Visual Narrative Inquiry

The Field of Narrative Inquiry

The Process of Visual Narrative Inquiry

Working within the relational methodology of visual narrative inquiry, researchers become aware of the intentionality and the ethics of listening and seeing the stories that children, youths, and adults share through the process of the inquiry. There is a need for visual narrative researchers to stay engaged with the ongoing ethical negotiations of working visually. This also calls attention to how visual researchers rely on a visual world that is endless and constantly changing: What is missing? What is dismissed? What is not seen? Visual narrative inquiry is a recursive process of engaging with participants in taking photographs and telling stories of those photographs over time. Visual narrative inquirers, as they engage with participants, discuss the possibilities and limitations of composing photographs, collecting photographs, and conversing with/through/about photographs.

Narrative inquiry is always composed around a particular wonder or puzzle, and visual narrative inquiry also begins with a sense of puzzle or uncertainty. As with narrative inquiry in general, visual narrative inquiry begins with the researcher's autobiographical lived experience, and the researcher's own stories of experience shape the relational space with participants. In the visual narrative inquiry process, [Page 939]the shared photographs and conversations are viewed and re-viewed over time. Visual narrative inquirers listen and re-listen to conversation tapes, and look and re-look at participants' photographs, as they turn both toward the inner and the outer—the personal and the social—of both their own lives and their participants' lives to reflect, meditate, and inquire into the storied experiences that are co-created with participants and researchers. Many visual narrative inquiries work with participants who are active in their subcultures. Visual narrative inquiry has the possibility of deepening insight into what is evaded by inquiring into the stories and photographs of everyday experiences of participants who are typically not seen or heard by those outside of the particular subculture.

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