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Interested in working with rural communities and using interactive research methods? Join us for this upcoming Centre for International Education (CIE) seminar!

Voice, Position and Power Relations: Engaging with young women in Northern Nigeria through participatory visual methods

With Barbara Crossouard, Máiréad Dunne (CIE), Dauda Moses, Safiya Aliyu Chin (Moddibo Adama University, Yola, Nigeria)

Location: Fulton 104 / Zoom Webinar

This presentation explores the use of participatory visual methods (PVM) with young rural women in Northern Nigeria within research that investigated how they navigated the demands of family life, education and work. The research team from Yola conducted a series of PVM workshops with two groups of young women (one Muslim and one Christian) from two rural communities. The workshops created spaces for the young women to talk about their lives in which they illuminated the unremitting demands of work and family life that they were expected to endure. In a context where young women typically have little voice or decision-making power, the workshops privileged their views and culminated in their development of action briefs setting out their agendas for change. Collectively, they then presented these to an assembly of local leaders in a community dialogue. While the engagement of the women was productive and remarkable in many ways, our analysis challenges the claims of PVM to be ‘empowering’ and highlights instead the need for attention to the social dynamics and differential positioning of the research participants and the reproduction of gendered power relations within the research.

Please contact the Centre for International Education (cie@sussex.ac.uk) if you have any queries. 

By: Eve Wilcox
Last updated: Tuesday, 15 October 2024