Abstract:

Our training and our professional culture leads us to think of the world through a rational, linguistic filter. We cling on to the idea that there is an objective reality 'out there' and that we have an impartial, objective standpoint. Of course, this account of how research works is now being challenged and we decided to take this challenge to an extreme. What if we abandoned our obsession with words and followed a visual narrative instead? What if a research project looked at the world through participants' eyes and embraced inter-subjectivity, visual narratives and associations rather than linguistics and deduction? What if we did research as photographers, not as researchers? Would it work? We shall undertake a real research study, for a real client, to find out.