1996. “Problematising Language: Limitations and Possibilities in ‘Foreign Language’ Research.” Area 28(2): 160–166. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/20003653. Somerville, Margaret. 2013. Water in a Dry Land: Place-learning through Art and Story. New York: Routledge. Tande, Dibusse. 2006. “The Politics of Pidgin English in Cameroon.” Scribbles from the Den, August 14. Retrieved 1 September 2015 from http://www.dib ussi.com/2006/08/the_politics_of.html. Thompson, Jennifer. 2017. “Women and Water Wahala: Picturing Gendered Waterscapes in Southwest Cameroon.” Ph.D. dissertation. Montreal: McGill University. Thompson, Jennifer, Fidelis Folifac, and Susan Gaskin. 2011. “Fetching Water in the Unholy Hours of the Night: The Impacts of a Water Crisis on Girls’ Health and Sexualities in Semi-urban Cameroon.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4(2): 111–129. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2011.040208. Todd, Loreto. 1990. Pidgins and Creoles. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Twyman, Chasca, Jean Morrison, and Deborah Sporton. 1999. “The Final Fifth: Autobiography, Reflexivity, and Interpretation in Cross-Cultural Research.” Area 31(4): 313–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.1999 .tb00098.x.

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United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2018. UN Human Rights Chief Deeply Alarmed by Reports of Serious Rights Breaches in Cameroon. Retrieved 1 August 2018 from https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEve nts/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23404&LangID=E. Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–132. https://doi.org/ 10.3167/ghs.2019.120201.

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Participatory Video as Method

Ethical Conundrums of Researching Cyberviolence Targeting Girls and Young Women Hayley R. Crooks

Cyberviolence, to me, is a way that people, who may be shy, use the web to make themselves feel powerful and to inflict emotional harm onto others. —Adele, fifteen

A participant, fifteen-year-old Adele,1 articulated this understanding at a workshop in which my colleagues and I used participatory video (PV) to work with young people to learn about cyberviolence from the perspectives of girls and young women. Literature on the subject suggests that cyberviolence exists along a continuum of behaviors, ranging from mean and cruel jokes rooted in dangerous stereotypes to the incitement of violence against individuals and groups seeking equality. It is a “technologically-facilitated” form of violence (Bailey and Mathen 2017: 50) in which intentional and anonymous harm is inflicted repeatedly “through the use of computers, cellphones, or other electronic devices” (Hinduja and Patchin 2009: 5). Also known as “cyberhate” (Jane 2017: 1), cyberviolence has far-reaching consequences, particularly for girls and young women (Crooks 2017, 2018). Cyberviolence is essentially misogynistic. While anyone can be a Notes for this section can be found on page 213.

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victim of cyberviolence, girls are most often its target. On social media platforms, its gendered manifestations include attacks against girls and women that target their gender and sexuality through activities such as public shaming, the non-consensual distribution of intimate images, doxing, stalking, misogynistic tropes, and revenge porn. Cases of this “gendered e-bile” (Jane 2014: 558) that have made global headlines include the sexual assault, online bullying, and resultant suicide of fifteen-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons in Canada and thirteen-year-old Megan Meier in the United States. Publicized cases such as these have captured international attention and prompted Nick Bilton to report in The New York Times that cyberviolence “seems to be reaching a cultural boiling point” (2015: D2). Nonetheless, although girls and young women are often targeted, their voices seldom reach international debates or research and policymaking forums that seek to address gendered cyberviolence. Online violence against women and girls permeates national and international borders to reach individuals living in diverse global communities (Suzor et al. 2018: 88). In connecting localized narratives of cyberviolence across these borders, we can work toward illuminating its global structure and, as Catherine Vanner (2019) suggests, attempt to mobilize transnational activism across borders. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty ([1997] 2012) suggest that by focusing on specific experiences of violence, we can learn more about how it operates and identify strategies to address it. Because of its pervasiveness in local and transnational spaces, there is an urgent need for innovative ways of studying cyberviolence and identifying multifaceted approaches to tackle it (Bailey and Steeves 2015; Jane 2017). PV is a promising method that can be used to address this gap and support global research and activism. E-J Milne, Claudia Mitchell, and Naydene de Lange (2012) describe PV as both a research process and a sociological intervention (see also De Lange and Geldenhuys 2012) that involves the use of video-making in participatory research. This means it can build on “a set of relationships and practices that are used to identify and address community needs or social problems” (Milne et al. 2012: 1). In particular, PV is a popular way of helping adult researchers to engage with young people and view the world from their perspective. Furthermore, it can also challenge traditional researcher conventions and the positivist aesthetic of colonial anthropological film (Limbrick 2010). This is particularly true when girls and young women engaged in research are granted the freedom to explore new visual aesthetics and to nurture what Jon Prosser and Catherine Burke call a “unique filmic subculture” (2008: 198

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412). Through the PV process, young people can develop useful skills such as filmmaking and digital editing along with communication and leadership skills (Milne et al. 2012; Prosser and Burke 2008), all of which foster transnational activism. PV can also help to challenge the pervasive and limiting construct of the universal girl, described by Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall as “vulnerable girls in crisis” (2010: 667). By challenging the one-dimensional figure of the tragic girl, PV can join a “resistant tradition of representing transnational and anything-but-universal girlhood” (2010: 668). Indeed, through PV, girls and young women living in diverse global settings can together construct a nuanced understanding of gendered cyberviolence and transnational girlhood. Scholars who employ visual methodologies in feminist participatory action research projects have demonstrated how the ubiquity of video technologies have allowed us to engage with young people in research, analysis, and dissemination, while doing good and not simply avoiding harm (Butchart 2014; Treffry-Goatley et al. 2017). Nevertheless, participatory visual research with young people gives rise to ethical questions and concerns, particularly when we are addressing difficult and sensitive topics such as cyberviolence. In this chapter, I provide a reflective analysis of a project focusing on cyber and sexual violence, which involved young people being invited to share their experiences of gendered cyberviolence using PV. I explore how the situated PV narratives created by participants contribute toward the building of a transnational body of evidence that can help researchers and practitioners develop a better understanding of cyberviolence, and strategize against it. In addition, I highlight the ethical questions and concerns that arose in our use of PV in this context and reflect on the strategies that we adopted to address them.

Project Background The Cyber and Sexual Violence Project arose out of a partnership formed in 2014 between the Atwater Library and Computer Centre’s Digital Literacy Project and Concordia University’s Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre (TAG) in Montreal, Canada. This partnership received a grant from Status of Women Canada in response to a call titled “Cyber and Sexual Violence: Helping Communities Respond” under the theme of “Preventing and Eliminating Cyberviolence against Young Women 199

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and Girls.”2 Led by Principal Investigator Professor Mia Consalvo and Co-Investigator Dr. Shanly Dixon, the Cyber and Sexual Violence Project research team carried out consultations with 690 individuals, of which 369 were girls and young women under the age of twenty-five. The consultations included group discussions, community conversations, writing exercises, focus group discussions, and interviews with law enforcement officers, video game designers, educators, experts in sexual violence, and school board members. In addition to these research activities, a small but significant component of the broader study involved using PV.

My Role as an Academic Videographer In 2014, Dr. Dixon of the Atwater Library and Computer Centre’s Digital Literacy Project invited me to collaborate as a research partner on the Cyber and Sexual Violence Project. As part of the PV component of the broader study, my role in the project was to design and lead a series of eight participatory workshops between 2014 and 2015 in which PV was to be used to engage with a group of thirty-four young people to explore, from their perspectives, how girls and young women, in particular, are targeted by cyberviolence, and how gendered cyberviolence might be addressed.3 In the workshops, I drew on my professional background in non-fiction television and film production. In conducting the participatory workshops and analyzing the findings, I drew on existing scholarly work (Bailey and Steeves 2015, BanetWeiser 2016, Ringrose and Renold 2016) on girls’ digital culture. This is an emerging field of study that focuses on the gendered dimensions of networked culture and investigates the power differentials inherent in mainstream, adultist definitions of digital culture and cyberviolence (Crooks 2018; Dobson 2015; Ringrose and Renold 2016).

Our Community-Based Partner The eight workshops took place in 2015 on the premises of a communitybased organization (CBO), which is located in a socially diverse urban neighborhood in Montreal.4 The final post-production workshop that I describe below took place at Concordia University. The CBO was founded by a Montreal citizen who was concerned about seeing young people stuck 200

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in a cycle of violence in this neighborhood. Its mandate is to create programming for young people, aged between fifteen and eighteen, who have been victims, perpetrators, and/or witnesses of violence, including selfharm. Its mission is to train and inspire youth to be leaders and champions of non-violence in their schools and communities. Since its inception, the CBO has encouraged youth to engage in arts-based projects on the topic of violence and has included photojournalism as part of its outreach strategy. The CBO’s explicit focus on addressing violence and its commitment to engaging young people through visual media made it a good fit for our research project. The CBO representatives were enthusiastic about our project and were keen to support us. They agreed to participate and asked me to design a curriculum that could be replicated after the project ended. The frontline youth workers at the CBO suggested that we conduct our video-making workshops as part of their weekly Media Arts Program, which is a voluntary drop-in program that targets local young people facing challenging circumstances. It was thought that the workshops could attract further participants to the Media Arts Program and encourage them to commit to the weekly workshops. As a research team, we trusted the frontline workers’ knowledge and expertise and integrated our project into the suggested weekly sessions, which allowed us to work with a group of young people who had previously participated in media-related activities through the drop-in center.

Methods Participant Recruitment and Consent The CBO allowed the research team to invite participants from the Media Arts Program on condition that, in addition to working with young women, we would also work with any young men who wished to participate. Consequently, although our explicit focus was on girls and young women, we worked with all interested young people who were able to obtain signed parental consent forms, including boys and gender-fluid individuals. We collected these consent forms as well as youth assent forms from all participants before the workshops began. In total, we worked with thirty girls and young women and four boys between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. We found that while many of the participants expressed a desire to participate during the initial workshop, 201

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responsibilities at home and other factors often prevented them from returning every week. Three boys and four girls were able to attend the workshops consistently, and they formed the core group of seven participants in the PV workshops. Workshop Details Between October 2014 and February 2015, we conducted eight two-hour workshops (two workshops per month over four months) on gendered cyberviolence. We also held one feedback session in March 2015, during which the young people and frontline workers reflected on the PV process. Over the eight workshops, we produced a short documentary of twentyone minutes and forty-three seconds in length and a one-minute video created by a participant. My focus in this chapter is on the short documentary. In designing it, my aim was to develop a curriculum that added value to the work of the CBO and which they could continue to use after the completion of the project. Given the participants’ interest in photojournalism, I began each workshop with a brief technical exercise. For example, in the first workshop, I devoted approximately twenty minutes to describing the features of the Canon SLR cameras available to participants through the Media Arts Program. I engaged volunteers from among the participants to help illustrate the concepts I was explaining. These volunteers acted as the videographers while I demonstrated different ways to frame a shot and introduced participants to basic lighting methods. At each workshop, after the technical exercise, we, as a group, discussed themes that had emerged in the previous workshop. Following these group discussions, I screened a short documentary to stimulate further discussion and critical thinking. I selected films from different historical periods and gave preference to documentaries that related to the themes discussed the previous week, and that were produced by young people. At some of the workshops, I also brought clips from YouTube videos. These clips were sometimes selected by Dr. Dixon or a participant and helped to highlight and bring to life concepts covered in the previous workshop. Gradually, the notion of transnational activism, however unarticulated at that stage, began to take hold. The practical components of the workshops involved participants filming peer-on-peer interviews about cyberviolence. The participants, who changed every week depending on who was able to attend, divided themselves into small groups to brainstorm the issues on which they wanted to focus in their filmed peer-on-peer interviews. These interviews 202

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would become the collaborative documentary film that was one of the end products of the workshops. Participants took turns acting as director, interviewee, and interviewer. In the style of cinema vérité (direct cinema), the participants did not create a concrete narrative in pre-production, nor did they rely on storyboarding to plan their narratives. Instead, they recorded themselves working toward a concept of cyberviolence. This style allows the viewer to see the process of the participants coming together and working through their differences of opinion as well as discovering shared perspectives on what cyberviolence means to them. I chose this approach to promote spontaneity of conversation and participant contribution. At each workshop, each group decided how much of their conversation they wanted to film. Once they had completed their filming, I asked them to consider what footage they would like to include in the edited collaborative documentary. I concluded each workshop with a group discussion during which participants were asked to highlight what was working or not working for them about the workshops, what they found most useful in the workshop, what they would like to develop further, and where they saw the project heading. The PV workshops were filmed by Gillian, an eighteen-year-old Montreal resident and journalism student from Concordia University, who worked with the research team and participants to document the PV process. Gillian connected quickly with the participants who enjoyed working alongside her. During the final workshop, I took the participants to TAG, “an interdisciplinary center for research/creation in game studies and design, digital culture and interactive art”5 at Concordia University. Here, I introduced them to post-production techniques. The participants used these crucial tools to craft their narratives about cyberviolence, and this, in turn, helped them to clarify their perspective on cyberviolence and make sense of their experiences. At the end of the eight weeks, we produced a coherent anthology of the many PVs in the form of the collaborative documentary. Gillian took the lead in the technical aspect of editing the video clips filmed during the workshops into one coherent documentary. She did a basic sound mix and created title cards based on what the participants had discussed in previous workshops and the post-production workshop. Her technical contribution was important because time was limited, and the participants wanted to focus on selecting the content of the discussion and the key messages about cyberviolence that they wanted to communicate to the public. Their transnational activism was flourishing. 203

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Overview of the Findings Before considering the ethical concerns that arose from using PV with the young people with whom I worked to understand gendered cyberviolence against girls and young women in particular and the strategies we adopted to address it, I provide a brief overview of the participants’ experiences and understandings of gendered cyberviolence. These findings are based on a deductive thematic analysis of the PV transcripts, ethnographic field notes, and recorded participant discussions. I draw on girls’ digital culture (Bailey and Steeves 2015; Ringrose and Renold 2016) as a framework to analyze the transcripts, field notes, and video work produced. Understanding Cyberviolence through PV My analysis of the PV transcripts, ethnographic field notes, and recorded participant discussions yielded rich insight into how young people in one specific location perceived and conceptualized the global problem of gender-based cyberviolence in digital culture. Three key themes emerged from the analysis: cyberviolence occurs in the spaces girls use to connect, cyberviolence is a transnational problem, and cyberviolence is complex. Cyberviolence Occurs in the Spaces Girls Use to Connect Through their filmed interviews, the collaborative documentary, and the discussions surrounding these visual products and the processes involved in creating them, it became clear that the international and transnational social media platforms that girls and young women use to stay connected to friends, such as Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter, often amplify gender-based violence (GBV) in networked spaces that sometimes encourage young women to share private information. Talking about the dangers of ignorance when it comes to the internet, Josh, a fifteen-yearold boy, said, I think that technology is in itself neutral, right? It’s a method of communication, right? A way to share things across the world. But like a gun that can be used to help people, it can also be used to harm people, right? And I think people just tend to ignore the fact that it can be harmful. It has its good sides and what, it’s very different from a gun because people always say guns are bad watch out—you could shoot someone—but they ignore the dangers of the internet. In that way, it’s far more dangerous than a gun would be, because people aren’t aware of the dangers.

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Cyberviolence Is Transnational Several participants pointed to the extensive reach of cyberviolence, and how through just one social media post, hundreds of people in disparate locations can harass and send hateful public messages to someone they have never met. For example, sixteen-year-old Aideen talked about how Facebook facilitates the rapid transmission of hurtful (as well as hopeful) communications across borders. In another video narrative, a young woman explicitly connected the scope and reach of networked culture to GBV, explaining that “if a guy makes a sexist comment on the bus” it is easier to address. When it is online, “it could be millions, billions of people and because of the scale . . . more people are going to agree” and participate in the harassment of the target in a transnational attack. Cyberviolence Is Complex It quickly became apparent that the experiences that some young women refer to as “drama” exist along a continuum that includes everything from mean jokes, which many girls told us are just part of daily life on- and offline, to sexual harassment and breaches of privacy, all of which we, as adults, would describe as cyberviolence. Listening to these girls and young women revealed that cyberviolence is often more contextual than specific. While a comment from a friend over one networked platform might be fun, that same comment, repeated by a stranger, might be hurtful and even scary. As fifteen-year-old Cory put it, whether or not an event is an example of cyberviolence often depends on how the individual feels about it. I think when the person starts to actually feel threatened and that their life might be in danger or really hurt that’s when it’s not so funny anymore and it’s not really a joke. It all depends on the person and how they feel about it. If they think it’s funny and they think it’s a joke, I guess it’s a joke, but if they start to feel that they cross a line and it’s not so funny anymore and it really hurts then they’ve crossed the line and it’s no longer a joke.

As we listened to the participants challenging each other’s definitions during their discussions, the research team realized that we must try to understand not only the types of language and violence that are normalized on social media, but also how young people describe them. We realized that it is important, too, to challenge the harmful internalized misogyny that revealed itself through young women’s comments about how what a young woman wears in pictures she posts can put her at risk of cyber-

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violence. This became an important focus in our discussions with participants at the workshops. Strategies for Addressing Cyberviolence Inadvertently addressing the transnational reach of cyberviolence, the participants in this study agreed that addressing it is difficult, given the wide reach of the internet and the lack of state control over content. Despite this, they also argued that if everyone works together to tackle cyberviolence, there is still hope of addressing it. Several participants drew attention to the need to shift global social norms around the use of cruelty online. For example, in one video narrative, sixteen-year-old Coral shows a keen understanding of what transnational girlhood activism might mean when she says, The internet is everywhere. There is no way that the government could enforce any policies on how to manage this because it is everywhere. If they can’t take down pirate websites, they can’t stop cyberbullying on social networking. If we all did our part to call people out on it, as individuals, maybe then we would have a better shot at stopping it.

In another plea for such activism, Josh argued that “we have to manage this as a community. The whole world has to work as a group to fix this. Unless the masses start getting involved in starting to change it, people are going to keep getting hurt because of that.” One participant drew attention to the power dynamics that underlie anti-cyberviolence strategies. Arguing that many of these strategies are top-down with adults teaching young people what to do, she suggested that adults, to be helpful, need to learn more about the issue. “I think if we talked about certain topics more in schools and more in general with parents, and adults were willing to learn more about it, adults in general would get a better understanding of these things that are actually important.” Participants at the workshops revealed that anti-cyberviolence curricula are often detached from their realities online and many well-meaning strategies are often in direct conflict with their lives on- and offline. For example, many anti-cyberbullying curricula caution young women not to share private information on social media. However, applications such as Snapchat allow users to send information that is ostensibly private and disappears within seconds of being sent. The tension described in our PV workshops between adult-led strategies to address cyberviolence and the realities of young peoples’ online lives is a problem that many young 206

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women are struggling with globally. Further, as Emma Louise Backe, Pamella Lileston, and Jennifer McCleary-Sills (2018) remind us, much of the available literature on cyberviolence focuses on cyberbullying among heterosexual adolescents in high-income countries, and there is a need for further research to better understand the transnational gendered dimensions of cyberviolence so as to guide strategies to effectively address it. Without knowing the term, our participants were arguing for transnational activism.

Using Participatory Video with Girls and Young Women: Benefits and Ethical Questions Our aim in this project was to avoid doing harm to the participants, but also to ensure that they reaped some benefit from their participation. Overall, we found that PV offered an accessible way for young people to discuss their perspectives on gendered cyberviolence. We anticipated that working together on PV would be fun and would offer these young people a set of tools and the opportunity to acquire skills that they could use after the workshops in their own work about issues that matter to them. The group filmmaking process did indeed facilitate the generation of rich data through inclusive, accessible activities. Using digital media is, arguably, second nature to many young people in this age group, and its application in this project encouraged their participation. For example, seventeen-year-old Monica reported that PV does not feel like “doing homework.” Her observation resonates with a growing body of scholarship (see, for example, Prosser and Burke 2008; Sime 2008) that supports Kyung-Hwa Yang’s view that participatory visual methods may be “more effective than conventional, word-based methods, such as surveys and interviews” at accurately communicating young peoples’ specific knowledge (2015: 309). We also found that PV allowed participants to take on leadership and communication roles that might not otherwise have been available or offered to them. For example, the premise of this project was that girls and young women are the experts on how cyberviolence affects them. In a sexist, adultist culture, this is a significant role for girls to take ownership of. At the workshops, we observed young women experiencing the PV process as a way of talking about cyberviolence directly in their own words. This participatory approach is very different from the colonial research 207

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and filmic practice of looking at participants, rather than with them (Limbrick 2010; Smith 2019; Vanner 2019). By involving these young women from this community meaningfully as authorities on their own lives, we challenged the positivist, male-dominated history of documentary filmmaking in the West. As Coral explained, “It’s great that you are talking to us and really listening to the people that know about it.” Despite these positive experiences, four ethical challenges arose related to which tools we should use, which stories we can we tell, how we can share stories, and how we can navigate institutional discourses. Which Tools Should We Use? One of the ironies of using digital media to address cyberviolence is that the very same tools that allow us to create PV projects and distribute media, such as digital cameras and YouTube, also facilitate a great deal of online misogyny and racism. For example, although the girls and young women involved in this project expressed a love of social media and a desire to participate in digital culture, they also explained that they face online sexism and racism daily. By making digital cameras, social media, and digital editing a part of our program, and talking openly to the participants about the platforms that girls and young people enjoy using to socialize and stay informed, we actively resisted the ongoing themes of technophobia in many e-safety strategies aimed at young people. Nevertheless, while we saw clear benefits to using digital media in the project, we were cautious and discouraged participants from posting their videos online lest this invite ridicule from the broader online community. What Stories Can We Tell about Cyberviolence? One of the major benefits of employing PV in this research project was that it offered a way to challenge colonial epistemologies that lead to a representation of universal girlhood by inviting young people to discuss the issue of cyberviolence in their own words and as they experience and understand it. PV was productive in helping to navigate the gaps between participants’ discourses and those maintained by institutions, including the CBO and popularized global media. From the outset, Dr. Dixon and I were explicit about our intention to avoid exploitative or sensationalized narratives or to elicit personal victim stories from the participants. We believed that it would be unethical for us to position the girls and young women who participated in the project as vulnerable or as victims in relation to cyberviolence since this would feed into the 208

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universal representation of all girls as being in crisis. In addition, we knew that sharing personal narratives of victimization could result in secondary trauma. Instead of discussing an individual case of cyberviolence against any specific young woman in our group, we chose to use YouTube videos to elicit discussion. These videos were informed by the participants’ own understandings and varied descriptions of cyberviolence. They painted a picture of cyberviolence as a phenomenon deeply embedded in broader cultures of misogyny and amplified by certain platforms, such as Instagram. We invited participants to respond to the YouTube clips and to speak on and in their own terms, explaining to them that they are uniquely positioned to provide key insights on the issues and to contribute to generating solutions. For example, as a provoking slut-shaming example, we shared Jenna Marbles’s “Things That I Don’t Understand About Girls Part 2: Slut Edition”6 and the response to it (videos posted by popular young YouTubers Hayley G. Hoover [2012] and Laci Green [2012]). Our approach of focusing on unearthing key issues through simply listening to how participants explained their digital culture and how gendered cyberviolence manifests in everyday interactions proved successful in helping to create a safe and collaborative environment as the video-making process developed over the weeks. How Can We Share Participant Stories? Our purpose in creating the collaborative documentary was not to have it go viral or for the acclaim that attends traditional notions of so-called high production value. Rather, it was to invite young people to use PV as the beginning of a community conversation about cyberviolence rooted in social justice. Nonetheless, the participants’ enthusiasm for the project and their pride in their work inadvertently presented us with complex ethical considerations. For example, they wanted to share their videos widely on YouTube. As trusted adults, we needed to balance this desire with our ethical responsibilities to the participants, the Research Ethics Board, and our funders. In an attempt to address this dilemma, Dr. Dixon and I led a group discussion about the ethical complexities of sharing visual research that has not been designed for distribution on social media. Given the current landscape of cyberviolence, we all agreed to have selected screenings for audiences we all trusted instead. In this manner, the young people participated in disseminating their work in a safe way, with which we all felt comfortable. 209

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Examples of screenings to trusted audiences included an initial screening of the collaborative documentary to the participants and the youth workers from the CBO. Thereafter, two participants joined me in a panel discussion at a symposium for academics and policymakers at McGill University, where they discussed what they learned from the project.7 Their documentary was also screened at a college in Quebec, where participants discussed the film with their peers. These screenings to selected audiences offered a safe way to nurture participant pride in their work and to promote further conversations and awareness around gendered cyberviolence and its impact on girls and young women. This is one way of encouraging transnational girlhood activism. How Can We Navigate Institutional Discourses? Further ethical concerns were raised when the anti-violence discourse promoted by the CBO directly contradicted the perspectives shared by participants attending the workshops. In its anti-violence curriculum, the CBO promotes bystander intervention as a way to deal with all forms of violence, arguing that we all have a moral obligation to intervene when we witness any form of violence, including gender-based cyberviolence. During group discussions, it became obvious that some young women hesitated before expressing their opinions because they felt under pressure to accept the discourse of bystander intervention in order to be considered a CBO leader. However, as the project progressed and the participants felt safer to share their views with us, many of them argued that bystander intervention is not always a viable option for dealing with cyberviolence, and suggested that engaging in it when faced with issues such as slut-shaming might put them at further risk. The participants also expressed frustration with the rhetoric of agency and girl power that they were being encouraged to adopt. While they wholeheartedly agreed that they had the right to express their sexual identity online, they also expressed the view that often, when girls act on this right, they put themselves at risk of cyberviolence. Their rejection of bystander intervention discourse and Western neoliberal (and often silencing) notions of girl power and empowerment (see Banet-Weiser 2015) is significant. It points to a broader tension between what girls believe about notions of empowerment and how they are often constrained in expressing themselves in global discourses and movements. The #MeToo movement is a useful example here since it highlights the ways girls and women often face pressure to disclose experiences of trauma even though, 210

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at the same time, speaking out about gendered violence online or offline often puts women and girls at further risk of censure and cruelty (Bumiller 2008). A primary ethical position of this research project was to place youth, especially girls and young women, at the center of identifying and defining the issues that are most significant and most in need of intervention. We sought to clarify where young people, particularly girls and young women, experience cyberviolence and to determine which aspects of ongoing debates around this issue they believe are most relevant. Yet, our ethical obligation to create a safe space for our research participants to share their insights put us, at least potentially, at odds with the organization’s youth workers, who had a responsibility to adhere to their bystander intervention curriculum. Indeed, there was a risk that by sharing their unedited insights about bystander intervention, the young women might set themselves up for censure from the youth workers and the institution itself. Therefore, given the potential risk to participants, when it came to selecting material from the PVs for the collaborative documentary, we worked with the girls to choose clips that framed their discussion in a way that still allowed their voices to be heard without coming into direct conflict with the institutional discourse. For example, one discussion with girls focused on how they often feel fearful or unsure about how to intervene in situations of online violence or harassment.

Conclusion PV offers adult researchers a way to engage with young people and see the world from their perspectives. We held eight collaborative filmmaking workshops with young people in which we used PV to learn more about the transnational phenomenon of gendered cyberviolence against girls and young women and to develop meaningful strategies to address it. Our goal was not to produce highly polished and stylized films but, rather, to use the PV process as a tool for communication that could lead to individual growth and activism. This approach allowed us to move away from the universalizing protectionist discourses on youth still engrained in ethics boards and traditional social science methods. Overall, we found that PV offered an accessible way for young people to discuss their perspectives on gendered cyberviolence. The group filmmaking process facilitated the generation of rich data through inclusive, 211

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accessible activities. The three key themes that emerged from the analysis—cyberviolence occurs in the spaces girls use to connect, cyberviolence is a transnational problem, and cyberviolence is complex—suggest that effectively tackling this complex problem will require a nuanced and multi-pronged approach that includes the perspectives of girls and young women. While PV offered a profound way of learning more about gendered cyberviolence from youth, four ethical questions arose: Which tools should we use? Which stories can we tell? How can we share stories? And how can we navigate institutional discourses? Through this work, we found that digital tools can facilitate online misogyny and racism and understand that these need to be used with participants with care. Researchers who use this approach could discourage participants from posting their video stories online to prevent further experiences of cyberviolence, and to reduce the risk of causing further harm. It may also be best to encourage participants to respond to online examples of cyberviolence rather than to tell their own stories to reduce the risk of re-traumatizing participants who may have experienced cyberviolence. Further, some of the perspectives shared by participants in this study conflicted directly with our CBO partner’s promotion of bystander intervention, and there was a risk that they might be censored by frontline workers should the stories be shared. Consequently, since we wanted to protect participants from harm and censorship, we worked with them to soften potentially controversial ideas in the final edit of the documentary. The ethical concerns discussed in this chapter as well as the strategies identified to address them are intended to draw attention to the ways using PV with young people might help us to hear their, often silenced, voices on important issues that impact their lives, including cyberviolence. As a fun and youth-friendly visual method, PV helped the Cyber and Sexual Violence Project research team to gain deep insight into the complex workings of gendered cyberviolence and potential context-relevant strategies to address it.

Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the editors of this book for their tremendous support in shaping this chapter.

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Hayley R. Crooks runs a research consulting practice and is a part-time Professor at the University of Ottawa with a background in documentary video. She has a passion for uplifting youth voices, particularly as this pursuit intersects with gender-based violence prevention. Her expertise includes youth participatory and arts-based research, community-based research, and program evaluation.

Notes 1. All names that appear in this chapter are pseudonyms. 2. See Atwater Library and Computer Centre, “Preventing and Eliminating Cyber Violence.” Retrieved 18 October 2020 from https://www.atwaterlibrary.ca/computerservices/preventing-and-eliminating-cyberviolence/. 3. This study was approved by the University Human Research Ethics Committee at Concordia University and the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Ottawa. The research was conducted in the early years of the author’s doctoral studies at the University of Ottawa and working as part of the Cyber and Sexual Violence project research team. She received permission from the principal investigator to analyze the data discussed in this chapter and successfully applied for secondary use of data through the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Ottawa. 4. I have withheld the name of the CBO here in the interest of maintaining its anonymity. 5. Technoculture, Arts and Games, “TAG Highlights.” Retrieved 18 October 2020 from https://tag.hexagram.ca/. 6. No link is available for this video as it has since been removed from Jenna Marbles’s YouTube channel. 7. The symposium “Minding the Gaps: Identifying Strategies to Address Gender-Based Cyberviolence” was held at the Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill University on 2 May 2015.

References Alexander, Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. (1997) 2012. “Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements.” In Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Claudia Mitchell, xiii–xlii. New York: Routledge. Backe, Emma Louise, Pamella Lileston, and Jennifer McCleary-Sills. 2018. “Networked Individuals, Gendered Violence: A Literature Review of Cyberviolence.” Violence and Gender 5(3):135–146. https://doi.org/10.1089/vio .2017.0056. Bailey, Jane, and Carissima Mathen. 2017. “Technologically-Facilitated Violence against Women and Girls: If Criminal Law Can Respond, Should It?” Ot-

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tawa Faculty of Law Working Paper 2017–2044. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.3043506. Bailey, Jane, and Valerie Steeves. 2015. “Introduction: Cyber-Utopia? Getting Beyond the Binary Notion of Technology as Good or Bad for Girls.” In Egirls, Ecitizens, ed. Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves, 1–18. Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2015. “‘Confidence You Can Carry!’ Girls in Crisis and the Market for Girls’ Empowerment Organizations.” Continuum 29(2): 182–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022938. Bilton, Nick. 2015. “When the Cyberbully is You.” The New York Times, 29 April. Bumiller, Kristen. 2008. In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butchart, Garnet C. 2014. “What Can a Philosophy and Ethics of Communication Look like in the Context of Documentary Filmmaking?” Semiotica 199: 83–96. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2013-0119. Crooks, Hayley. 2017. “An Intersectional Feminist Review of the Literature on Gendered Cyberbullying: Digital Girls.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8(2): 62–88. https:// doi.10.1353/jeu.2017.0003. ———. 2018. “Reel Girls: Approaching Gendered Cyberviolence with Young People through the Lens of Participatory Video.” Ph.D. dissertation. Ottowa: University of Ottawa. https://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-21965. De Lange, Naydene, and Mart-Mari Geldenhuys. 2012. “Youth Envisioning Safe Schools: A Participatory Video Approach.” South African Journal of Education 32(4): 494–511. https://doi.org/10.15700/saje.v32n4a734. Dobson, Amy Shields. 2015. Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. 2010. “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance.” Feminist Studies 36(3): 667–690. https://doi.10.2307/27919128. Green, Laci. 2012. “Re: Jenna Marbles’ Slut Edition.” Video. 5:19. Uploaded 13 December. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCw2MzKjpoo. Hinduja, Sameer, and Justin Patchin. 2009. Bullying beyond the School Yard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying. Thousand Oaks, CA: Cornwin Press. Hoover, Hayley. 2012. “SLUTS.” Video, 5:38. Uploaded 12 December. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzB_O_B7-_Y. Jane, Emma. 2014. “‘Back to the Kitchen, Cunt’: Speaking the Unspeakable about Online Misogyny.” Continuum 28(4): 558–570. https://doi.10.1080/ 10304312.2014.924479. ———. 2017. “Feminist Digilante Responses to a Slut-Shaming on Facebook.” Social Media + Society 3(2): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/205630511770 5996. 214

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Limbrick, Peter. 2010. Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Milne, Elisabeth-Jane, Claudia Mitchell, and Naydene de Lange. 2012. Handbook of Participatory Video. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Prosser, Jon, and Catherine Burke. 2008. “Image-Based Educational Research: Childlike Perspectives.” In Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues, ed. Gary Knowles and Adra Cole, 407–419. London: Sage. Ringrose, Jessica, and Emma Renold. 2016. “Teen Feminist Killjoys?: Mapping Girls’ Affective Encounters with Femininity, Sexuality, and Feminism at School.” In Girlhood and the Politics of Place, ed. Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler, 104–121 https://doi.10.2307/j.ctt14jxn16.11. Sime, Daniela. 2008. “Ethical Methodological Issues in Engaging Young People Living in Poverty with Participatory Research Methods.” Children’s Geographies 6(1): 63–78. Smith, Ann. 2019. “The Transnational Girl in the Text: Transnationalism Redefined?” In The Girl in the Text, ed. Ann Smith, 1–12. New York: Berghahn. Suzor, Nicolas, Molly Dragiewicz, Bridget Harris, Rosalie Gillett, Jean Burgess, and Tess Van Geelen. 2018. “Human Rights by Design: The Responsibilities of Social Media Platforms to Address Gender-Based Violence Online.” Policy & Internet 11(1): 84–103. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.185. Treffry-Goatley, Astrid, Lisa Wiebesiek, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. “Technologies of Nonviolence: Ethical Participatory Visual Research with Girls.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10(2): 45–61. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2017.100205. Vanner, Catherine. 2019. “Toward a Definition of Transnational Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2): 115–132. https://doi.org/ 10.3167/ghs.2019.120209. Yang, Kyung-Hwa. 2015. “Voice, Authenticity and Ethical Challenges: The Participatory Dissemination of Youth-Generated Visual Data over Social Media.” Visual Studies 30(3): 309–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X .2015.1017364.

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Toward a New Ethics in Transnational Research with Girls and Young Women in Indigenous and Rural Communities Relebohile Moletsane, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Lisa Wiebesiek, and April Mandrona

The idea for this edited book was inspired by work that emerged from the project “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa.” Five of the chapters in this volume, which focuses on the ethics of doing participatory visual research with girls and young women in Indigenous and rural contexts, come from this project. The remaining contributions are from researchers doing similar work elsewhere. Collectively, the chapters in Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls: Transnational Approaches (hereafter Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls), highlight the threat of gender-based violence (GBV) to the security and well-being of girls and young women and their communities, particularly in diverse Indigenous and rural contexts. Reflecting on work that uses participatory visual methodology (PVM), the chapters invite readers to explore the complexity of researching some

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of the issues and the ethical challenges that often arise out of this work. Events in 2020, the year in which we completed this book, have created new forms of exclusion and risk. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased attention to the global anti-racism movement Black Lives Matter, we see that even though these impact the lives of all people in different ways, the voices of girls and young women remain marginalized and silenced. This silencing continues even though it is evident from various local and international news reports that rates of GBV against women generally, and girls and young women, in particular, have increased during this challenging time. The contributions to Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls draw attention to the agency that girls and young women have in understanding their own lives and the conditions in their communities and to their voices as they articulate this. Too often, adult researchers and research gatekeepers, including institutional Research Ethics Boards (REBs) and Research Ethics Committees (RECs), ignore the significance of this population as knowers, experts, and actors in their own lives (Oakley 1994). Instead, they tend to treat girls and young women as perpetually vulnerable and in need of protection. In this collection, as feminist researchers, we respond to Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall’s call to action to destabilize the idea of girlhood (and young womanhood) as “a single sad story in which imperiled girls await rescue, with limited hope or success” (2010: 667). This is why we invited contributions that focus on the ethics of research that acknowledges the socio-cultural issues that negatively impact the lives of girls and young women, while simultaneously recognizing their voice and agency.

Some Emerging Lessons Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls contributes to a body of evidence about the ethics of using PVM with girls and young women in Indigenous, rural, and other marginalized communities in diverse transnational contexts. The authors reflect on various ethical issues they have encountered in their PVM research, mostly with girls and young women, and discuss how they resolved them. From their reflections and analyses, some critical overlapping themes emerge that offer valuable lessons for PVM researchers who are serious about doing ethical research with girls and young women. 217

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Working with Research Ethics Committees and Boards Managing the expectations and protocols of RECs and REBs is a common theme across many of these chapters. While formal ethical review processes are essential, many of the guidelines have not changed in several decades. The criteria used to judge the ethicality of research often ignore the unique circumstances and cultural expectations that govern research in Indigenous and rural communities, particularly research that uses various participatory visual methods. To meet this challenge, RECs or REBs should embrace a broader range of methodological principles, contextual variance, and Indigenous socio-cultural values in their review processes (Clark 2013). Linked to this, girls, especially those in Indigenous, rural, and other low-resource communities are deemed to be particularly vulnerable to harm in research (see Lange et al. 2013). For this reason, RECs and REBs often require stringent protection measures when scholars engage with population groups they (RECs and REBs) identify as vulnerable. Despite their benevolent intent, these safeguards are often at odds with the critical democratic principles of PVM. Many of the authors reflect on these contradictory ethical requirements and the barriers they encounter when they attempt to meet ethical regulations while simultaneously acknowledging and respecting the autonomy and agency of co-researcher participants and their communities. This is because participatory research involves co-creating knowledge with research participants. Ideally, analysis and dissemination of findings from such research must also be participatory and, at a minimum, involve participants as active partners in the process. This approach, participatory methodology researchers argue, not only produces knowledge that is authentic and relevant but is likely to generate research that policymakers and practitioners can use to effect social change (Mitchell et al. 2017). However, involving co-researcher participants, particularly girls and young women, actively and consistently from the conceptualization of the research to the dissemination process has often proved challenging. A number of questions arise for PVM researchers as they strive to balance the requirements of RECs and REBs with ethical research practice with co-researcher participants and their communities. For example, how might participatory researchers balance the need to do least harm and “avoid any possible harmful consequences resulting from [participants’] identification” (Amnesty International 2008: 5), but to also work toward social change, as the principles of participatory research dictate? Should it not be the co-researcher participants who decide whether or not they want their identities to be anonymous, particularly in projects in which 218

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they produce artifacts for exhibition in community and other public spaces? In such spaces, should they present their work or, to safeguard their anonymity, should the researchers present on their behalf? For PVM researchers, ideally, these issues must be negotiated with the co-researcher participants, a principle most REBs and RECs seldom consider or accept. The answer to these protectionist approaches to research ethics may lie in providing training in a variety of emerging qualitative methods, including PVM. Furthermore, to embed more robust and contextually informed approaches in ethics protocols, we need diverse representation on RECs and REBs. For example, ethics committees could ensure that they appoint researchers who are familiar with PVM and other participatory methodologies, as well as Indigenous people, in particular girls and young women, when the research involves them (Flicker et al. 2007). Negotiating Informed Consent with Girls and Young Women A second theme emerging from the chapters in this volume is that of negotiating informed consent. Research that uses PVM is a collaborative process in which researchers negotiate the research tools, procedures, and outcomes with co-researcher participants. This makes it difficult to predict with precision the research design and the outcomes of the inquiry. Several authors in this volume interrogate how PVM researchers might ask co-researcher participants to consent to share artifacts they create in their projects or that feature information about others who are not directly involved in the work. While the adoption of a multi-stage and dynamic consent process can help to navigate this challenge, obtaining ongoing or rolling consent in participatory projects over time remains problematic. Moreover, while consent forms may be well-intentioned and have the approval of the REC or REB, the procedures involved in obtaining informed consent are often alienating to young people and their parents or guardians. To address this, researchers working with these populations implement in-person verbal informed consent processes through a faceto-face individual or group meeting with parents or guardians. Coupled with the emergent nature of PVM research is the challenge of balancing the benefits of research with potential risks to participants and their communities, a concern most of the authors in this volume highlight. For example, the contributions refer to the numerous benefits of using PVM in research with girls and young women and illustrate how these fun-filled and youth-friendly methods can create valuable opportunities for these often-silenced voices to be heard. However, all authors 219

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emphasize the need to consider ethical issues when one is planning and conducting research. This is particularly true for PVM projects that span many months or years and demand a lot of the co-researcher participants’ time and energy. Where such research focuses on controversial or taboo subjects such as GBV, including sexual violence, the risks are exacerbated. As the authors in this volume remind us, in such work, obtaining informed consent at the start of the project is not enough. Participatory research requires the active engagement of participants in decision-making regarding the direction of the research and the methods and tools to be used for data generation and dissemination. To ensure this, not only does consent have to be informed, but it also has to be freely given. The process of obtaining such informed consent must not only occur before the work begins, but must be ongoing and be based on relationships of trust between the participants and the researchers, and between the researchers and the young people’s communities. Anonymity and Silencing The reflections in the various contributions in this volume suggest that REB or REC guidelines require researchers to anonymize visual data and protect participant identities through the use of pseudonyms. These constraints can silence co-researcher participants who feel, rightfully, that they own the data and have the right to be recognized for their contributions and have their real names made public. Some authors point out that visual tools often make anonymity impossible and question whether enforcing anonymity is always in the best interest of co-researcher participants. Others note that co-researcher participants often fear the repercussions of talking about sexualized violence and want their stories and names withheld. As noted above, ensuring that consent processes are ongoing will go a long way toward responding to these challenges.

Some Concluding Reflections How do we do PVM research with girls and young women safely and ethically, particularly in contexts in which they often have little power given both their age and the universally unequal gender norms they experience? What might such research look like in contexts in which they are often rendered invisible, and where there are few or no opportunities for their voices to be heard as they speak about the issues that affect them, includ220

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ing sexual violence? In essence, how might we break down traditional boundaries in research to embark on a transgressive process of scholarly dialogue and inquiry that positions girls and young women at the center? When we first conceptualized this volume, it was these questions we most wanted to address. Importantly, we wanted to contribute to the scholarly debate about how we might, as PVM researchers, be responsive to the needs and experiences of girls and young women in Indigenous and rural communities, as well as to the local communities and cultural contexts in which other girls live. We wanted to reflect on how we might use our research ethically to address the marginalization of girls and young women around the world. The contributions in Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls engage with the complexities of this work. According to the authors, such scholarship requires going beyond the silencing and tokenistic involvement of girls and young women in research, and instead, as Ann Oakley (1994) might suggest, approaching them as co-researchers (knowers) and agentic beings (actors) in their own lives. To facilitate this, RECs and REBs would need to be transformed both in form (membership) and approach. This would enable more democratic processes of negotiating and doing research with these often-marginalized populations and their communities. Finally, for PVM researchers, to do ethical research with girls and young women in marginalized contexts requires continual researcher reflexivity and self-critique about their relative positions of power (Mitchell et al. forthcoming). Such reflexivity must focus on how the research contributes to listening to the otherwise silenced or unheard voices of girls and young women on issues that impact their lives. Importantly, researchers need to focus on how their research contributes to social change in the lives of the girls and young women with whom they engage in their research. Relebohile Moletsane is Professor and the J. L. Dube Chair in Rural Education in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal with research interests in poverty alleviation, HIV, gender inequality, and GBV as barriers to education and development. She is co-PI with Claudia Mitchell, of an IPaSS grant: “Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘From the Ground Up’ Approaches to Addressing Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa.” Astrid Treffry-Goatley is a South African researcher based at the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her areas of interest include gender and health, girlhood studies, film studies, 221

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and ethnomusicology. She has extensive experience using participatory methods to understand and address key health challenges, including HIV-drug adherence, healthcare systems, and gender-based violence. Lisa Wiebesiek is the Research Manager of the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her current work focuses on using participatory visual methodology to work with girls and young women to better understand and address gender-based violence in rural communities. April Mandrona is the Director of Art Education at NSCAD University. She received a PhD in Art Education from Concordia University and was an SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Mandrona’s current SSHRC-funded research supports children with refugee experience in making picture books that reflect their perspectives and creativity.

References Amnesty International. 2008. “I Am at the Lowest End of All”: Rural Women Living with HIV Face Human Rights Abuses in South Africa. London: Amnesty International. Clark, Andrew. 2013. “Haunted by Images? Ethical Moments and Anxieties in Visual Research.” Methodological Innovations Online 8(2): 68–81. https://doi .org/10.4256/mio.2013.014. Flicker, Sarah, Randy Travers, Adrian Guta, Sean McDonald, and Alieen Meagher. 2007. “Ethical Dilemmas in Community-Based Participatory Research: Recommendations for Institutional Review Boards.” Journal of Urban Health 84(4): 478–493. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-007-9165-7. Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. 2010. “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance.” Feminist Studies 36(3): 667–690. Lange, Margaret, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. 2013. “Vulnerability in Research Ethics: A Way Forward.” Bioethics 27: 333–340. Mitchell, Claudia, Katarina Giritli, and Relebohile Moletsane. Forthcoming. Where Am I in the Picture? Researcher Positionality in Rural Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene de Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community, and Policy. London: SAGE. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526416117. Oakley, Ann. 1994. “Women and Children First and Last: Parallels and Differences between Children’s and Women’s Studies.” In Children’s Childhoods Observed and Experienced, ed. Berry Mayall, 13–32. London: Falmer Press. 222

INDEX A abuse, 92, 98, 139, 143–145 action brief, 31, 32 activism feminist activism, 58 online activism, 58–59 transnational activism, 44, 49, 51, 156–158, 210 youth activism, 43, 56–58, 134 adolescence, 145 agency girls’ agency, 6, 57, 66, 81 youth agency, 2, 6, 57, 66, 68, 80, 88, 125, 134–135, 137, 144–145, 148, 158, 210, 217 anonymity, 5, 13, 22, 29, 79–80, 119–121, 126, 146–147, 167–168, 220 appropriation, 182 archive, 58 digital archive, 49, 58 artifact(s), 23, 219 visual artifacts, 156–158 arts-based methods, 3–4, 91, 98 assent, 53, 114, 125 asset-based approach, 49 audience, 33, 51, 55, 119, 169 audiencing, 53 autonomy, 5, 66, 218

B Belmont Report, The, 24, 28–29, 31, 36–37, 39, 138 Belmore, Rebecca, 103, 106 beneficence, 49, 54, 56, 100, 102, 117, 125, 137, 148, 158–159, 162, 207–208, 219 Bickham Mendez, Jennifer, 111, 115– 116, 125, 129 biomedical framework, 27 Black, Gillian, 65 body sovereignty, 91 border crossing cultural border crossing, 111 disciplinary border crossing, 9 transnational border crossing, 9, 45, 111, 125, 127–128 borderland feminism(s), 94 Brown, Leslie, 94 Burke, Catherine, 198 Bush, Shane, 66 bystander intervention, 210–211 C Campbell, Maria, 104 cellphilm(s), 46–47, 55, 58, 68, 70–71, 73, 76–77, 79, 111, 119–122, 126, 128 cellphone, 74–75

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children, 7, 112, 114, 125, 139, 155 Chilisa, Bagele, 25 cinema vérité (direct cinema), 203 Clark, Alison, 64 Clark, Andrew, 27, 153 collaborative research, 153 collaborative documentary film, 203, 209, 211 colonialism, 112 settler colonialism, 44, 49 community engagement, 73, 113, 129 community-based participatory research, 65, 114, 160 community-based participatory video, 140 confidentiality, 29, 56, 79, 114, 167 consent, 70, 122–125, 128, 162 consent forms, vii, 70, 117–118, 129, 201 informed consent, 28, 31, 37, 53–55, 77, 110, 219–220 parent or guardian consent, 114, 184 culture cultural difference, 37 culture-jam, 44 D Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 10 data generation, 139 de Finney, Sandrina, 6 de Lange, Naydene, 46, 49 decolonization, 24 decolonizing research, 23, 25, 39, 95, 110, 124, 127 democratic research, 159, 165 Derrida, Jacques, 176 digital storytelling (DST), 67, 71 dilemma ethical dilemma(s), 35, 51, 74, 141, 153–154, 158, 161, 167 dissemination, 47, 68, 73, 77–78, 81, 141, 143–144, 146–147, 169, 218 Dixon, Shanly, 202 drawing (as method), 72, 74, 120, 140

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E empowerment empowered postfeminist liberal girl, 6 empowering children and young people, 114 participant empowerment, 30, 116, 137, 192, 210 resistance as empowerment, 190 environmental justice, 46 epistemology positivist epistemology, 24–25, 49 transformative epistemology, 25 Ermine, Willie, 113, 127 ethical ethical clearance, 31, 38, 45, 80, 143, 161 ethical cycle, 161 ethical guidelines, 28, 111, 144, 146, 153, 158, 170 ethical practice(s), 22, 37, 39, 49–51, 65, 113, 114, 128–129, 192 ethical principles, 158 ethics community ethics ethics of care, 38 ethics of refusal, 100 Indigenous ethics, 89 situated ethics, 37 visual ethics, 162 Western ethics, 22 ethnographic research, 100 autoethnographic research, 30 Eyre, Linda, 49 F Fairey, Tiffany, 137 female identifying, 45, 52 femicide, 8, 67 feminism(s) borderland feminism, 93–94 Indigenous feminism, 93–94 transnational feminism, 9–10, 64, 111, 115–116, 217 feminist(s), 2, 43, 104, 111, 129, 160, 167

INDEX

feminist activism, 58 feminist mapping, 9 feminist movement, 157 feminist research, 3, 49, 115, 128 fieldnotes, 204 First Nations, 6, 93, 113 Flicker, Sarah, 13, 112, 114–116, 158 Flynn, Paula, 135 Folifac, Fidelis, 178 food (in)security, 47, 69 Fredericton Feminist Film Collective, 46 fun, 3, 76, 205, 207, 212, 219 G Gaertner, David, 102, 103 Gannon, Susanne, 154 Gant, Larry, 154 gaze, 4, 99 gender gender discrimination, 2 gender expression, 44 gender identity, 114 gender inequality, 136, 178, 188 gender norms, 7, 8, 67, 190, 220 geopolitical, 122, 124 Gergen, Kenneth, 24 Gilligan, Carol, 38 Gilmore, Leigh, 2, 199, 217 girl Black girls, 30, 135, 136 girl-centered, 111, 124 girl-led, 11, 68, 73, 81–82, 116 girlhood girlhood studies, 3, 5–6, 10, 15, 64, 69, 135, 144, 146, 154 Global North, 21, 22, 147, 167 Global South, 2, 65, 78–79, 135, 145, 147, 155, 167, 169, 177 globalization, 9, 50 Goeman, Mishuana, 96 Gonick, Marnia, 99, 154 Gore, Veronica, 99 Graham, Louis, 115 grassroots knowledge, 156 Gubrium, Aline, 115

E

Guillemin, Marilys, 140 Guta, Adrian, 114 H harassment, 79, 147, 205, 211 heterogeneity, 113, 115 heterosexual, 207 high-tech, 4, 74 High, Steven, 23 Highway of Tears, 93 HIV, 1–2, 15, 22, 69, 70, 136 hooks, bell, 94, 102 human rights, 66, 112, 160, 171, 179 Human Rights Watch, 67 Hunt, Sarah, 92 I identity, 6–7, 47, 57, 180 identity politics, 94, 179 Indigenous identity, 6, 103 protection of identity, 72, 80, 118, 124, 126 (see also anonymity) sexual identity, 114, 210 imperialism, 6, 94–95, 105, 116 Indigeneity, ix, 5–6, 8, 10–15 Indigenous Indigenous children, 112, 125 Indigenous community(ies), ix, 2, 5–9, 13, 15, 36, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 97–98, 102, 105, 110–114, 116, 124–125, 127, 136 Indigenous girls and young women, x, 6, 11, 13, 22–25, 30, 32, 35–37, 39, 66–67, 78, 87, 89–93, 95, 96, 99–100, 102, 104, 105, 112–113, 116, 124, 126 Indigenous knowledge systems, 113, 116 Indigenous language, 47, 176, 179, 182 indigenization, 6 inequality, 4, 58, 75, 115, 135–137, 178, 188, 190 inequity, 14, 89–90, 103 informed assent. See assent informed consent. See consent

225



INDEX

intersectionality, 7, 94, 115–116, 124–126, 177, 182, 191 Inuit, 6, 29, 113 Isserman, Andrew, 8 J Jiwani, Yasmin, 135 Justice Institute of British Columbia, 89 K Keller, Jessalynn, 43, 58 Kirk, Jackie, 9, 185 knowledge co-generation of knowledge, 136 co-production of knowledge, 21–22, 26, 178 knowledge keeper(s), 99, 105 knowledge production, 34–35, 49, 94, 174–175, 191 Kouega, Jean-Paul, 192 L Lambert, Joe, 72 land land-based research, 13, 91, 93, 96 land sovereignty, 91 language multilingual, 14, 175, 191–192 leadership, 93, 199, 207 community leadership, 81 youth leadership, 114 Lefebvre, Haidee, 29 LGBTQ+, 44 Lileston, Pamella, 207 lingua franca, 179, 182, 191 Lin, Vivian, 75 Little, Edward, 23 lived experience, 5, 32, 39, 44, 97, 156, 164, 177 Löfman, Päivi, 158 low-tech, 74 Lowe, Sarah, 115 M MacEntee, Katie, 13, 111–112, 115–116, 119 226

Mak, Monica, 71, 140 Marbles, Jenna, 209 marginalization, 7, 8, 12, 15, 65, 75, 115, 135, 160, 221 marriage, 155 early and forced marriage, 69 Marshall, Elizabeth, 2, 199, 217 Mbembe, Achille, 25 McCleary-Sills, Jennifer, 207 media digital media, 4, 44, 67, 74, 80, 207, 208 media coverage, 29 media production, 44, 47, 51, 76–77 visual media, 9, 12, 70, 73, 78, 115, 117, 141, 191, 201 Meier, Megan, 198 Mertens, Donna, 28, 135 Métis, 6, 93, 102, 104, 113, 116, 129 Milne, E-J, 53, 198 misogyny, 44, 51, 205, 208 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, 89–90, 112 Mitchell, Claudia, 3, 6, 9, 22, 25, 46, 51, 65, 71, 74, 79, 114, 126, 135, 138, 140, 165–166, 185, 198 Mohanty, Chandra, 115, 124, 198 N narrative(s), 9, 29, 79, 103, 115, 134–135, 148, 198 nationalist(ic), 28, 30 nationalist(ic) colonial policies, 96 nationalist(ic) discourse(s), 29–30, 182 research, 32, 35 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo, 20, 25, 39 negotiation(s), xi, 14, 37, 111, 148, 170, 177, 191 neoliberal, 210 No-Editing-Required (N-E-R), 71, 140 non-binary, 44, 52–53 Nuremberg Code, 158–159 O ontology, 24–25

INDEX

P paradigm critical (and) transformative paradigm, 22–23, 26, 35–36, 38–39 positivist paradigm, 24, 36, 39 transformative paradigm, 27–29, 39, 135–136 Parsons, Rehtaeh, 198 participation, 104, 113, 122, 125 politics of participation, 39, 176 participatory research, 14, 144, 153, 158–159, 161, 175, 218, 220 participatory video, 146, 207 participatory visual research, 4, 21, 27, 74, 156, 158, 167 patriarchy, 57, 89, 177 policy, 81 Pootoogook, Annie, 29 positionality, 90, 176–177 post-production, 122, 128, 200, 203 poverty, 65, 75 power, 32, 34, 36, 100, 115, 138, 159, 175–176, 182, 189, 193, 200 colonial power, 94 power dynamics, 65, 74 power imbalances, 3, 103, 135, 160, 165 power relations, 4, 38–39, 135, 177, 190 protest, 58 R reciprocity, 38, 127 reconciliation, 90, 103, 113 reflexivity, 105, 159, 221 dialogue with self, 30 reflexive, 90, 176 refusal, 94 ethic(s) of refusal, 100 honoring refusal, 89, 100–101 right of refusal, 124 Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline, 9, 185 relational, x, 105, 113, 124, 128 relational ethic, 36 relational justice, 38

E

research ethics board (REB), 2, 52–57, 153, 158, 160, 219–220 research ethics committee (REC), 2, 22, 27, 36, 66, 68, 79, 146, 154, 217–218 resilience, 135 resistance, 95, 102–105 Romm, Norma, 24, 27–28, 36, 38 rurality, 5, 7–8, 11 S self-determination, 6, 91–92 sexual sexual abuse, 76, 139 sexual assault, 198 sexual exploitation, 92 sexual happiness, 29 sexual violence, ix–xi, 2, 4, 26, 31, 36, 65–67, 88, 157 sexuality, 30, 50, 198 silencing, 78, 100, 137, 146, 169, 210, 220 Sisters Rising, 89, 91 slum, 154–155, 163 smartphone, 75–76 Smith, Ann, 10, 22, 55 Smith, Fiona, 177 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 38–39, 88 social social justice, 11, 22, 25 social media, 143, 147, 198, 204–209 Sontag, Susan, 90 sovereignty, 6, 91, 98 speaking back, 25, 126 sterilization, 112 stereotypes, 51, 79, 103, 122, 197 gender stereotypes, 78 stigma, 99, 160, 169 storyboard, 71–72, 120, 140, 203 sub-Saharan Africa, 154–156, 182 subjectivity, 176 Sultana, Farhana, 50 T Taft, Jessica, 44 227

D

INDEX

technology, 74–75 digital technology, 66 mobile technology, 111, 126 teenage teenage pregnancy, 70, 155–156 unwanted pregnancy, 79 tokenism, 34, 176, 191, 221 transgender, 12, 43, 52, 114 transnationalism, 55, 59 transnational activism, 44, 58, 122, 134, 147, 156, 158, 198 transnational girlhood, 15, 57, 65, 78, 99, 115, 125, 135, 146 transphobia, 44, 51 trauma, 126, 209, 212 Tri-Council, 49, 113 trigger warnings, 51, 55 trust, 112–113, 118, 146, 220 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 67 Tuck, Eve, 44 two-spirit, 114 U United Nations United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 67 United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 7 V Vanner, Catherine, 9, 32, 57, 78, 115, 135, 177, 188, 198

228

victimhood, 29, 135 video participatory video, x, 22, 51, 75, 140, 146, 154, 156, 176, 178, 185, 198, 207 violence cyberviolence, 204–205 gender-based violence, 6, 13, 22, 46, 110, 119, 157, 204 representational violence, 90 sexualised violence, 89, 98, 105 state violence, 89 structural violence, 135 Vizenor, Gerald, 96 voice, 99, 135, 137, 144–145, 158 vulnerability, ix, 2, 66, 79, 137 W Walsh, Shannon, 4, 137 Watson, Caitlin, 75 Weems, Lisa, 43 Wiles, Rose, 5 Wilson, Shawn, 102 witness(ing), 90, 100, 103, 105 Y Yang, Kyung-Hwa, 146, 207 young mothers, 154 YouTube, 23, 51, 56, 58, 143, 202, 208, 209 Z Zembylas, Michalinos, 24