title: Visual methodologies and participatory action research: Performing women's community-based health promotion in post-Katrina New Orleans.
abstract: Recovery from disaster and displacement involves multiple challenges including accompanying survivors, documenting effects, and rethreading community. This paper demonstrates how African-American and Latina community health promoters and white university-based researchers engaged visual methodologies and participatory action research (photoPAR) as resources in cross-community praxis in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. Visual techniques, including but not limited to photonarratives, facilitated the health promoters': (1) care for themselves and each other as survivors of and responders to the post-disaster context; (2) critical interrogation of New Orleans' entrenched pre- and post-Katrina structural racism as contributing to the racialised effects of and responses to Katrina; and (3) meaning-making and performances of women's community-based, cross-community health promotion within this post-disaster context. This feminist antiracist participatory action research project demonstrates how visual methodologies contributed to the co-researchers' cross-community self- and other caring, critical bifocality, and collaborative construction of a contextually and culturally responsive model for women's community-based health promotion post 'unnatural disaster'. Selected limitations as well as the potential for future cross-community antiracist feminist photoPAR in post-disaster contexts are discussed.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology , Center for Human Rights & International Justice, Boston College , Chestnut Hill , MA , USA.
authors.forename: M Brinton
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Lykes
authors.affiliation: b Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy , School of Social Work, Tulane University , New Orleans , LA , USA.
authors.forename: Holly
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Scheib
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American; D055812:Community-Based Participatory Research / Q000379:methods* / Q000458:organization & administration; D003159:Community-Institutional Relations; D054521:Cultural Competency; D055867:Cyclonic Storms; D004190:Disasters; D005260:Female; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000379:methods* / Q000458:organization & administration; D006630:Hispanic or Latino; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D033262:Narration; D055820:New Orleans; D010781:Photography; D012066:Relief Work; D044465:White People; D016387:Women's Health
keywords: Feminist antiracist participatory action research; community health promoters; critical bifocality; humanitarian disaster; photonarratives