King's Professor presents Photovoice project to the community

King’s University College welcomes Dr. Bharati Sethi to the School of Social Work. Dr. Sethi will showcase her Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) on Tuesday March 8, 2016 in the Student Life Centre from 9:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. as part of Social Work Week. She will give a research presentation at noon. All are invited.

Dr. Sethi uses a new methodology, Photovoice, to display day-to-day struggles of the immigrants / refugees living in Brantford and in the Brant-Haldimand-Norfolk region. Photovoice is a photography-based research technique that aims to portray the concerns and struggles of the people participating in the study.

Dr. Sethi’s PhD research study “Do You See What I See?”, includes a collection of 525 images from the employment and health experiences of a number of immigrant / refugee women. These women are from a variety of different areas including Asia, Africa, Japan, Arab countries, and Latin America. Dr. Sethi recognized the difficulty in translating one’s experience from their mother tongue to English, and so she therefore captured their experiences via photography. She states, “this method has allowed me to gather a holistic understanding of participants work and health experiences post migration”.

Dr. Sethi used the power of photography to explain the struggles that these women are experiencing. Her research was well appreciated and she earned several awards including the Governor General’s Award and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Dr. Sethi has also been recognized by the Newcomer Champion award in 2014 by the government of Ontario.

Dr. Sethi is a member of the London Poverty Research Centre at King’s. Her intention in the near future is to incorporate arts-based research methodologies across London and Middlesex county and benefit the community from this research.