Giving Voice To Children's Voices Analysis

In the article “Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials,” James argues that “despite the representations of the “voices of children,” children themselves may, nonetheless, continue to find their voices silenced, suppressed, or ignored in their everyday lives.” (James, p. 261) After conducting the photo voice assignment with my fifteen-year-old participant, Keerthana, I was able to come to a realization that due to the power imbalance between the researcher and child, the representation of the child’s voice is mediated which results in the lack of authentication of the child’s voice.
For the Photo Voice project, I chose to work with one of my sister’s close friends. The participant, fifteen-year-old
James claims that “the generational divide between children and adults, an unequal power relationship, need not be an obstacle to the research process. By acknowledging, rather than ignoring or trying to mask, the different standpoints of the adult researcher and child informant, good conversations with children can be had, and where children are actively engaged in the process of data production, a similar participatory dialogue can develop.” (James, 269) When introducing the project to Keerthana, I notified her that she was to take the lead in how she wanted to pursue the project by giving her the authority. Immediately the power of authority was shifted from the child participant back to me. During our first meeting Keerthana came up with some great ideas which she wanted to capture for this project, however, she started to ask me for my feedback on her ideas. Being aware that she is helping me with my university paper, Keerthana is intimidated by her task and is seeking to get an approval in order to impress
After picking the pictures, I asked her to give the four snapshots a name in which they can be addressed as and right away she seemed to look confused as to what she would name the pictures. However, after looking at the pictures and giving me a quick narrative of each picture she was able to come up with a title for each of the pictures which best described the context of the image in which she captured it. The first picture she picked up was called “One of the World’s Tallest Towers.” The picture is of the free standing building from afar where she chose to capture it with a “dimensional” look. Before we started to talk about this picture, the child participant had asked me if I had ever did an art piece in elementary where you are required to draw a line from the bottom two corners and then connect it at the top, center of the page. At first I was not aware of what she was talking about but later came to remember that the concept was to give a 3-dimensional effect to an art piece. That was the effect she was going for when taking the picture. As Mitchell and Reid- Walsh claim that “in each these photographs there is the care of positioning.”(Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 102) I was amazed at how she chose to incorporate the technique she learned in elementary school in the way she took to position the picture in which she took