The Personal Interview

Although a growing number of projects have been implemented using the community-based participatory research method known as photovoice, no known systematic review of the literature on this approach has been conducted to date. This review draws on the peer-reviewed literature on photovoice in public health and related disciplines conducted before January 2008 to determine (a) what defines the photovoice process, (b) the outcomes associated with photovoice, and (c) how the level of community participation is related to photovoice processes and outcomes. In all, 37 unduplicated articles were identified and reviewed using a descriptive coding scheme and Viswanathan et al.’s quality of participation tool. Findings reveal no relationship between group size and quality of participation but a direct relationship between the latter and project duration as well as with getting to action. More participatory projects also were associated with long-standing relationships between the community and outside researcher partners and an intensive training component. Although vague descriptions of project evaluation practices and a lack of consistent reporting precluded hard conclusions, 60% of projects reported an action component. Particularly among highly participatory projects, photovoice appears to contribute to an enhanced understanding of community assets and needs and to empowerment.

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Photovoice: A Review of the Literature in Health and Public Health:

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup. Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all.

Prologue to The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

Modifying Photovoice for community-based participatory Indigenous research

As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.@@@Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory.

Northern Ireland: Case Study

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Submission to the Committee of Education. Inquiry into Shared and Integrated Education.

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MOOCs and Open Learning at Ulster University: Research, Consultation and Recommendations on an Institutional Approach

The Psychological Impact of Truth Commissions

This chapter provides an overview of the key lessons that can be read across the case studies of precarious life in Johannesburg. Reflecting on the different case studies, a number of themes emerge. Firstly precarity is a central part of life for many of Johannesburg’s residents and has been since the city began. This requires an understanding of precarity beyond what currently exists in the literature. In addition, many of the chapters explore the politics of narration and show how and under what conditions people narrate their precarious lives. They grapple with the risks of both speaking out and remaining silent. In doing so, many migrants in Johannesburg constantly navigate their visibility and invisibility on a daily basis with new forms of (in)visibility possible and desirable in the city. The case studies also require us to rethink what we mean by help-seeking behaviour. Help was sought and found in unexpected places and blurred the divisions of physical, emotional, spiritual assistance so common in formal services. Connected to this, the dichotomies so prevalent in the literature and in the delivery of services such as African/traditional, physical/emotional or victim/perpetrator are blurred in the spaces where people seek help. Finally, these lessons force us to rethink healing and conceptualise it as a life project connected to the constant striving for change that is a part of life in Johannesburg. Healing is found in multiple ways and places which, at first glance, seem contradictory but speak to the complex lives that the residents of Johannesburg live.

Brandon Hamber

Papers

Northern Ireland: Case Study

Submission to the Committee of Education. Inquiry into Shared and Integrated Education.

MOOCs and Open Learning at Ulster University: Research, Consultation and Recommendations on an Institutional Approach

The Psychological Impact of Truth Commissions

Healing and Deliverance in the City of Gold