Abstract
Educational research using visual methods has the power to transform the society
in which we live and the communities in which we work. We must not naïvely
imagine that having the desire to make change in people’s lives will mean that it will
happen, as sometimes there may be surprising, unintended negative repercussions
as well. Other constraints, such as structural violence and institutional racism, can
also intersect with the possibility of making tangible change through educational
research using visual methods. Qualitative assessment with a longitudinal approach
is one approach that can reveal both the impact, and the limitations, of educational
research on social change. I discuss these issues through grounded examples from
an HIV educational project that used visual methodologies with a group of youths
in Cape Town, South Africa over a number of years. Almost ten years later we interviewed
three of the former participants about what impact the work has had on their
lives. Each has travelled a different journey and been faced with different constraints
that have implications for the effectiveness of such work. Where are they now, and
as adults, what do they have to say about the visual methodologies, memory, and
social change?