Seeing Together: Photovoice as a visual participatory approach to amplify marginalized voices

Abstract

Including marginalized voices in organizational research requires researchers to establish trust and authenticity. Methodologically, creating this level of rapport can be challenging, especially with marginalized organizational participants. Previous research suggests ethnographic, participative, and visual approaches as potential solutions to facilitate greater meaning-making of the experiences of those in marginalized groups. Yet, despite advances in these methods, the voices of marginalized groups in organizations are often not fully embraced. We suggest photovoice as a method particularly well suited for studying marginalized groups because it prioritizes the voices of participants by including them throughout a research project. While photovoice has been used in other disciplines, in this article we provide guidance to management and organizational researchers about how to conduct photovoice with marginalized groups in an organizational context. We present a figure describing each element of the photovoice process using sensemaking and sensegiving lenses and illustrate this method with two examples. Overall, we shed light on the benefits that photovoice can offer as a complement or an additional methodological tool for researchers seeking to elevate voices of marginalized groups and their role in organizational phenomena.