Freedman, Ethan
Professor Amy Werman
Columbia University School for Social Work, New York
Submitted in partial fulfillment as a Participatory Research Project within the requirements for Columbia's School for Social Work program and Prof. Amy Werman's Social Work Research Class.
Acknowledgements:
In introducing the following work, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Amy Werman and her class in Social Work Research (SOCWT6501) for introducing me to photovoice research. Moreover, my peers who I worked closely in discussion with including Niké, Leah, Rebecca, Claire, Sofia and others in the class were very influential in developing thoughts around this paper. I appreciate everyone in the class for the ideas they have assisted in generating. With these acknowledgements, I present the following work of my own.
Photovoice and Participatory Research Projects "Social Work Brightens My Day"
As I orient myself in the profession of Social Work through Columbia University School for Social Work (CSSW), Professor Amy Werman's course in Social Work Research provides a foundation for methodologies and epistemological approaches to knowledge acquisition. Social Work is dominated by systematized academia that often ignores marginalized voices and ways of knowing during the research, analysis, and implementation process. There are many paths to anti-oppressive research that are rendered invisible, but choosing to conduct investigations that liberate voices otherwise silenced has the capacity to change inquiry procedures dramatically.
One of the methodologies used to expose students to alternative paradigms is Photovoice Research (Wang et al., 2000). This method is capable of legitimizing voices and perspectives of the world with which people can "identify, represent, and enhance their community" via a "photographic technique" (Wang et al., 2000). While Wang et al. (2020) reveal what implementing photovoice research strategies could look like through a participatory action research (PAR) photo project with the homeless population in Michigan, Prof. Werman has mobilized researchers within her class and community at CSSW to capture how does the public perceive social work and social workers? [Content continues in the same structured format through the Bibliography section, maintaining all sections and formatting as in the original document]