Exploring youth, religion, and sexuality through visual methods: A researcher example.
With the fieldwork for our research project underway, we’ve been asking participants to create a photo collage of moments, things, people, places, ideas, or texts that are significant to them in how they have navigated the combinations of youth, gender, sexuality, and faith. These collages provide a new opening into conversations about what sustains participants as they navigate the interplay of these topics in their everyday lives. The collages have shed light on participants’ strengths that underpin their capacity to act in the world, their struggles, and the complexity of their emotional lives.
I figured I’d give the exercise a go myself to understand the research method from a new angle.
James’ collage
On the left hand side, I have some visual representations of my early life as an evangelical Christian attending a mix of Pentecostal and Anglican churches. Music was a central part of this era in my life. It was my favourite way to connect to God and it facilitated many moments of transcendent connection, euphoria, and creativity. In the bottom right-hand corner, I have two novels that had profound impacts on me and helped me to articulate my experience as a queer person in an intensely religious social landscape. Both of these novels cultivate an overwhelmingly claustrophobic atmosphere. They creatively and vividly expose some of the harms that can occur when young people have their desires constrained and shamed.
The three photos down the middle represent both a fissure and a continuity from my life as a Christian teenager. These photos were taken at my choir’s performance of Faure’s Requiem at St Stephen’s Anglican Church in Newtown. When I left the church in my late teens, I also inadvertently stepped away from the experience of group singing. So when a friend of mine invited me to a local choir full of mostly queer adults, I jumped at the chance. Polyphony choir has given me a chance to reconnect with the effervescent feeling of singing in a crowd, and singing a requiem in a church venue felt like a full-circle moment for me, reclaiming my musical roots.
In the top right hand corner is an image of a whale shark. I had the privilege of swimming with these on Ningaloo Reef a few years ago, and it was one of the more profound experiences of my life. As a young Christian, I would often pray, read scripture, and sing worship songs in nature – at the time I felt that being surrounded by God’s creation produced a special resonance. As a non-Christian adult, being in nature still fills me with awe, wonder, and spiritual nourishment. Here, connecting to nature is another aspect of my youth that, though transformed into something new, still bring me immense comfort and inspiration.
Exploring this method for myself has shed light on the types of feelings and reflections this project’s participants are experiencing during our fieldwork. What stood out to me is the capacity for a visual method to hold several overlapping temporalities at once, opening the door to new and generative analyses. Another great feature of this method is its openness – each of the collages produced through our study have been wildly unique, which is its own ballast against entrenched bias within a pre-prepared interview schedule.
-James Gardiner