Seeing Within, Without, Across and Between

Abstract

This paper discusses letters and photo-stories as sites for making strange our familiar relationships with the non-human world, through considering images and methods from the action-research project ‘Portraits of Change’, which explored environmental behaviour change and human/non-human relations through participatory visual dialogue between urban youth in Bangladesh, Australia and China.  In particular, it focuses on various themes arising in the exchange of letters and photo-stories created by students through workshops in Dhaka and Melbourne, and how these can both reinforce and challenge our ways of viewing the non-human world.  These themes, including health, aesthetics and visuality, also highlighted differing environmental perspectives between youth in majority and minority worlds.  The complexity of the multi-sited action-research engagements require methodological adaptations in both the participatory design of the workshops, and analysis of their resulting visual artifacts.