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Introduction
What can participatory visual research – the coproduction of visual research materials and an archive of these products – look like during a pandemic? Pride/Swell is an art and activism project that engages 50 youth who are 2SLGBTQ+ [1] from across Atlantic Canada: Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been exploring the creation of new communities and connections across spaces through different artistic media (i.e. collage, zines, facemasks, dioramas and dolls) and their exhibition through digital archiving practices. Pride/Swell is grounded in ethical concerns about representation and voice in participatory visual research methodologies (PVM). We seek to employ participant-produced art to catalyze broader public participation in complexifying our understanding of 2SLGBTQ+ youth-led activism (Gubrium and Harper, 2013; Mitchell, 2011) [2].
Participatory visual researchers have only begun to probe the notion of what it means to bring a participatory ethos – including the perspectives of participants who generated the data and the audiences who interact with the texts (Rose, 2014) – to exhibiting and archiving (exceptions include: Allard and Ferris, 2015; de Lange and Mitchell, 2012; Rydz, 2010). The role of archiving in a participatory fashion is also grossly understudied (Burkholder, 2016; Lorenz and Kolb, 2009; Vindrola-Padros et al., 2016). In this article, we examine how Pride/Swell has supported the consumption of participants' art through social media [3] and a project website. In addition, we consider how broader publics interact with the work. We argue that coproducing digital archives is an important part of knowledge mobilization.
Positioning ourselves in relation to the study
In this article, Casey, Katie, April and Amelia write together as the members of the Pride/Swell research team. Our project builds from earlier collaborations that Casey and Amelia had fostered with 2SLGBTQ+ youth on Wolastoqiyik Territory (Fredericton, New Brunswick) through a series of monthly arts-based workshops surrounding issues of belonging and identity within and beyond schools (Burkholder and Thorpe, 2019; Burkholder et al., 2021; Thorpe, 2020). Casey is a cisgender, White [4], bisexual associate professor whose research program centers on exploring issues of gender, sexuality, belonging and activism through participatory visual approaches, especially using cellphilms, zines and stencil production. Amelia is a White, queer, cisgender graduate student whose research...