Janice Haaken Barnard Center for Research on Women

Since visual images invoke the spectator's experience of
unmediated access to the inner world of the subject, the evocative power
of photographic images may readily reproduce forms of voyeurism. This
under-theorizing becomes particularly problematic in projects that
document the lives of migratory and marginalized women. Drawing on
several decades of prior field research and documentary film projects,
Professor Haaken presents a study carried out with women refugee and
asylum-seekers in the UK. In discussing photographic images from the
study, Haaken provides a framework for working through a series of
ethical, political, and methodological dilemmas. She draws on
psychoanalytic feminist theory, critical psychology, and participatory
action research methods to argue for the importance of an approach to
the visual that includes the dynamics of spectatorship as well as the
dynamics of the research setting itself as an affectively rich and
conflicted site of knowledge production.