ABSTRACT
Social psychology has long recognised the role of the visual in the development of identity, representations of others and prejudice. Research within the social representations tradition, for example, demonstrates the ways in which representations produce, extend, threaten and sometimes transform different social identities. In this chapter the author examines one community-based arts project that does precisely this: it uses art as a medium to examine the images that people hold of themselves and explore how far these correspond to and contest others’ sometimes negative images of them. Hence the visual methods led to an important finding: identity is both restricted by and liberated by its very visibility. The children and teenagers in the workshops were used to being seen as ‘minorities’, subjected to stereotypes of otherness and often treated as the object of reifying and racialising representations. This is a complex task in settings where competition for resources is high, often manifested through suspicion and other forms of relational violence.
