Broadening the normative and evaluative space for assessing the impact of photo diary research in higher education: A capabilities approach

This chapter proposes a framing and extension of the evaluation of the impact of photo diary research, drawing on data from a project that applied photovoice to explore the experiences of inclusion and exclusion within universities, for low-income rural and township youth in South Africa. Using concepts from Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to describe their normative and evaluative framework for photovoice, the authors propose that the impact of photovoice, understood here as a politicised and more socially engaged extension of photo diary research, be assessed according to three criteria. Namely, the extent to which it enhances research participants’ opportunities for (a) epistemic contribution, (b) well-being achievement and (c) collective agency. The authors argue that these criteria also broaden the evaluative space for assessing what constitutes justice in knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing processes in photo diary research, and that this matters especially in Global South contexts, where participatory visual research methods can be used to promote decoloniality. By doing so, the authors present a normative conceptualisation of photo diary research that offers possibilities for more critical and transgressive applications of visual methods in higher education research settings.