The Role of the Visual in Narratives of Violence: Co-creating Fissures

When visual approaches are used in the social sciences, the distinction between researcher and researched becomes destabilised, due to a greater transference of autonomy and narrative authority over to the participant who creates, organises and analyses data in partnership with the researcher. ‘Showing a world’ is more agentic, perhaps, than the traditional format of ‘telling a world’, where participants inevitably have to respond to the researcher’s agenda. In this chapter we argue that one of the reasons for the productive ambiguity over authorship and participation within this methodological process is due to the facilitation of affect, embodiment and space within the visual research agenda. We argue here, using examples from an empirical project on black women’s experiences of violence, that visual methods open channels that encourage the surfacing of emotional ruptures in rehearsed biographical narratives (Reavey, 2011a)