Workshop details
Participants will have the chance to act as both photo-interviewer and research participant during this hands-on workshop
intended to surface the challenges and benefits of working with photographic methods in organizational research.
Participants should bring three printed photographs to the workshop that they have taken themselves, and that in some way
represent the issues involved in managing personal "work-life balance". Photographs can be of anything, from any area of life
– the only rule is that they have to ‘say’ something about how the participant manages the interface between work and non-work
in their life. If participants take photographs of people, they should ask permission to do so.
During the session participants will take turns to interview each other about the images and the themes that emerge, to critically
examine the power of images to act as "voices". We will also be thinking further about participants’ positive and negative
experiences encountered in carrying out the task. We will consider the act of taking the photographs, the experience of interviewing
with images, and the extent to which the photos add to the "traditional" qualitative research process. Various conceptual
lenses on working with images in research will also be discussed as part of the workshop.
Value of the workshop
Visual methodologies are growing in popularity and there are now a range of publications appearing that present various techniques
and tools for working with and analyzing visual data (cf., for example, www.in-visio.org).
This workshop is intended to complement these developments by providing an opportunity to gain experiential understanding
of one particular method – reflexive photography – facilitated by two experienced visual researchers.
It complements the sub-theme's 07 theme for 2014: "Visualizing Institutions and Knowledge".