Images as ‘potentials’: Feminist new materialist orientations to photovoice

This article contributes to sociological and new materialist efforts to reorient and reimagine qualitative methodologies. I explore the more-than-human and more-than-representational potentials of one traditional humanist qualitative method, photovoice and its ‘affordances’ when the epistemologies and ontologies underpinning what images ‘can do’ are opened up. I extend the work of Higgins (2014; 2016) and others who have ‘recalibrated’ visual methods to argue that photovoice has the potential to be an aleatory methodological practice which connects to efforts to mobilise ethics of encounter in feminist new materialist research. I draw on two empirical examples from a study which used photovoice as a key tool to explore young people’s embodiment and wellbeing as emergent traces, formed through entangled processes and relations, rather than inherent properties of human bodies and subjects. The article explores what photovoice ‘can do’ and how it may be useful in contributing to sociological efforts to generate new answers to old questions through attending to the ways structures and material inequalities are themselves produced through the situated and affective practices and embodiments of everyday life.