Naydene de Lange

Engaging girls with disabilities in Vietnam: making their voices count

This article addresses a theoretical and methodological intervention in support of inclusion for girls with disabilities in Vietnam. Drawing on an internationally collaborative project, Monitoring Educational Rights for Girls with Disabilities in Vietnamese schools, we critically engage the politics of inclusion and exclusion of girls with disabilities in education. Using a critical methodological framework that foregrounds the lived experiences of 21 girls with disabilities in Vietnam, we ask how we might strengthen participatory knowledge production through the work of monitoring rights in order to inform practices and policies related to disability and education. Through a preliminary analysis of the visual data emerging from our participatory visual methodologies, we demonstrate how these methods can contribute to constructing more inclusive practices and policies for girls with disabilities in both the Vietnamese and the global contexts.

Every voice counts: Towards a new agenda for schools in rural communities in the age of AIDS

This discussion piece focuses on possible strategies for taking action around some of the challenges teachers and schools in rural communities face in the context of larger systemic changes in southern Africa, and particularly in the context of HIV/AIDS. For this purpose we examine five key entry points, i.e. teachers’ lives, school leadership and management, the voices of young people, teachers working with communities, and partnerships and pedagogies for preparing new teachers. We propose visual participatory research as a possible strategy for providing a space for dialogue that could be unleashed from the narrow political and economical aims of education transformation in South Africa. In a context where rural communities and schools are often viewed and approached as deficient, we consider the importance of an asset-based approach, invoking specific types of communication as an alternative to a needs-based approach to community development.

Before the Cameras Roll

“Girls Can Make It” is the title of a storyboard created by a small group of adult participants during a workshop in Kigali, Rwanda, on using visual participatory methodologies in addressing gendered poverty in Rwanda. Their title is an optimistic one and is in harmony with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The challenge, of course, is whether girls can actually “make it”, given that their voices are often left out when it comes to envisioning solutions to the obstacles that confront them.

Giving Life to Data: University-Community Partnerships in Addressing HIV and AIDS through Building Digital Archives.

The partnerships, especially university–community partnerships, that sustain globally networked learning environments often face challenges in mobilizing research to empower local communities to effect change. This article examines these challenges by describing a university–community partnership involving researchers and graduate students in Canada and South Africa, working with a rural community in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in order to develop a participatory digital archive of more than 3000 photographs and videos collected from various visual methodology research projects related to HIV and AIDS education. The main purpose of the digital archive was to place community members as active participants at the centre of data analysis, as opposed to recipients of findings, and to give voice to teachers, learners, health-care workers and parents in identifying the key issues and challenges affecting their lives in the context of HIV/AIDS and their impact on their communities. The article outlines the technical and conceptual issues in developing the partnership as well as the digital archive, such as developing a scanning protocol, producing a metadata schema, choosing the digital archive software and, most importantly, involving community members, in particular teachers, in the processes of coding the visual data and using the archive for HIV and AIDS education and community change.

Visual Ethics with and Through the Body: The Participation of Girls with Disabilities in Vietnam in a Photovoice Project

This chapter comes out of a two year study in Vietnam with a group of girls with disabilities. It focuses on the ways in which the use of the well-known visual tool of photovoice in a project where issues of embodiment are already critical, can contribute to re-framing the idea of a body politic in participatory visual research. For example, how can work with girls with disabilities inform such typical ethical issues in visual research as ‘a no faces approach’ in the context of anonymity? Why no ‘faces’ (vs no hands or no feet) and where does the anonymity of the body reside? At the same time, what are the ethical dimensions of the use of the visual in a study associated with a population that has typically been ‘hidden from view’? What are the rights of the ‘learning bodies’ of the girls with disabilities to be seen and heard? In drawing on work in the area of Critical Disability Studies, Girlhood Studies and Participatory Visual Research, the chapter has key implications for research ethics boards and raises critical issues of human rights. Critically it asks the question: what is the place of our own researcher reflexivity in relation to ‘learning bodies’, advocacy and research ethics?

‘I want to be a hope champion!’ – Research as hope intervention with rural South African children

This study explored how visual participatory research-as-intervention enabled a strengthening of hope among a group of South African primary school children. Twelve learners aged 9–13 years from a rural village in the QwaQwa region of South Africa participated in the study. Data on the children’s experiences of hope were co-constructed with them, applying various visual participatory approaches, while data on their engagement in the research itself was generated using group discussion, individual interviews, and notes captured in a research journal. Thematic analysis of the data revealed a strengthening of the children’s hope on personal, relational, and collective levels from engaging in hope-oriented visual participatory processes. The findings suggest that research-as-intervention has hope-enhancing value for rural South African children.

Community health workers as cultural producers in addressing gender-based violence in rural South Africa

ABSTRACT South Africa has been experiencing an epidemic of gender-based violence (GBV) for a long time and in some rural communities health workers, who are trained to care for those infected with HIV, are positioned at the forefront of addressing this problem, often without the necessary support. In this article, we pose the question: How might cultural production through media making with community health workers (CHWs) contribute to taking action to address GBV and contribute to social change in a rural community? This qualitative participatory arts-based study with five female CHWs working from a clinic in a rural district of South Africa is positioned as critical research, using photographs in the production of media posters. We offer a close reading of the data and its production and discuss three data moments: CHWs drawing on insider cultural knowledge; CHWs constructing messages; and CHWs taking action. In our discussion, we take up the issue of cultural production and then offer concluding thoughts on ‘beyond engagement’ when the researchers leave the community.

Girl-led strategies to address campus safety: Creating action briefs for dialogue with policy makers

In exploring gender activism with girls and young women in South Africa, we take up, in this visual essay, the activism practices and strategies of a group of 14 young women with whom we have been working in the Girls Leading Change project. This project is aimed at addressing sexual violence on campus, which in the context of gender-based violence in South Africa, requires urgent, but also continuous, attention. Although this is a project at a university in South Africa, sexual violence and rape culture on university and college campuses is a worldwide concern (Phipps and Smith, 2012).

Poetry in a Pocket

In this chapter we explore what we choose to call the everyday poetics1 of rural teachers as expressed through the production of cellphilms, or, as we refer to them here, pocket films, in recognition of the ever-present mobile phone that fits easily into a pocket.

Interventions that address sexual violence against girls and young women: Mapping the issues

This issue of Agenda takes forward many of the concerns raised in the Gender-based Violence ‘Trilogy’ (Domestic Violence, Agenda, 19 (66); Trafficking, Agenda, 20 (70); Rape, Agenda 21 (74)) and a recent issue on Girlhood in Southern Africa (Agenda, 23 (79)) in order to consider how we might reimagine ways of addressing the extreme levels of violence that girls and young women in the Global South encounter on the streets, in families, in institutions such as schools and universities, in theworkplace, and in communities. Clearly, the issue of sexual violence and coercive sex is a pressing concern for society as a whole. South Africa has one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world (Abrahams et al, 2009), and while absolute numbers are unreliable because of under-reporting, as it is estimated that only one in 25 women who have been raped have reported it to the police (Machisa, Jewkes, Lowe-Morna and Rama, 2011), adolescent girls between the ages of 12 and 17 are particularly at risk (Human Rights Watch, 2001; Burton and Leoschut, 2013). As Banwari (2011) pointed out, in 2000, of the over 52, 550 cases of rape or attempted rape of girls and women reported to the South African Police Service, 21, 438 were under the age of 18 years (with 7,898 of these under 12 years). Confounding the under-reporting of sexual assault, as Banwari noted, is the fact that rates of prosecution are low; a 2005 study indicates that fewer than 1% of cases actually result in a conviction. The issues are exacerbated by the conservative gender regimes and practices that prevail (Jewkes, Penn-Kekana and Rose-Junius, 2005). In this regard Mullick, Teffo-Menziwa, Williams and Jina (2010) reiterate the role of pre-existing social, cultural, and economic inequalities between men and boys, and women and girls, while Jewkes, Flood and Lang (2014:2) refer to the role of “social values, roles, behaviours, and attributes thought to be appropriate and expected for men and women”. In rural areas, for example, sexual violence may be shaped by certain customary practices, particularly the taboos relating to discussing sex and sexual activity across generations (see Amnesty International, 2008). This often works to intensify the violence rural girls and young women may experience, but it can also be played out in urban contexts and in a variety of ways in different institutional contexts. For example, writing about the situation of campus violence several years ago Jane Bennett observed that “there has been very little ongoing engagement with the issue of sexual harassment (including sexual violence) at university” (2009: 12).