Visualising Voices: Photoyarn as a Decolonial Tool for Centring Indigenous Girls’ Lived Experiences in Qualitative Research

Abstract

This paper examines Photoyarn, an Indigenous adaptation of photovoice, as a methodological tool for amplifying the voices of Indigenous girls in Zambia during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2024, twelve participants from Chongwe (Lusaka Province) and Solwezi (North-Western Province) used photography and yarning to represent their experiences of education under school closures. Photoyarn counters extractive research by combining participant-generated images with yarning, a dialogic practice grounded in relational accountability, to support participant-led storytelling and analysis. Rooted in Indigenous epistemologies, it recognises knowledge as relational, storied, and community-grounded. Three interconnected analytic spaces illustrate how the method enables participant-led theorising and relational analysis. Education Interrupted shows how participants used Photoyarn to narrate educational rupture and reconstitute belonging through home study. Invisible Labour reveals how the visual-dialogic process surfaced reflections on domestic work as both constraint and site of learning. Indigenous Resilience highlights how cultural knowledge - herbal remedies, storytelling, and craftwork - emerged as expressions of health, patience, and informal pedagogy. Across these spaces, Photoyarn operated as a decolonial practice of co-theorisation, enabling participants to interpret their educational realities through culturally grounded lenses. The paper advances Photoyarn as a decolonial methodological approach that integrates visual storytelling and relational dialogue to support participant-led theorising. It contributes to participatory and Indigenous research by demonstrating how culturally grounded visual methods can foster collaborative knowledge-making and epistemic justice in crisis-affected contexts.

Introduction

In 2024, Esnart, a sixteen-year-old girl from Chongwe, photographed her sister steaming over a pot of boiling herbs. She explained:

When you sweat, it means the disease is coming out… That’s how this medicine was helping us in COVID-19. It helped me not to catch any disease because the disease kept on coming out. Steaming was a natural remedy, an Indigenous way - how we were protecting ourselves so that life can continue normally. Education could continue normally. Studying could continue normally.

Her words encapsulate how families drew on cultural knowledge to sustain health and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Esnart’s analysis moves beyond recollection; she theorises her image as evidence of Indigenous science and communal care. In narrating her photograph, she redefines education itself as an embodied practice of wellbeing and continuity - learning not in classrooms but through intergenerational knowledge and collective resilience.

This Photoyarn image (Figure 1) visualises Indigenous health practice as a form of learning, illustrating how communities reconstituted knowledge and care when formal schooling was disrupted. It shows how Indigenous girls theorise education through both image and story, revealing the limitations of conventional research approaches.

Figure 1.

“Steaming for strength”: Indigenous knowledge as embodied learning and care (Photograph by Esnart, Chongwe, 2024)

Although participatory and visual methods are increasingly employed in educational research, the voices of Indigenous girls remain marginal. Qualitative traditions often interpret their lives through externally imposed analytic frameworks, muting the epistemic authority of those most affected (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021). In rural Zambia, this imbalance intersects with structural barriers: gendered labour, cultural expectations, and economic precarity shape girls’ educational experiences, yet their perspectives are rarely recognised as knowledge in themselves (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021; UN Women, 2022; UNDP & Ministry of Gender Zambia, 2021). At the same time, national and global discourses, exemplified by large-scale “learning loss” reports, privilege quantitative recovery metrics and overlook the everyday resilience and local resourcefulness that sustained girls’ learning during school closures (UNESCO, UNICEF & World Bank, 2021; UN Women, 2022; Plan International, 2020).

This paper positions Photoyarn, an Indigenous adaptation of photovoice developed by Rogers (2017), as a decolonial methodology and a site of co-theorisation, showing how participatory visual practice can itself generate new forms of analysis and knowledge-making. Photoyarn combines participant-generated images with yarning, a dialogic storytelling practice grounded in relational accountability (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Wilson, 2008). Unlike conventional participatory projects that often preserve researcher authority, Photoyarn embeds interpretation within participants’ own narratives—images function as analysis in dialogic spaces grounded in Indigenous epistemologies of story and relationship (Castleden, Garvin, & Huu-ay-aht First Nation, 2008; Rogers, 2017; Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Wilson, 2008). Using participatory visual and narrative methods, the study explored Indigenous girls’ experiences of learning and resilience during COVID-19. These visual-narrative accounts provide a distinct lens on pandemic schooling, highlighting not only disruption but also resilience, improvisation, and cultural continuity. Esnart’s photograph, for example, does more than document herbal steaming; it repositions Indigenous health knowledge as pedagogy, revealing how cultural practices sustained both wellbeing and informal learning during crisis.

Within these debates, the paper makes three contributions. First, it demonstrates how Indigenous girls conceptualise education not as absence or “loss” but as a practice re-constituted through kinship and resourcefulness. Second, it shows how participatory visual methods can be indigenised, operationalising principles of relationality, reciprocity and epistemic justice. Third, it reframes participatory research not as tokenistic inclusion but as co-theorisation, a process of knowledge-making with, for and by those whose worlds it seeks to understand.

Accordingly, this study asks two interrelated research questions:

(1) How does Photoyarn empower Indigenous girls to document and interpret their lived experiences?

(2) What methodological lessons emerge from using Photoyarn in crisis contexts?

These questions are explored within the context of education during COVID-19 school closures, ensuring that methodological insights are grounded in girls’ lived realities. In this way, the paper contributes to rethinking how Indigenous girls’ narratives, and the methodological frameworks that honour them, can inform more relational, equitable and culturally responsive approaches to education and policy in post-crisis contexts.

Literature Review

This review addresses three interrelated domains: (1) critiques of photovoice, (2) Indigenous methodologies, and (3) the application of visual methods in crisis research. Tracing the genealogy of photovoice and its critiques, examining Indigenous alternatives such as Photoyarn, and situating these debates within COVID-19 disruptions establish the central stakes of this study: how to engage participatory visual methods without reproducing colonial hierarchies of knowledge, particularly when working with Indigenous girls in crisis-affected settings.

Photovoice and Its Critiques

Participatory visual research has become a prominent methodological strand in the social sciences, especially in education and public health. Its rise is often traced to photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997), which proposed that giving cameras to marginalised groups could democratise research by enabling participants to document their realities and communicate directly with decision-makers. Developed in rural China with women documenting health and livelihood challenges, photovoice spread rapidly across Global North and South contexts (Wang, 1999). Its participatory ethos resonated with critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) and feminist standpoint theory (Haraway, 1988), promising to unsettle hierarchies of voice and representation embedded in traditional research.

Even in its early applications, photovoice often relied on academic and donor logics. It presumes the broad communicability of photographic representation, and project outputs are frequently oriented to advocacy or policy audiences (Cook & Hess, 2007; Latz, 2017). This raises questions about whether its emancipatory claims rest on epistemological foundations that remain Eurocentric.

Despite its wide uptake, photovoice has attracted sustained critique. Scholars note that emancipatory claims are often blunted by structures that leave researcher authority intact (Catalani & Minkler, 2010; Latz, 2017). The familiar trope of “giving voice” presumes that participants lack voice and obscures how facilitation, curation, and dissemination are controlled by researchers (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021). This emphasis on individual voice also contrasts with Indigenous epistemologies, which locate knowledge in collective, relational, and storied practices. A systematic review on Indigenous youth projects found that many engaged participants in image production but excluded them from interpretation and analysis - tokenism that reproduces colonial dynamics (Anderson et al., 2023). Further critiques highlight the commodification of trauma and the limited structural change that often follows (Castleden, Garvin, & Huu-ay-aht First Nation, 2008; Mitchell, 2011). These concerns are especially acute in Indigenous contexts, where externally defined categories and outputs can misrecognise local epistemologies and priorities (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021).

Recent adaptations of photovoice during COVID-19 illustrate both its flexibility and its limitations. Studies that moved photovoice online to explore barriers to distance education (Doyumğaç et al., 2021), youth experiences of remote learning (Tanhan et al., 2023), and intimate relationships during the pandemic (Genc et al., 2022) show how the method can be reconfigured in crisis conditions. Yet these examples also highlight persistent risks: participation may remain limited to image production, while deeper interpretation and agenda-setting often remain under researcher control, reinforcing critiques about tokenism and deficit framings when projects are not grounded in participants’ epistemologies.

Indigenous Visual Methodologies

Indigenous methodological scholarship proposes a different starting point: methods should be grounded in relational, storied, and holistic epistemologies (Mbah et al., 2024; Mbah & Bailey, 2022) and accountable to communities (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021; Wilson, 2008). Within this tradition, yarning has been articulated as a legitimate dialogic practice that centres reciprocity, trust, and co-construction of meaning (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010).

Photoyarn, developed by Rogers (2017) with Aboriginal girls, adapts photovoice by integrating participant-generated photography with yarning, shifting interpretation from researchers to participants and their collectives. In Photoyarn, images are not inert artefacts awaiting external decoding; they are prompts for participants to theorise lived realities through dialogue. This operationalises “relational accountability” (Wilson, 2008) and addresses critiques that participatory methods often import Western analytic logics while leaving power asymmetries intact (Anderson et al., 2023; Smith, 2021). Other Indigenous visual practices reinforce this turn. Sharing circles, digital storytelling, and the use of artefacts or craftwork as data similarly emphasise that meaning emerges through collective narration rather than external categorisation (Kovach, 2009; Tachine et al., 2016). Photoyarn thus sits within a wider constellation of Indigenous visual methods that foreground community authority, narrative continuity, and reciprocity.

Gobena (2023) reinforces this point in the context of African research training, showing how coloniality continues to privilege Western epistemic standards and marginalise Indigenous knowledge systems. He calls for embedding Ubuntu philosophy as an ontological and epistemological foundation, emphasising relationality, reciprocity, and collective accountability. While his focus is on researcher education more broadly, the principles he articulates align with the commitments underpinning Photoyarn, which similarly embeds relational epistemologies such as yarning at every stage of the research process, from agenda-setting to interpretation.

The promise of such indigenised visual methods is twofold. Substantively, they surface forms of knowledge that are distributed, embodied, and relational - kinship, care, and community practice - often flattened by conventional instruments. Methodologically, they relocate interpretive authority, challenging the pipeline in which participants create images that researchers then categorise and circulate. Rogers (2017) argues that Photoyarn resists fragmenting experience into decontextualised “data,” honouring narrative as analysis. Systematic syntheses confirm that when visual methods embed local epistemologies (e.g., yarning, sharing circles, community-led interpretation), projects are more likely to achieve genuine empowerment and produce knowledge valued in both Indigenous and academic worlds (Anderson et al., 2023).

Why Photoyarn for Crisis Research?

The relevance of these debates intensifies in crisis research. Global reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic documented extensive school closures and uneven recovery, with rural and low-income communities disproportionately affected (UN Zambia, 2021; UNESCO, 2021). In Zambia, policy responses emphasised radio and television lessons, yet access in rural areas was constrained by electricity, device scarcity, and cost (Mudenda et al., 2023; Mulenga & Marbán, 2020). Evidence across Sub-Saharan Africa indicates that crises exacerbate existing inequalities, with girls shouldering intensified domestic labour and elevated risks of early marriage and gender-based violence (ILO, 2019; Phiri et al., 2021; UN Zambia, 2021). Standard educational metrics - enrolment figures, test scores, and generic “learning loss” indicators - struggle to capture these dynamics and risk reinforcing deficit framings that obscure the relational ways education persisted. In this context, Photoyarn offers a method that documents and theorises resilience without lapsing into deficit. By coupling photography with yarning, it enables participants to articulate how education was reconstituted within everyday practices of care (Rogers, 2017; Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010). Crucially, it addresses the epistemic stakes identified by decolonial scholars: knowledge should be produced with and for communities, and interpretive authority should remain with knowledge-holders (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021; Wilson, 2008). Anderson et al. (2023) caution that visual projects risk performativity if they fail to restructure interpretation and dissemination; Photoyarn directly targets that risk by designing analysis as a participant-led, dialogic process.

While Photoyarn significantly advances decolonial and participatory commitments, it remains situated within institutional research systems that can reproduce hierarchies of authorship, dissemination, and ethics oversight. Scholars caution that even community-led approaches operate under funding, publication, and linguistic constraints that may shape what counts as legitimate knowledge (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021). Recognising these tensions underscores that decolonising research is not a fixed achievement but an iterative process that demands ongoing reflexivity and accountability (Anderson et al., 2023; Rogers, 2017). A recent example of such reflexivity is Moletsane et al. (2023), who employ metaphor drawing as a participatory visual methodology with Black women academics in South Africa during COVID-19 and climate crises. Their study demonstrates how visual artefacts, when combined with collective reflection, can generate counter-narratives that resist deficit framings and foreground care, solidarity, and Ubuntu values. Although situated in higher education rather than schooling, the emphasis on relational care and collective theorisation resonates strongly with participatory work with young people. This underscores the broader potential of methods such as Photoyarn to function as decolonial feminist praxis in times of crisis.

Gap Synthesis

Taken together, the literature establishes both a critique and a pathway. Photovoice catalysed a participatory turn (Wang, 1999; Wang & Burris, 1997), yet unmodified deployments often leave knowledge hierarchies intact (Catalani & Minkler, 2010; Latz, 2017) and can commodify trauma (Castleden et al., 2008; Mitchell, 2011). Indigenous methodologies insist on relational accountability and storied knowledge (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021; Wilson, 2008). Photoyarn, as an indigenised visual method (Rogers, 2017), responds to these imperatives by integrating image-making with yarning, relocating interpretive power, and aligning procedure with community epistemologies - an approach particularly apt in crisis contexts where conventional metrics obscure lived experience (ILO, 2019; Mudenda et al., 2023; Mulenga & Marbán, 2020; Phiri et al., 2021; UN Zambia, 2021; UNESCO, 2021).

Recent contributions (Moletsane et al., 2023; see also Doyumğaç et al., 2021; Tanhan et al., 2023; Genc et al., 2022) confirm that the stakes of visual participatory methods are both methodological and epistemic. Together they highlight the need to embed relational and decolonial frameworks while adapting visual methodologies to crisis conditions. Photoyarn builds upon and localises this trajectory by situating Indigenous girls not as data providers but as co-theorists of resilience, education, and care during COVID-19.

Contextual Background

Study Setting

The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in Zambia within an educational system historically shaped by colonial neglect and enduring rural–urban divides. For Indigenous and rural communities, long-standing marginalisation had produced fragile systems of provision well before the pandemic. In Chongwe (Lusaka Province) and Solwezi (North-Western Province), the two districts central to this study, these inequities were already evident in teacher shortages, under-resourced schools, and gendered barriers to girls’ participation in education (Mudenda et al., 2022; United Nations Zambia, 2021).

The roots of these disparities trace back to the colonial era, when formal education was concentrated in urban and mission centres, leaving most rural and Indigenous areas underdeveloped (United Nations Zambia, 2021). Post-independence reforms did not fully redress these imbalances, and investment in rural schooling remained limited (United Nations Zambia, 2021). Before 2020, classrooms in rural Zambia were often overcrowded, teacher absenteeism was high, and dropout rates for girls, particularly after puberty, were consistently higher in rural areas, including Chongwe and Solwezi (Phiri et al., 2021; United Nations Zambia, 2021)

This historical marginalisation created the structural vulnerability into which the COVID-19 crisis erupted. The pandemic did not create inequality but amplified long-standing educational divides embedded in Zambia’s geography and history of uneven development.

At the national level, the Ministry of General Education (MoGE) had, prior to the pandemic, pursued reforms such as the School-Based Continuing Professional Development through Lesson Study programme and the Primary Literacy Programme, both designed to improve teacher competence and literacy outcomes (MoGE, 2014). These initiatives relied on face-to-face mentoring and collaborative learning, which were disrupted by lockdowns and distancing requirements. The interruption of in-service training left many teachers, particularly those in remote schools, without pedagogical or psychosocial support.

The broader economic environment compounded these challenges. Zambia entered the pandemic amid fiscal constraints and high external debt (United Nations Zambia, 2021; Ministry of Finance and National Planning [MOFNP], 2020). Lockdown measures and reduced trade revenues deepened financial pressures, prompting reallocations of public expenditure toward health and emergency response (United Nations Zambia, 2021; Ministry of Finance and National Planning [MOFNP], 2020). Education budgets were tightened, constraining education service delivery and school operations, particularly in rural areas (United Nations Zambia, 2021). Rural districts, including Chongwe and Solwezi, experienced these constraints acutely. The contraction of the agricultural and informal sectors, key livelihood sources for rural households, exacerbated food insecurity and reinforced families’ dependence on children’s labour.

COVID-19’s Local Impact

Between March 2020 and February 2022, schools across Zambia experienced repeated closures as part of the national pandemic response. Although reopening dates were announced nationally, many rural districts, including Chongwe and Solwezi, remained closed for extended periods or operated with irregular schedules due to infrastructural deficits and inconsistent communication (Mukuka et al., 2021; United Nations Zambia, 2021). To sustain learning, the Ministry of General Education promoted radio and television lessons. However, these initiatives reflected urban privilege: electricity supply was unreliable in many rural households, radios were scarce, and televisions largely absent (Mukuka et al., 2021; Mulenga & Marbán, 2020). Consequently, while some urban students accessed remote instruction, many rural learners were effectively excluded from formal schooling for nearly 2 years (United Nations Zambia, 2021). The impact was especially severe for girls. School closures intensified household labour demands, with many girls devoting their days to childcare, cooking, farming, and fetching water, leaving little time for study (Mukuka et al., 2021; United Nations Zambia, 2021). Emerging reports also documented increases in teenage pregnancy, early marriage, and exposure to gender-based violence during lockdowns (Mudenda et al., 2022). These outcomes further constrained possibilities for educational re-entry once schools reopened. They mirror broader regional patterns in which crisis, poverty, and patriarchy interact to restrict girls’ schooling opportunities (Unterhalter, 2022).

Local evidence from Chongwe and Solwezi suggests that these gendered effects were compounded by already limited educational infrastructure (Phiri et al., 2021; United Nations Zambia, 2021). Many schools lacked sanitation facilities, safe transportation, and female teachers who could act as role models (United Nations Zambia, 2021). With families facing deepening economic hardship, some parents prioritised boys’ return to school, while girls remained at home to contribute to household survival (Phiri et al., 2021; United Nations Zambia, 2021). Overall, COVID-19 disrupted education systems that were already strained by structural neglect (United Nations Zambia, 2021). For students in rural Zambia, and for girls in particular, the pandemic deepened existing exclusions and exposed the fragility of state and community responses (Phiri et al., 2021; United Nations Zambia, 2021). These intersecting challenges provide the backdrop for this study’s exploration of educational experience and resilience in Chongwe and Solwezi. Within this context of compounded exclusion, Photoyarn was introduced not merely as a tool for data collection but as a decolonial methodology through which Indigenous girls could reclaim narrative authority.

Theoretical Framework

Epistemic Justice

Fricker (2007) defines epistemic injustice as the structural inequality that determines whose knowledge is treated as credible. She distinguishes between testimonial injustice, when prejudice undermines a speaker’s credibility, and hermeneutical injustice, when collective interpretive resources exclude marginalised groups from making sense of their own experience. Later theorists situate these injustices within colonial and gendered hierarchies: Medina (2013) argues that racial and gender power structures organise credibility, while Dotson (2012) identifies epistemic oppression, where supposedly universal norms of rationality silence particular ways of knowing. Epistemic injustice is thus systemic, shaping which experiences are intelligible as knowledge. Indigenous and decolonial scholars extend this critique to the legacies of colonisation, reframing it as epistemic violence (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021). Research has historically extracted Indigenous knowledge while dismissing Indigenous epistemologies as unscientific. Chilisa (2012) calls for methodologies grounded in relational, storied, and holistic worldviews that affirm community authority over knowledge. Achieving epistemic justice therefore demands transforming research logics, not merely including new voices. Wilson (2008) and Bessarab and Ng’andu (2010) operationalise this transformation through relational accountability and yarning, practices in which knowledge is co-created through reciprocal relationships rather than individual intellectual production. These methods enact what Fricker (2007) calls epistemic repair, restoring interpretive authority to those historically excluded from knowledge-making. Yet, as Pohlhaus (2017) warns, invocations of epistemic justice can remain rhetorical without material shifts in power. Photoyarn enacts such a shift by embedding Indigenous principles of story, reciprocity, and collective analysis within visual inquiry, redistributing interpretive responsibility and grounding knowledge in Indigenous lifeworlds.

Feminist Decolonial Theory - Centring Girls’ Agency and Intersectional Oppression

Feminist decolonial theory situates gendered experience within the coloniality of power - the enduring structure through which modernity organises knowledge, labour, and life (Lugones, 2010; Mignolo, 2011). In education, girls’ realities are often rendered visible only through frameworks that obscure intersections of race, class, language, and age (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins, 2000). Intersectionality, in this sense, functions as an analytic of interlocking domination while keeping agency visible. This perspective rejects universalist narratives of “the girl child.” Mohanty (1988) demonstrates how such narratives flatten difference and reproduce Global North imaginaries, while Spivak (1994) warns that attempts to speak for subaltern women often reinscribe silencing. Tuck and Yang (2012) extend this critique: inclusion without epistemic transformation simply re-centres colonial power. Indigenous feminist scholars further insist that decolonisation must reconfigure relational ontologies and epistemic ethics (Hunt, 2014; De Oliveira Andreotti et al., 2015). For research with Indigenous girls, knowledge must therefore be co-theorised with participants rather than filtered through external analytic categories (Hooks, 1994; Ahmed, 2017). Photoyarn embodies these commitments by coupling participant-led photography with yarning so that analysis unfolds through participants’ own narratives and negotiated meanings (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Wilson, 2008; Rogers, 2017). Images become visual arguments articulated by their makers, and dialogue becomes the space for collective theorisation. Intersectionality here becomes practice: addressing intersecting constraints while resisting deficit framings. Following Indigenous feminist science and technology studies, accountability means standing with communities so that evidence, interpretation, and circulation remain under participant direction (TallBear, 2013; Wilson, 2008). By centring girls’ agency in both making and reading images, Photoyarn positions co-theorisation as the criterion of valid knowledge (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021).

Visual Sovereignty

Visual sovereignty translates intersectional agency into a lived practice of representation and resistance. Raheja (2013) defines it as Indigenous peoples’ right and responsibility to depict themselves on their own terms - an ethical and political assertion of authority that resists colonial regimes of visibility (Ginsburg, 2002). Within Indigenous feminist frameworks, it functions as both empowerment and ethical obligation: the ability to see, be seen, and create meaning through community-grounded ethics rather than external validation. Lonetree (2012) extends this principle to curatorial practice, describing museums as “painful sites” entwined with colonisation. Decolonising them requires truth-telling and community control over narrative. Sovereignty, in this sense, entails not only freedom from misrepresentation but also the duty to represent with relational integrity, echoing Wilson’s (2008) notion of accountability. Recent scholarship depicts Indigenous visual practices as acts of futurity, projecting sovereignty into digital, educational, and communal spaces (Qureshi et al., 2025). For Indigenous women and girls, visual sovereignty carries distinct feminist resonance. As Hooks (1994) observes, to look back and frame one’s own image subverts a history of objectification. When Indigenous girls narrate their lives through image and story, they claim both visibility and interpretive authority; their photographs become acts of theorising. Representation thus becomes both critique and enactment of freedom. Photoyarn ensures that participants determine how their photographs are interpreted and shared; choosing what to reveal or withhold becomes a form of ethical resistance. Through this process, visual sovereignty provides the analytic lens through which Photoyarn operationalises decolonial and feminist commitments, guiding decisions on authorship, consent, and storytelling authority.

Together, these interrelated frameworks - epistemic justice, feminist decolonial theory, and visual sovereignty - anchor the methodological and ethical stance of this study. They inform how Photoyarn was designed and enacted: privileging Indigenous girls’ interpretive authority, ensuring that meaning-making remains relational and reciprocal, and situating visual storytelling as an act of epistemic repair. In grounding analysis within these theoretical commitments, the study treats each photograph and yarn not merely as data but as co-theorisation, through which participants articulate knowledge on their own terms. This theoretical grounding directly shapes the methodological choices outlined in the next section.

Methodology

Research Design

This study employed a qualitative design integrating participant-generated photography with yarning-based storytelling to explore Indigenous girls’ experiences of learning and resilience during and after COVID-19 school closures. Building on Indigenous and constructivist epistemologies, the design embedded trust, ethical care, and participant agency at every stage, ensuring that the inquiry remained relational and community-grounded. Fieldwork was conducted between March and November 2024 in two rural Zambian districts - Chongwe and Solwezi (see Contextual Background). The study formed part of a broader participatory effort undertaken with community leaders and local schools to co-develop culturally grounded approaches to girls’ learning under pandemic conditions. Photoyarn, adapted from photovoice (Rogers, 2017), combined participant-generated photography with yarning (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Wilson, 2008) as complementary modes of data generation. The Photoyarn phase built upon earlier family yarning circles held in early 2024, ensuring that subsequent activities reflected local priorities and collective consent. The research team, comprising Indigenous and non-Indigenous members, worked closely with community representatives and traditional leaders. Methodological decisions, including timing, location, and facilitation, were discussed collectively to uphold principles of relational accountability and ethical respect. Ethical approval for the study was granted by the University of Manchester Research Ethics Committee 5, ref. no. 2023-16148-27899 of 23/03/2023 and the University of Zambia Humanities and Social Science Research Ethics Committee ref. no. HSSREC-2024-May-033 of 05/06/2024. The following subsections describe research positionality, participant selection and the Photoyarn protocol.

Research Positionality

This study was initiated and coordinated by non-Indigenous researchers working within decolonial feminist commitments. Our location as outsiders shaped both access and interpretation: analytical distance can make certain assumptions more visible (Goundar, 2025), but culturally embedded meanings are not fully accessible to outsiders. Misinterpretation is especially likely when researchers assume the right to name, translate, and frame participants’ accounts without community-led interpretation. We therefore treated interpretation as something to be developed through relationship and accountability, rather than assumed in advance.

Indigenous co-researchers were engaged across study design, facilitation, and interpretive work, including co-facilitating Photoyarn and yarning sessions through which stories and meanings were generated. Fieldwork was conducted in-person by a team comprising Indigenous and non-Indigenous members, with yarning conducted in participants’ preferred languages with bilingual Indigenous facilitators. These arrangements were intended to support culturally grounded meaning-making and to guard against extractive dynamics in cross-cultural research (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2021).

At the same time, we did not romanticise “insiderness.” Because familiarity can naturalise what requires critical attention, Indigenous team members practised what Massoud (2022) describes as a critical insider orientation through structured reflexivity and collective debriefing. Across the project, roles and responsibilities were revisited as the work unfolded, with accountability directed to Indigenous participants and communities in line with epistemic justice (Chilisa, 2012; Fricker, 2007).

Participant Selection

A purposive, community-mediated sampling strategy was implemented in both districts. Traditional leaders, and community liaisons supported community entry and endorsed recruitment. During yarning circles with caregivers and children, families jointly identified one girl per household to participate, following caregiver consent and the girl’s assent. This process yielded twelve participants, six in each district, aged ten to seventeen years and attending primary or lower-secondary school. Inclusion criteria prioritised girls from Indigenous households who had experienced pandemic-related schooling disruption and expressed interest in photography or storytelling. Those outside the target age range, not from Indigenous households, or unable to provide consent were excluded. Recruitment followed community rhythms rather than fixed timelines, accommodating local events, agricultural seasons, and family commitments. Participants and caregivers received oral and written information, with interpreters available as needed. Sessions were held in familiar, accessible community spaces, with transport and refreshments provided to support inclusion. Throughout recruitment, the facilitation team kept reflective field diaries to document relational and procedural dynamics. In keeping with Indigenous ethics of mutual care, a modest token of appreciation was offered upon completion, and cameras were gifted to participants as ongoing tools for creative learning.

Photoyarn Protocol

The Photoyarn protocol unfolded in four interconnected stages designed to uphold participants’ agency, safety, and cultural integrity. After community entry, a brief orientation was co-facilitated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous team members. Sessions introduced responsible photography, privacy, and safety, with minimal instruction to preserve participant control. Together, participants defined what “ethical” and “respectful” meant within their communities, establishing shared guidelines for photographing people and spaces. Each girl then used a digital camera for about one week to document scenes that reflected her experiences of learning, care, and adaptation during the pandemic. Participants were encouraged to photograph everyday moments - without predefined categories, deciding for themselves what counted as learning and resilience. Typically, each participant took 10 to 15 photographs and selected five for printing and discussion.

All cameras were returned to the field researchers in person who retrieved the digital images and printed them for the ensuing discussion and analysis. Some girls chose to annotate their printed photographs with short captions, symbols, or markings, while others preferred unmarked images; this variation was treated as part of their expressive and analytic practice rather than standardised data. Researchers recorded brief contextual observations, such as environmental conditions and participants’ reflections when cameras were returned.

The photographs formed the basis for individual yarning sessions of about 45–60 min, held at comfortable times and in community spaces negotiated with participants. Conversations drew on the SHOWED framework, a participatory analytical approach derived from Freirean critical pedagogy, that uses six guiding prompts - What do you See? What is really Happening? How does this relate to Our lives? Why does this situation exist? How could we Educate or Empower others? What can we Do? These were used flexibly as conversational prompts, rather than as a fixed analytic template. Dialogues were conducted in participants’ preferred languages with bilingual Indigenous facilitators. Audio recordings were made under confidentiality agreements and collaboratively transcribed to maintain linguistic and cultural precision. Field notes documented emotional tone and non-verbal cues.

Finally, district-level yarning circles of about 3 hours brought all participants together for collective discussion as illustrated by Figure 2. In these gatherings, girls shared and compared their selected photographs, developing joint interpretations that extended individual insights. These collaborative discussions were also photographed, with participants’ consent, to document the collective analytic process. Conversations followed local storytelling customs - turn-taking, humour, and empathy guiding exchange - and collective understanding emerged through dialogue rather than researcher interpretation.

Figure 2.

A district-level yarning session in Solwezi, facilitated by an Indigenous female researcher

This methodology positioned Indigenous girls as narrators and interpreters of their own experiences, integrating photography and yarning to produce visual and narrative accounts grounded in everyday life. Each stage - from recruitment to dialogue - was guided by mutual care, respect, and community-defined ethics. In both districts, the group sessions were facilitated by field female researchers, to boost relationality with the girls. Together, these methods established a collaborative foundation for analysis, described in the next section.

Data Analysis

Analysis built directly on the Photoyarn process described above. Photographs and transcripts were approached as interwoven narratives, with the girls’ captions and stories recognised as analytic meaning-making in their own right (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019; Chilisa, 2012; Rogers, 2017; Smith, 2021).

Participant-Led Interpretation

Each participant’s selected photographs and yarns were reviewed using an inductive approach (Charmaz, 2006). Coding drew directly from the girls’ own words and captions, supported by the SHOWED prompts (see Methodology), which helped surface local interpretive categories and metaphors. Short analytic summaries paired images, captions, and key excerpts, maintaining links between visual and verbal meaning as the foundation for collective reflection. The presence or absence of annotation was itself noted analytically, reflecting how participants used different representational strategies - visual, textual, or oral - to convey meaning.

Collaborative Thematic Discussions

District-level yarning circles, facilitated by Indigenous research assistants, extended this first-level interpretation. The girls shared and compared their printed photographs, identified overlaps across experiences, and discussed variations in meaning. Each image-maker’s interpretation remained authoritative for her own photographs, in line with relational accountability (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Wilson, 2008). These collaborative dialogues deepened the analysis, allowing themes to develop through the girls’ own language and communal reasoning. Field notes and session photographs captured the energy of these dialogues - moments of laughter, debate, and mutual affirmation - which enriched the analytic process.

Reflexivity and Translation Integrity

Transcription, translation, and coding decisions were reviewed collaboratively with Indigenous team members to preserve linguistic nuance and cultural intent. When direct English translation risked flattening meaning, original terms were retained with brief glosses. Facilitators’ field diaries documented affective cues such as humour, hesitation, or collective silence, which informed interpretation. Reflexive notes traced how researcher standpoint, language, and emotion shaped interpretive choices. Through these iterative steps, analysis remained dialogic, moving from individual reflection to collective synthesis while maintaining the girls’ interpretive authority and embodying relational accountability.

Thematic Clusters

From the cycles of individual and group interpretation, three broad clusters of meaning were identified across the participants’ photographs and yarns. Each cluster reflected a recurring pattern of how the girls represented learning and adaptation during the pandemic.

Cluster 1 – Disrupted Learning Environments

The first cluster centred on photographs and captions depicting difficult or disrupted spaces for study - dark rooms, damaged classrooms, and limited access to materials. These images pointed to structural conditions that shaped when and where learning could occur in rural contexts.

Cluster 2 – Learning within Household Responsibility

A second cluster drew attention to the merging of domestic work and study. Photographs showing chores, caregiving, or farming were discussed as evidence of how girls balanced educational aspiration with the labour required to sustain their families. Participants described this intersection of work and study as part of everyday life rather than an exception to it.

Cluster 3 – Collective Adaptation and Community Care

The third cluster highlighted practices of persistence and creativity grounded in kinship and community. Participants shared images of peer study groups, home-based learning, and the use of cultural or local knowledge to sustain wellbeing and motivation. These materials illustrated how education was maintained through cooperation and shared responsibility.

Together, these clusters provided the analytic foundation for the Findings that follow, where participants’ photographs and words are presented in depth to illustrate each theme.

Visual Narrative Approaches

Throughout the analysis, attention was paid to how participants used contrast and composition within their photographs to express meaning. Several images juxtaposed study materials with tools of labour - for instance, a school uniform placed near farming equipment or books photographed beside household items. These visual contrasts were interpreted as narrative strategies, showing how girls used imagery to communicate tensions between work, learning, and aspiration. Such visual contrasts were interpreted alongside verbal and annotated elements as intentional narrative devices, expressing tension, aspiration, and care. These patterns were noted alongside verbal reflections to preserve the relationship between visual and spoken meaning.

Analytic Positioning

The thematic structure was developed through iterative discussion and refinement between Indigenous facilitators and the broader research team. This process maintained the participants’ interpretive authority, ensuring that the final themes aligned with their language and collective reasoning. By including participants’ annotations, oral interpretations, and collaborative dialogue as co-equal analytic sources, the analysis demonstrated how Photoyarn operationalised decolonial visual inquiry through shared authority. The analysis thus remained dialogic and grounded in participants’ lived experience, establishing a coherent foundation for the thematic findings presented in the following section.

Findings

The girls’ photographs and yarns revealed three interconnected themes that together portray how learning was experienced during and beyond pandemic disruption: Education Interrupted, Invisible Labour, and Indigenous Resilience. Each theme draws on participants’ visual and narrative accounts to illustrate distinct yet overlapping dimensions of continuity - how education was disrupted, sustained, and reimagined through everyday practice and Indigenous knowledge.

Education Interrupted

Across Chongwe and Solwezi, the girls’ photographs and yarns portrayed how education was disrupted during the COVID-19 school closures and how learning adapted in response. Although photographs were taken in 2024, after schools had reopened, they often recreated remembered scenes of interruption, turning memory itself into a form of analysis that traced how classrooms fell silent and learning moved into homes and open spaces.

Mesinja (Solwezi) photographed herself seated outside with a radio and a schoolbook (Figure 3). She explained, “This picture shows how we used to learn during lockdown… that is the picture of me sitting and listening to a radio. This simply indicates that we were learning through radio.” Reflecting on this experience, she added, “During the pandemic, many communities, particularly in rural areas with limited access to the internet or digital devices, relied on radio as an alternative learning platform. Radio became a crucial tool for distance education where learners lacked access to online learning platforms.” Her image and words captured the displacement of formal schooling into family life - the radio becoming both lesson and lifeline. She continued, “Our parents often engaged in our learning process, listening to radio lessons together, which helped us stay focused and motivated.” In these accounts, education persisted not through infrastructure but through relationships, where family support and local initiative filled the gaps left by institutional absence.

Figure 3.

Learning through radio during COVID-19 school closures, illustrating how home-based education extended into outdoor spaces (Photograph by Mesinja, Solwezi, 2024)

In Chongwe, Purity described the rhythm of combining study with household work: “We used to help at home first - fetching water, cooking - and then after that we started our lessons.” Her account framed the home as both a site of labour and of learning, where persistence replaced formal provision. Mervis (Chongwe) recalled the uncertainty when schools first reopened, explaining, “Some teachers were not coming early, and we were just waiting for them to teach us.” Her comment reflected a shared sense of stillness and expectation that appeared in other participants’ photographs - books resting on desks, radios tuned to distant voices - visualising the waiting that followed disruption.

Yet across these images and stories, the girls rejected the idea that schooling had stopped altogether. They reorganised learning around what was available - radio lessons, torchlight reading, shared study with siblings, and guidance from elders. As Mesinja put it, “People will know that learning doesn’t only take place physically at school, but also at home using radio and television sets.” Through these visual and narrative accounts, interruption became transformation. Education persisted through improvisation, collective care, and everyday endurance, demonstrating that even amid infrastructural breakdown, Indigenous girls continued to define themselves as learners. These improvisations often unfolded alongside domestic responsibility, a connection explored in the next theme.

Invisible Labour

While the first theme illustrated how learning relocated from classrooms into homes, this second theme reveals what sustained that relocation: the often-unseen labour that enabled education to continue amid economic and domestic strain. Across both districts, the girls’ photographs and yarns portrayed study unfolding alongside household and family responsibilities - cooking, caregiving, fetching water, and selling in family shops. Homes and their surroundings appeared as spaces of constant activity, where learning happened between tasks rather than apart from them. Through these accounts, “school” extended into the everyday work that kept families alive.

Anastazia (Chongwe) photographed her family’s small shop (Figure 4) and explained, “This shop helped us to provide whatever was needed for the people who live here.” When supply chains collapsed and customers could no longer come, “we started gardening as an alternative… because we needed money for books, uniforms, and pens.” Her narrative linked economic work directly to schooling, showing how family survival labour was inseparable from educational continuity. “COVID-19 took us backwards in business and school because imagine you don’t have books, but they’re teaching, you have nowhere to write.”

Figure 4.

Family shop as source of income sustaining schooling during school closures (Photograph by Anastazia, Chongwe, 2024)

In these recollections, invisible labour meant more than chores; it encompassed the collective economic strategies that allowed children, especially girls, to remain in school. Similar reflections emerged elsewhere. Purity (Chongwe) said, “Sometimes I was tired because of the chores, but I still wanted to learn.” Prophetess (Solwezi) remembered, “I used to wake up around five to draw water and sweep, then I could start reading.” These words illuminated the double shift of study and subsistence, where learning was folded into routines of care and production.

Taken together, the girls’ images of cooking fires, buckets, and shop counters visualised this continuum of labour. By photographing what usually remains unseen, they made visible the work that underpinned their education. Each scene showed how schooling relied on the same hands that sustained households and community wellbeing. Seen together, these photographs and yarns reposition “study” within the wider economies of care, showing that education was upheld not by formal institutions but by the everyday acts of work, ingenuity, and endurance.

Indigenous Resilience

Where Theme 2 exposed the invisible labour that sustained schooling within the home, this final theme traces the deeper roots of that endurance - the Indigenous knowledge systems that protected and enabled learning itself. Across Chongwe and Solwezi, the girls’ photographs and yarns framed resilience not as mere endurance but as learning sustained through Indigenous knowledge, intergenerational care, and collective wellbeing. When schools closed and clinics felt unsafe, families turned to long-known remedies and communal practices to protect health so that study could continue.

Amecha (Solwezi) photographed herself preparing a mixture of leaves and “special grass” for steaming (Figure 5), explaining that “there is me here in this picture, and there are different leaves, including some special grass, and I’m in the process of putting them in the pot.” She described how the mixture “has to boil for about 30 min,” with enough water “because we need to make sure that there will be enough steam.” This practice, she noted, “relates to the COVID-19 pandemic in the sense that we were using this method as a form of traditional medicine, which played a role in helping us recover from COVID-19 and be able to continue learning.” In a second photograph, she reflected more directly on schooling:

During COVID-19, of course, you knew that a lot of people never used to go to school, but because of steaming with traditional medicine we protected ourselves and others from having the diseases within our communities. Then we continued doing school work as normal.

Figure 5.

Preparing the leaves and special grass for steaming: Indigenous medicine enabling continued learning during COVID-19 (Photograph by Amecha, Solwezi, 2024)

Her account portrayed Indigenous medicine as the material foundation of learning itself - enabling concentration, homework, and attendance to persist.

Similar connections appeared across Solwezi. Prophetess added that steaming was woven into the rhythm of schooling itself:

When you go, before going to school, you steam; even after coming back to school, you do the same exercise. This helped to remain healthy and protected from the COVID-19 pandemic… one would get better and continue going to school without any problem.

Her words emphasised health practice as daily preparation for learning, a bodily discipline that kept study possible.

Taken together, these images and narratives depict Indigenous resilience as a relational pedagogy (Battiste, 2002; Dei, 2017): knowledge handed down, enacted together, and oriented toward continuity. The photographs of fire, herbs, and shared labour make visible the invisible infrastructures of education - care, health, and cooperation - that kept learning alive when formal systems faltered. Through their cameras and stories, the girls redefined schooling itself as a communal practice of protection and persistence, showing that education endured not in spite of crisis but through the very knowledge systems that had always sustained their communities.

Across both Chongwe and Solwezi, the girls’ photographs and yarns converge on a shared truth: education endured not through formal provision but through relational practices rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Whether through radio learning, shared domestic labour, or herbal care, learning became an act of collective resilience. These findings reposition education during crisis as a culturally embedded process of adaptation, revealing how Indigenous communities already possess the pedagogical resources needed to sustain learning in the face of disruption. Building on these findings, the following discussion explores how the Photoyarn process deepened understanding of learning, resilience, and Indigenous knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discussion

The discussion is organised into four sections. It first considers Photoyarn as a decolonial praxis, then explores gendered epistemic agency, details key methodological innovations, and closes with implications for crisis research and participatory scholarship. Together, these sections interpret the findings through the relevant theoretical lenses.

Photoyarn as Decolonial Praxis

Photoyarn functioned as more than a participatory research tool; it operated as a decolonial praxis in which Indigenous girls used cameras and storytelling to theorise their own experiences of learning and survival during the COVID-19 pandemic. The photographs and yarns presented earlier - of radio study, shared labour, and herbal care - formed the basis of this praxis, as participants moved from depicting their realities to analysing them through image-making. By deciding what to photograph, how to narrate it, and which images could be shared, the girls shaped knowledge through visual and dialogic practices rather than simply supplying data for researcher interpretation.

These dynamics echo Butet-Roch and Del Vecchio’s (2023: 734) account of elaborated images as a decolonial visual praxis that “unsettle [s] the authoritative perspective of the photographer” and enable researchers to emphasise polyphony (the coexistence of multiple participant voices and interpretations), honour refusal, support truth-telling, and imagine alternative futures. In a related way, Higgins (2014) conceptualises methodology as the space between theory, methods, and ethics, situated at the cultural interface between Western and Indigenous knowledge systems. He argues that rebraiding photovoice within this interface requires working against colonial visualities that privilege Western ways of seeing and knowing. Photoyarn’s emphasis on participant-led image-making and interpretation aligns with these interventions: it created conditions in which Indigenous girls defined both representation and analytic meaning.

Through these acts of selection and narration, Photoyarn enacted visual sovereignty in practice - agency expressed not only in self-representation but in directing the focus of analysis. This emphasis on participant control resonates with Castleden, Garvin, and Huu-ay-aht First Nation’s (2008) critique of “classic” photovoice as resembling “parachute” research and their call to modify the method by embedding iterative, community-driven cycles of feedback and interpretation. In this study, images and stories - whether of studying by torchlight or preparing medicinal herbs - functioned as theory in action: visual epistemologies grounded in lived experience and cultural practice.

Agency, however, unfolded within structural tension. Anderson et al. (2023) systematic review of photovoice with Indigenous young people notes that, even amid efforts to decolonise research, Western hegemony continues to organise much research practice and that photovoice projects face persistent methodological challenges. Their analysis underscores how participatory visual work remains shaped by broader research frameworks and institutional expectations. Similar pressures surfaced here, yet these negotiations became a key site of decolonial praxis: meaning emerged through reciprocity and mutual recognition rather than methodological control.

Gendered Epistemic Agency

As discussed above, Photoyarn functioned as a decolonial praxis that unsettled hierarchical research norms by giving interpretive control to participants. Yet this process was also deeply gendered in its enactment of knowledge. The girls’ photographs and narratives revealed not only how learning continued under constraint but also how knowledge itself was produced through gendered labour, care, and resilience. Their images of cooking fires, water buckets, and herbal steaming illuminated what academic discourse often overlooks - the everyday epistemologies of Indigenous girlhood. In this sense, the project became a site of gendered epistemic agency, where participants authored ways of knowing emerging from the intersections of gender, Indigenous identity, and material practice. Here, the personal and political converge. Papenfuss et al. (2019) describe emancipatory and transformative pedagogies that challenge power relations and cultivate relational, embodied, and participatory forms of knowing within sustainability and decolonial education. Each photograph thus became an intervention in who gets to be recognised as a knower. The girls’ authorship, deciding what to photograph and how to interpret meaning, was itself a political act. Their stories of studying after chores, using torches when electricity failed, or preparing herbal medicine re-centred women’s and girls’ expertise as sustaining the very conditions for education. “We used to help at home first - fetching water, cooking - and then after that we started our lessons,” one participant explained, collapsing the boundary between work and study. This moment of self-definition through imagery and narrative echoes Higgins’s (2014) argument that decolonial visual praxis requires returning interpretive authority to participants through creative and relational representation, rather than researcher control.

The girls’ epistemic agency was also collective. Their yarning sessions transformed individual reflection into communal theorising, mirroring Indigenous cosmologies in which learning is co-produced (Battiste, 2002; Smith, 2021). Narratives of shared work and care - studying while tending fires, learning from grandmothers, helping siblings - functioned as pedagogical acts. Through these exchanges, participants not only narrated experience but redefined the boundaries of schooling and knowledge itself. As Mzimela and Moyo (2024) argue, Indigenous knowledge systems disrupt colonial hierarchies of expertise by recognising care, healing, and everyday practice as legitimate forms of knowledge production. Yet this agency unfolded within constraint. Anderson et al. (2023) caution that even participatory visual research can reproduce epistemic hierarchies by privileging text over image and reason over relation. Negotiating these tensions demanded attentiveness to how gender, power, and colonial histories shaped the research encounter itself.

By foregrounding gendered epistemic agency, the study extends decolonial visual methodology into explicitly feminist terrain. The girls’ photographs are not merely artefacts of memory or resistance; they are methodological arguments - claims that knowledge can be embodied and relational. In this sense, Photoyarn becomes not only a mode of data generation but an epistemic practice of freedom, signalling how participatory visual research might reconceive analysis itself as relational, gendered, and decolonial.

Methodological Innovations

Building on this recognition of gendered epistemic agency, the methodological implications of Photoyarn reveal how such agency can be ethically and practically sustained in research design. The approach demonstrated that low-tech visual storytelling can serve as an accessible and ethically grounded mode of Indigenous research. Cameras functioned not as extractive instruments but as mediators of reflection - tools for translating memory and emotion into shareable knowledge. This aligns with Higgins’s (2014) argument that decolonial praxis requires reconfiguring interpretive authority so that participants define meaning through creative representation rather than researcher oversight. In this context, photography was neither documentary nor illustrative but dialogic - an invitation for participants to articulate meaning across visual and oral.

The approach also repositions ethics as a methodological axis rather than an administrative requirement. Dual-layer consent, shared ownership, and community review enacted Chilisa’s (2012) principle of relational accountability: the responsibility to represent others only through relationships of trust and reciprocity. Girls retained copyright of their images and determined which photographs could circulate publicly - an important departure from conventional visual research, where images are often treated as data objects. This attention to ownership and translation integrity echoes Anderson et al. (2023), who urge Indigenous youth research to foreground long-term reciprocity over short-term outputs.

The use of simple tools and locally grounded facilitation further illustrated how accessibility can democratise participation. As De Oliveira Andreotti et al. (2015) argue, accessibility and simplicity can themselves be decolonial design principles when they foster relational and ethical engagement. Within decolonial pedagogies, technological or methodological sophistication is less important than cultivating spaces of dialogue and reciprocity that challenge modernity’s “grammar” of control. In this sense, Photoyarn’s strength lay not in the precision of image but in the precision of relation - where meaning-making was sustained through conversation, co-presence, and mutual recognition.

Implications for Crisis Research and Participatory Scholarship

At a policy level, the girls’ photographs and narratives show that education in times of crisis depends on household infrastructures of care, communication, and Indigenous knowledge. Learning continued not through digital connectivity but through radios, torches, and community ingenuity. These insights could inform locally responsive interventions - such as investment in solar-powered radios, printed materials, and community-based study hubs - rather than purely digital solutions that overlook rural realities.

At an academic level, Photoyarn challenges tokenism in participatory research. As Monno and Khakee (2012) argue, inclusion without structural transformation can reproduce the very inequities it seeks to resist. Here, however, participants’ visual authorship reconfigured the research relationship: the girls were not symbolic collaborators but interpretive leaders. Their images generated the analytical framework itself, turning participation into co-production. This shifts participatory methodology from the rhetoric of empowerment toward the practice of epistemic justice. In particular, the study shows that epistemic justice must be gender-attentive, ensuring that Indigenous girls’ modes of reasoning and representation are treated as analytic, not anecdotal.

More broadly, the project demonstrates how crisis research can move beyond documenting vulnerability toward foregrounding Indigenous resilience and knowledge. The girls’ visual narratives did not depict loss alone - they portrayed continuity through care, reciprocity, and learning grounded in community. This reframing, consistent with Dei’s (2017) and Battiste’s (2002) notions of Indigenous resilience, situates education as a living system sustained through relational practice. It reminds us that decolonial research is not only about methodology but about ontological stance: acknowledging that knowledge, healing, and learning are inseparable. Ultimately, Photoyarn demonstrates that when Indigenous youth author their own representations of learning, research itself becomes a space of shared world-making.

These insights point toward broader transformations in research design and educational practice, elaborated further in the conclusion.

Conclusion

Photoyarn shows that decolonial visual methods can do more than invite participation - they can transform who creates and defines knowledge. Through their cameras and yarns, Indigenous girls in Chongwe and Solwezi became interpreters of learning, care, and continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their images reframed crisis not as interruption but as persistence sustained through community knowledge and reciprocity, amplifying voices often marginalised in policy and research.

The study demonstrates epistemic justice as both method and outcome. By deciding what to photograph, how to narrate, and which stories to share, participants redistributed interpretive authority and challenged the extractive tendencies of conventional research. Photoyarn shows that community-based, low-tech inquiry grounded in reciprocity and consent can sustain ethical and analytic rigour while producing theory from lived experience.

At a broader level, Photoyarn offers an accessible model for Indigenous-led visual inquiry. Inexpensive cameras, collective dialogue, and shared reflection created spaces where meaning was negotiated rather than imposed. Supporting such approaches requires structural change: funding Indigenous-led projects, training researchers in culturally safe facilitation, and embedding relational ethics in governance. Decolonial research cannot rest on good intentions alone; it must be underwritten by systems that honour reciprocity and community authority. As an adaptation of Rogers’ (2017) original Photoyarn approach, this study suggests that such relational visual methodologies hold promise across diverse contexts where storytelling and image-making support local theory-making. Any future use, however, should remain grounded in community epistemologies and developed in collaboration with local knowledge-holders rather than transferred or replicated wholesale.

Ultimately, Photoyarn reimagines research as a space of shared world-making. By centring Indigenous girls as authors and analysts of their own knowledge, it transforms representation into relation, method into ethics, and participation into praxis. In times of crisis and beyond, such approaches remind us that epistemic justice is not an abstract principle but a lived, ongoing practice - sustained through listening, reciprocity, and co-creation.