Preface & Acknowledgements

PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins, pastres.org) is a European Research Council-funded research project that aims to learn how pastoralists respond to uncertainty, applying such ‘lessons from the margins’ to global challenges. The project fosters conversations with other policy domains where uncertainty is pervasive, including financial and commodity systems, critical infrastructure management, disease outbreak response, migration policy, climate change, and conflict and security governance.

One of the highlights of this project was to use photovoice to centre the voices of pastoralists, inviting them to share their beliefs and perceptions within their frameworks of understanding, and exploring their experiences of contending with unfolding uncertainties. This embracing of the ‘indigenous lens’ and ‘letting go of researcher control’ through photovoice was facilitated in all six PASTRES sites: Amdo Tibet in China, Sardinia in Italy, Isiolo in northern Kenya, Borana in southern Ethiopia, Kachchh in Gujarat, India and Douiret, Tataouine in southern Tunisia. The photovoice experiences helped unearth the pastoralists’ voices and implicit narratives and their understandings of variability and uncertainty.


This guide is a co-produced collective output of the PASTRES team and the photovoice community groups in our research sites. The contents of the guide are primarily derived from discussions with PASTRES researchers – Palden Tsering (Amdo Tibet, China), Natasha Maru (India), Linda Pappagallo (Tunisia), Giulia Simula (Italy), Tahira Mohamed (Kenya), and Masresha Taye (Ethiopia). All of the researchers were PhD researchers at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex at the time of the photovoice work. The excellent design and layout and the photo curation are by Roopa Gogineni. Nathan Oxley provided invaluable support to reach audiences far and wide. Ian Scoones, the motivating force behind this guide, meticulously checked it to the last detail while ensuring we had all the resources and time for its publication.


Why is this guide different?

Since Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris wrote about the visual research methodology ‘photovoice’ in 1997, this participatory action research technique, involving providing cameras to people to voice their lived realities, has become a topic of interest amongst researchers and practitioners globally.

This guide does not seek to add to the numerous other ‘How to’ photovoice manuals but offers a reflexive journey and the diverse perspectives that the PASTRES researchers encountered while aiming to learn from pastoralists responding to uncertainty from a wide geographical spread of pastoral areas in Amdo Tibet (China), Sardinia (Italy), Isiolo (Kenya), Borana (Ethiopia), Gujarat (India), and Tataouine (Tunisia). It explores what happened in practice, sharing how researchers faced challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic and improvised accordingly. It demonstrates how to adapt and extend the standard photovoice approach with other visual methods, which proved effective in collecting, producing, analysing, and presenting diverse voices.

The overall research is discussed in the book Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Development (2023), with cases from each site. The photovoice work was an important component whose main objective was to understand, through the photos and narratives of the pastoralists, how they view the complex, contested and highly differentiated realities that arise from conditions of uncertainty. By exploring the diverse meanings of uncertainty from pastoralists’ perspectives, we aimed to uncover understandings that were difficult to articulate simply in words, generating a debate amongst participants on what uncertainty is and why it is important in their lives.

Within the PASTRES project, photovoice was embedded in the research process. It facilitated giving pastoralists a voice, offering them opportunities to share how uncertainties are faced daily. In other contexts, photovoice can take a more utilitarian approach with specific objectives such as evaluating a project through the eyes of beneficiaries.


In the PASTRES work, researchers used the photovoice method to surface new meanings and perspectives that are missed by traditional methods such as interviews or focus group discussions. During their reflexive sessions, PASTRES researchers concluded that the evidence revealed by the visual techniques complemented their research and, in some cases, became central to their research findings.


One of the primary reasons for developing this guide is due to the numerous requests from the community, local organisations, NGOs, aid agencies, research students and others, including audiences of our visual methods website (seeingpastoralism.org) for sharing the PASTRES experience of embedding photovoice experiences in research processes.

This guide presents the photovoice process in seven sections, each drawing heavily from field experiences. The guide gives field-based accounts of how researchers situated the method, their challenges and revelations, and how they complemented and improved on a standard approach using other visual and digital ethnography tools. Each of the sections provides a frank reflexive assessment offered by the participants. The guide has tried to cover all aspects of the photovoice journey, from the first orientation with the researchers to the exhibitions and feedback dialogues in different fora. The guide has also tried to view the photovoice experience as a site of enquiry, putting forth a loose road map on how other visual research methods and ever-evolving visual study techniques can complement the photovoice approach, flexibly adjusted according to the situation, study population, and social and political environment.