Weaving Sight and Self: Integrating Photovoice With Scholarly Personal Narrative in Trauma-Informed Participatory Research With Marginalised Students

This article introduces Photovoice-Scholarly Personal Narrative Weaving, an innovative methodology that integrates participant-generated visual inquiry with researcher reflexive narrative within participatory action research and trauma-informed frameworks. Drawing on Wang and Burris’s (1997) Photovoice methodology and Nash and Bradley’s (2011) four-phase scholarly personal narrative framework (Pre-search, Me-search, Re-search, We-search), I develop a systematic approach for conducting participatory visual research while honouring researcher positionality. The weaving metaphor, offered with gratitude and accountability toward the Indigenous knowledge traditions that inform relational research practice, captures how these methodological strands maintain their integrity while creating emergent analytical patterns. This article addresses a persistent methodological gap: Photovoice centres participant voice yet renders researchers largely invisible, while scholarly personal narrative centres researcher experience yet risks marginalising community perspectives. I demonstrate how careful integration creates parallel narratives that illuminate shared structural conditions without claiming equivalence. Drawing on illustrative examples from research with international students navigating precarity in Canadian higher education, I introduce practical analytical approaches including kitchen-table analysis, protective divergence, and calibrated vulnerability. The article provides step-by-step implementation guidance with tables summarising key principles, phase-by-phase activities, and materials checklists. The methodology offers researchers committed to participatory principles a replicable framework for making positionality visible while maintaining ethical accountability to participants.