ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the participatory productions where the social scientist acts as the participatory facilitator, examining how acts of participatory creation can work towards ameliorating some persistent difficulties in qualitative social science research. It explores the ways in which positionality and familiarity act to blunt traditional research tools, drawing on a body of empirical work to highlight the problem of familiarity. Clear insider/outsider boundaries have traditionally been drawn for groups of respondents who are structurally marginalised in respect of class, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. For example, epistemic privilege can be found in the expression of feminist standpoint theory. Interpretive research aims to investigate the invisibility of everyday life but when a researcher is working in familiar territory there is a danger that their findings will be overshadowed by the enclosed, self-contained world of common understanding. The chapter explores how visual techniques can act to fight familiarity.
