Creating Spaces for Public Dialogue and Generating Solutions for COVID-19 through Virtual PhotoVoice
Project Team: Matthew Marr (FIU Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies), Natália Marques da Silva (Stetson University Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center), John Vertovec (Behavioral Science Research Institute), Kaila Witkowski (Florida Atlantic University School of Public Administration), and Gary Allen (independent artist)
In Fall of 2020, as mandates related to the Coronavirus pandemic limited public interaction, we implemented an online PhotoVoice project in collaboration with Camillus House, one of South Florida’s largest providers of assistance to the unhoused. The project’s aim was to have participants living in Camillus House’s emergency shelter to use photography and captioning to document their experiences of living in congregate shelter during the pandemic.
As a group via Zoom, we discussed these photographs and what they mean to the photographer and group members, and generated captions that would help stimulate dialogue about how the pandemic and associated restrictions were impacting some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Given PhotoVoice’s objective of promoting dialogue about pressing social issues from the perspective of those impacted, we conducted an online virtual exchange and gallery exhibition with our group from Camillus House and participants in a similar project based at the HIV-support organization Pridelines.
We also published an article in a peer-reviewed journal (citation below) that analyzed data produced in the PhotoVoice project by Camillus House residents. We explored how shelter residents conceptualized their risk and resilience while living in a congregate shelter during the pandemic, showing how they felt “safe but stifled.” This project enhanced the research relationship between FIU and Camillus House and helped lay the foundation for another PhotoVoice project that in Spring of 2025 will explore how people living unsheltered in Miami-Dade County experience street outreach programs (funded by the National Alliance to End Homelessness).
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