ABSTRACT
This paper explores human-waste relationships across multiple countries through a range of adapted multi-sited photovoice methods. It considers images, text, and participatory methods from the action-research project ‘Portraits of Change’, which investigated environmental behaviour change and human-waste relations amongst urban youth in Bangladesh, Australia, and China through participatory visual methods. It explores the various ways that both the methodological adaptations of the photovoice workshops, and the resulting ‘photo-story’ visual artefacts that arise from them, can reveal the complexities of human-waste relationships across multiple geographically separated sites. Two contrasting analytical approaches are taken; firstly, a realist content analysis approach that explores the broad themes emerging from the photo-stories, and secondly a more-than-human, relational-materialist analysis that explores the relational quality of the waste-actors as emergent networks rather than discrete entities. Together, these help to expand on conceptions of agency, subjectivity and visuality in human-waste relationships.
