Photovoices: Grad Student Belonging

Overview

Photovoice for Grad Student Belonging is a qualitative, participatory research project exploring how graduate students experience and co-create belonging on Georgia Tech's campus. Using the Photovoice methodology, participants collect photographs in response to weekly prompts exploring themes of identity, space, inclusion, and emotional safety. These images become tools for storytelling during focus group sessions, where participants reflect collectively on their experiences navigating institutional, social, and cultural dynamics of graduate life.

Project Details

My Role: Co-Researcher · Exhibition Creative Technologist · Archive System Engineer
Technologies / Methods: Phone Cameras · Participatory Design · Social Action Research · Focus Groups · Storytelling · Thematic Coding · Mixed-Methods Qualitative Research
Team: Dr. Stephanie Selvick (PI), Allie Texeira Riggs, Kevin Beasley, Jose Awo, Photovoice for Grad Student Belonging Cohort of 2025 (anonymized for IRB confidentiality)
Timeline: October 2025 - Ongoing

Funded by Georgia Tech Arts, Belonging, and Community Division and Catalyst Grant

The Problem

Graduate student belonging is often measured through surveys and retention data, which miss how belonging is experienced emotionally, culturally, and relationally. Many students face isolation, invisible labor, cultural displacement, and limited agency in shaping their academic communities—yet these realities often remain unseen and unaddressed.

The Solution

Photovoice For Grad Student Belonging provides students with cameras and storytelling prompts to visually capture how belonging (or exclusion) appears in their everyday lives. These images serve as conversation tools during focus group sessions, enabling students to reflect collectively, surface invisible dynamics, and articulate how belonging is shaped through everyday spaces, rituals, relationships, and acts of care.

Design Approach

Photovoice is an arts-based participatory action research method where participants use photography and narrative to document and reflect on lived experiences (Wang and Burris, 1997). It positions participants as experts of their own lives and enables tacit, emotional, and culturally grounded experiences to become visible (Latz, 2017; Cornell et. al.,2022). 

Photovoice is “the little method that could change the world” for the way it bridges “ideas, people, resources, opportunities, and mutual hopes and dreams” (Evans-Agnew and Strack, 2022)

Core Process:

1. Community cohort takes photos of their everyday lives in response to thematic prompts.

   
   

2. Reflect on and contextualize images through stories that become titles and captions for the photos.

   
   

3. Perform thematic analysis to select images that best reflect the community’s strengths and concerns.

   
   

4. Make recommendations for support that are “pragmatic, immediate and tangible” (Wand and Burris 1997).

The project spans four facilitated sessions—including an orientation and three guided discussion workshops—to process participants’ photos and narratives. 

The prompts given were:

Prompt #1: What does belonging mean to you? What enhances your experience with belonging as a graduate student on Georgia Tech’s campus?

Prompt #2: What interferes with, interrupts, or just generally gets in the way of your sense of belonging as a Georgia Tech grad student?

This collaborative meaning-making process generates insight into how physical spaces, social structures, and lived experiences shape students’ sense of belonging.

Key Outcomes

The data collected from Photovoice will produce three genres of deliverables: art activations, scholarship, and advocacy impacts. 

Photovoice for Grad Student Belonging is an ongoing project. While data analysis and exhibition curation are currently in progress, the completed sessions have already:

• Surfaced emotional, spatial, and cultural dimensions of belonging often missed by traditional surveys.

  
  

• Built a curated database of student-selected photographs and reflections representing graduate life.

  
  

• Reframed belonging from an institutional metric to a relational, co-created experience.

  
  

• Generated visual and narrative artifacts that communicate lived experiences to stakeholders.

  
  

• Positioned students as co-researchers and knowledge producers, not just participants.

Impact

The 2025 Photovoice cohort serves as Georgia Tech’s pilot initiative for using arts-based research to surface student experiences of belonging. The findings will be used to:

• Inform campus policy, program design, space planning, and wellness initiatives through lived experience.

  
  

• Establish archives that center students’ emotional, cultural, and relational insights in academic decision-making.

  
  

• Demonstrate photography, storytelling, and arts-based inquiry as tools for institutional reflection and change.

  
  

• Model participatory, care-centered research approaches for higher education programming and policy.

Reflection and Futures

Photovoice is not meant to provide a single answer, but to spark ongoing inquiry, reflection, and community-based knowledge-making. This approach can be adapted to explore themes such as cultural identity, burnout, neurodiversity, disability experience, or care-in-academia—particularly where lived experience is central.

Next steps include completing data analysis, curating a public storytelling exhibition based on thematic insights, and developing a digital archive of photos and narrative reflections from the 2025 Cohort. Insights will also be translated into a design toolkit for higher education and used to prototype support services and community interventions.

Long-term, the project aims to expand into multiple cohorts, engage diverse student populations (including first-generation, international, neurodivergent, and disabled students), and contribute to a sustained participatory platform where students become co-designers of campus belonging, wellbeing, and policy.

References

Cornell, J., Kessi, S., & Ratele, K. (2022). Examining the dynamics of belonging and alienation in higher education through Photovoice. Health Promotion Practice, 23(2), 325–330.

Evans-Agnew, R. A., & Strack, R. W. (2022). Photovoice: The little method that could change the world. Health Promotion Practice, 23(2), 201–204.

Latz, A. O. (2017). Photovoice research in education and beyond: A practical guide from theory to exhibition. Routledge.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 329–387.