Article of the Month August 2012: When words fail us: using visual composites in research reporting

[Delta Lau Milayo Ndou]

Often research participants’ own perspectives and rich life-worlds are invisible in final reports and articles, submerged under layers of governmental or scholarly discourse. The authors of this research were intrigued by the use of visual means to foreground interviewees’ own words both as a way to register their importance to read­ers and to try to signal the multi-modal nature of literacy. They depicted their interviewees’ words as language spoken by imagined individuals typical of the interviewees, grounded within photographs of their research site. In this article, the authors describe their intentions and methods in making their reports visual and artistic composites rather than more traditional densely worded policy reports; they deconstruct some of the key images contained in their report in order to critique their efficacy in achieving their aims.

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