Interviewing Images: How Visual Research Using IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis) Can Illuminate the Change-Making Possibilities of Place, Space, and Dwelling

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201009.003How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Interviewing images, Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), visual research, image-analysis, decolonising orientations, change-making

Abstract

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a qualitative method mainly used in psychology, the social sciences and health science. Beginning with processes of open question interviewing, and taking an idiographic approach, it elicits unusually rich data from persons about specific life experiences, opportunities, and challenges. In so doing, it generates flexibility of thought and feeling, and evokes unanticipated insight. As a visual culture scholar, and inspired by the distinctly visual connotations of the word interview, I propose that our understanding of contemporary lived experience and our attempts at change-making might be extended if the descriptive, analytical and interpretative techniques of IPA were applied to the image- worlds (and object-worlds) that play a role in shaping us as individuals, citizens, and researchers. But is it possible to interview images without this being merely or wholly a process of projecting our own perspectives onto them? This question has been central to a series of workshops I began developing and delivering in 2018 called ‘Using Phenomenology in Contemporary Arts Research and Pedagogy’. In this paper, I present the philosophical underpinnings for the “interviewing images” methodology and report on the techniques involved. In particular, I focus on what workshop participants have found to be its decolonising potential. For purposes of demonstration, I draw on my use of this technique in early-stage research for a small-scale community-based urban development project I am hoping to initiate in the underprivileged area of the city where I live and teach.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jorella Andrews
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/10/10
TI  - Interviewing Images: How Visual Research Using IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis) Can Illuminate the Change-Making Possibilities of Place, Space, and Dwelling
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Dwelling Form (IDWELL 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 20
EP  - 31
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201009.003
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201009.003
ID  - Andrews2020
ER  -