Participatory Visual Analysis — Collaborative Visual Inquiry

Participatory Visual Analysis (PVA) is a qualitative research approach in which community members or research participants actively produce and interpret visual materials — photographs, drawings, videos, or maps — as a means of documenting their own experiences, surfacing knowledge, and informing action. Rather than the researcher imposing an analytical gaze on pre-existing images, participants are co-investigators who create visual data and participate in its interpretation, making the method both epistemologically democratic and particularly powerful for accessing marginalized or hard-to-articulate perspectives.