Photostory
This is a adaptation of a method called photovoice and it was used in the South East of South Australia and Coleambally, NSW, to express the values of irrigators in the new world of water policy changes.
Book
Release Picturing Fresh Water Justice in Rural Australia
NEW!
Abstract: A key output of Cooperative Research Centres is peer reviewed research publications. The pictures and captions contained in this book were collected as data for research but deserved a much broader audience.
My hope is that through this book the images will continue to get people
thinking about our irrigation regions in new and more productive ways. The
additional content from a range of other perspectives, including researchers
and members of the legal fraternity, add to the publication's depth.
Ian
Atkinson (Chief Executive Officer, CRC for Irrigation Futures).
Full Text
Highlights from the Australian Irrigation Conference and Exhibition held at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre from 8-10 June included:
The release of the book, Picturing Fresh Water Justice in Rural Australia, co-authored by Professor Jennifer McKay, Dr Ganesh Keremane and Adam Gray.
This book is a key output of the Photostory project conducted by Centre for Comparative Water Policies and Laws (CCWPL) under the CRC for Irrigation Futures System Harmonisation program.
The book presents over 50 photographs and words used by the irrigators at the sharp end of Australian water policy to capture several outcomes of sustainability policies and drought in their local region and express their intuitive understandings of water policy and justice.
Dr Ganesh Keremane presented a paper co-authored with Professor Jennifer McKay, ‘Looking, listening and learning from irrigation communities: A photostory project in two NSW & SA regions’. This paper has been published in the Journal - Action Research.
Photostory is an approach where various stakeholders are given disposable cameras and a list of 'themes' or questions. They then use the camera to illustrate their perception of the specified themes/questions.
After the photos are developed, all of the participants get together for a workshop and discuss the experiences and points of view covered in the photos.
This is an adaptation of ‘PhotoVoice’ (Wang & Burris, 1997) which has been used in a number of disciplines, mostly in the field of education.
However, Photostory departs from the conventional photovoice approach because in case of Photostory the focus is more on the narrative or the story provided by the story tellers (participants).
Adopting such an approach enables storytellers to communicate how they make sense of lived experience while the narratives suggest connections between daily social interaction and larger social and cultural forces that shape and are shaped by everyday experiences.
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Sustainability: “Our town was built due to water. Our community survives by using water efficiently. Our lads grow up knowing how to enjoy water. In a rural community like ours, our life is water and we do what we can to preserve it” |
The researchers at CCWPL have successfully used this approach to access irrigator’s perspectives on water management issues in 2 Case Study regions in the Murray Darling Basin: Coleambally (Rural New South Wales) & The Limestone Coast (South East South Australia). The work using Photostory offers glimpses into how irrigator’s value water in their everyday lives and reflects on a range of water management issues from irrigators’ perspective.
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Meaning of water: “A single drop of water means hope. The emotion just a single drop of rain causes for many farmers is amazing” |
In essence, this project covers the personal aspects of the story of water use and justice to the water users in two very different irrigation dependent communities in South Australia and New South Wales. It helped us to grasp the irrigators’ point of view -how the social, cultural, and policy issues have an impact on water management in the region which in turn had adverse effect on community resilience. As per the adage ‘ a picture’s worth thousand words’, the data obtained from the exercise are rich; it was deeper, wider and covered the personal aspects of the story of the water users in the study regions wanted to tell. Here are a couple of examples. Further, the approach has received wide appreciation from researchers and the general community around the world.
Dear UniSA Team,
Congratulations on this excellent and innovative effort in creating this
visual picture about aspirations about sustainable water management. This a
great way to explore values attached by different stakeholders to the
multifunctionality of water management in the Murray Darling Basin. The
photos and captions provided by the members of the community as well as
other stakeholders clearly show vital importance of water to the
sustainability issues of a arid region under continued drought for more than
a decade.
This effort will contribute in a great way towards public participation a
key pillar of ecologically sustainable development. The analysis developed
from the rich datasets may be presented in different interactive ways for
the policy makers including the UNESCO HELP global social network forum. I
encourage the team to also present their results in the form of a UNESCO IHP
publication along the line of water and values - a photo story from
Australia. I invite other HELPers to provide comments as well as explore
opportunities for applying this smart research technique in creating visions
for the water futures in their basins.
Professor Shahbaz Khan,
Global Coordinator UNESCO HELP,
Chief, UNESCO Water and Sustainable
Development Section,
Paris, France 4-2-2010
For more feedback please visit Photostory a novel participatory research approach