An exploration of young Singaporeans’ lived citizenship through Photovoice...

This interactive workshop highlights the potential of Photovoice as a participatory research methodology to explore and gain insights into young people’s citizenship perceptions and practices in their everyday lives. A key challenge in researching young people’s lived citizenship is a methodological one as it is difficult to conceptualise and ‘capture’ private and personal forms of citizenship practices. Photovoice, however, provides opportunities for young people to share their everyday lived worlds through images, thus enabling a more sensory and creative approach to data collection, and to study the rich details of their lived citizenship from their own perspectives. This workshop presents findings from a recent Photovoice research with post-secondary young Singaporeans (ages 19-25) which explored (1) their perceptions of service-learning and citizenship education, (2) what actually shaped their citizenship dispositions, and (3) how they practiced their citizenship in their everyday lives. Underpinned by critical and feminist theories, and arising from young people’s critique of education, society and politics, the workshop involves discussion on the implications of this research findings for citizenship education and service-learning. This workshop will also feature details of a mobile application (app) that was developed specifically for this Photovoice research project. This youth-centric app was designed to harness the power of digital technology in order to open up new methodological possibilities for visual research.

Keywords: Lived citizenship, Photovoice, participatory research, service-learning, citizenship

Tags:Community Building