Dream homes and dead ends in the city

A Photo Essay Experiment

Bibliographic Data

ID2249265
AuthorsD Fast (0000-0001-5994-3669, St. Paul's Hospital, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume39
Issue7
Pages1134-1148
Publication date2017-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociology of Health & Illness (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9889 • E-ISSN: 1467-9566
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9566.12563
PMID28425117
OpenAlexW2606100353
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited25

Research focused on the relationship between place and health demonstrates that it is complex and shifting, as overlapping social, historical, institutional and political and economic processes continually transform the landscapes in which lived experiences are embedded. Understanding this relationship requires knowledge of the situated meanings and local worlds that ethnographic methods are well suited to investigate. However, even conventional ethnographic methods can be inadequate to capture the embodied, lived experience of place - experiences in which the sensory and inner processes of memory and imagination are often privileged. Accessing these experiences and processes can require more experimental methodological approaches. In this article, I present work from a series of photo essays created between 2011 and 2016 by 15 young people who inhabit the social, spatial and economic margins of Vancouver, Canada, and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities presented by this methodology. Created over 5 years, and broadly focused on how they understood, experienced and navigated their 'place' in the city in the midst of poverty, addiction, violence and physical and mental health crises, the photo essays young people produced are embedded with personal biographies and trajectories, as well as shared experiences of geography, precarity and possibility in Vancouver

Aesthetics · Art · Dream · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethnography · Lived experience · Memory work · Mental health · Political science · Poverty · Precarity · Psychoanalysis · Situated · Social science · Social worlds · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics