Interfaith Photovoice Through the Lenses of Our Interns

By Jenna Allman, Amy Miller, and Delaney Sall, Summer 2022 Interns

Introduction

If you have been following Interfaith Photovoice on social media, then many of the posts you have seen in the past couple of months have been created by a group of students from Calvin University. The three of us—Amy Miller, Jenna Allman, and Delaney Sall—had the opportunity to intern with Interfaith Photovoice over the summer. Our work included reading the work of interfaith scholars, engaging community members through social media, building connections with other organizations, and participating in a photovoice project. Through this internship, we broadened our knowledge about interfaith work and developed skills to apply this knowledge in our communities. Doing this work together also allowed us to build friendships with one another through mutual vulnerability and a shared passion for promoting religious diversity in the spaces we occupy. 

Photo 1. Jenna Allman shares the story behind her photo as the small group listens and asks questions during the interns’ photovoice project.

Studying IFPV’s Work

A key part of our internship was learning about how Interfaith Photovoice fits into the broader picture of social research. Interfaith Photovoice stands among a steadily growing group of participants in the burgeoning discipline of interfaith studies, which approaches interreligious/interfaith work with an emphasis on inclusion, intersectionality, and relationship-building. As opposed to its predecessors that lean toward generalization and ‘othering,’ interfaith studies as a discipline seeks to include a variety of voices and acknowledge that religious identity is “influenced, complicated, and given nuance by other human characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, political ideology, and ability” (Patel et al., 2018). 

Another key aspect of interfaith studies is its applicability beyond academia. Interfaith thinkers seek to give people access to the tools they need to engage respectfully and deeply in a religiously plural society. Interfaith Photovoice incorporates both of these aspects of the academic discipline it belongs to by providing spaces where diverse groups of people from a variety of social positions can build relationships with one another. Specifically, the fact that each photovoice participant has the chance to share their own unique story encourages participants to look beyond generalizations and recognize the complexity of individual experience. This helps us recognize that a person’s various identities influence—but do not dictate—the way they exist in society. 

Photo 2. Amy Miller shares the story behind the photo she is holding with the other interns during their photovoice project.

Communicating IFPV’s Work

Engaging in interfaith as an academic discipline directly impacts the applied communications side of interfaith work. We took what we were studying and made it engaging to our public audience on all of our social media platforms, trying to make content accessible and relevant to everyone, regardless of academic background or religious tradition. We did this by highlighting recent religion news and sharing how interfaith engagement has impacted real people who have been involved with our organization and others. 

Through our communications work, we learned that participating in social media dialogue requires an extra amount of care and thought due to the clear distance between posts and those who view them. When addressing sensitive issues, like religious persecution or doctrinal disagreements, we use the same etiquette and respect established in Interfaith Photovoice meetings to further welcome different worldviews and cultures, even within something as seemingly simple as sharing a news link. We seek to understand, recognize the identities and beliefs of every person involved, and tell the stories from the perspective of the persons the story concerns. The words we use matter, and they especially matter when we are trying to communicate complex ideas to people with different beliefs or life experiences; the words we use matter so that sharing the stories of interfaith today can be meaningful for everyone.

Experiencing IFPV’s Work

For part of our internship this summer, we practiced these principles for respectful intergroup discourse by participating in our own in-person photovoice project. After becoming familiar with the structure of an Interfaith Photovoice project, we also learned how to facilitate a photovoice project ourselves from the logistics to the ethics and foundations for dialogue. This logistical process alongside meaningful sharing and listening added a lot to our experience: we learned how to foster a safe space and learned how to be vulnerable ourselves. 

Photo 3. Delaney Sall shares about her experience at Interfaith America’s annual conference in Chicago.

A typical Interfaith Photovoice project consists of a group of individuals with different religious identities. Although the members of our photovoice project all identified with the Christian tradition in some way, we represented multiple different denominations and had experienced faith in different ways. One of us noted: “We have learned more about each other in just these ten hours of photovoice meetings than I learned about my coworkers I worked with all summer.” Discussing things like faith in everyday life and our challenges to living out faith invited us to practice a level of vulnerability and trust with one another which helped us to develop deeper relationships. 

Photo 4. In the final photovoice project meeting, interns discuss the themes of photos that most consistently showed up as a group throughout the whole project.

This mutual vulnerability we experienced during our photovoice sessions struck us as especially powerful because it is not something we have often encountered in faith-based settings. For some, church is a place to gather and worship but not necessarily a place to express struggles and doubts. It seems that, while Interfaith Photovoice focuses on building relationships across different religions, photovoice could be just as powerful within religious traditions. Photovoice gave us insight into how quickly vulnerability makes community grow—branching across gaps and differences in experience to create a space that feels therapeutic and safe. The relationships that emerge from photovoice provide a basis for enacting institutional change by equipping participants with the tools they need to engage with one another in a constructive and compassionate manner. These tools are valuable in any context—from workplaces to religious institutions to personal relationships.

Conclusion: Building New Work

These tools we learned in our photovoice meetings gave us a tangible means to impact our communities effectively and offered pathways of thinking through other means of positive change. The final part of our internship included reading and discussing Eboo Patel’s book, We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. Our discussions forced us to engage critically about how to constructively criticize structurally-based problems. In his book, Patel highlights how his mindset changed from one that criticized systems to one that aimed to build systems that promoted positive change. As students enrolled in sociology and social work courses, we were able to take a lot of ideas from the book and relate them to ideas from our classes. In our discussions, we especially focused on Patel’s observation that college students can find it easy at times to be too critical of systems without being willing to work to make them better. 

Photo 5. Interns curate their photos based on chosen themes and determine which photos best represent the change they hope to see in their communities.

In our conversations, we went from agreeing to disagreeing with Patel’s statements and were challenged to evaluate our own willingness or lack of willingness to take productive action. As we thought through how we can influence the building of better systems, we noticed our own pains, doubts, and fears that come with taking action that actually makes change. In some ways we are still left with the question: how can we be changed and how can we change the world around us? It is a question for a lifetime of discovery. Yet, we began to see the answer unfold as our internship experience helped us discover new hopes. We all found the experience of photovoice to be life changing because the conversation allowed us to critically examine our own faith, to think in new ways about our beliefs, and to share our genuine stories more deeply than before in a group setting. Our photovoice project changed us and built something new in us to give to others. And this internship, with all of its discussions and work, challenged us to hope for what can be different in our communities: to hope for adults to have childlike wonder and question again; to hope for social work programs to educate more fully and inclusively around religious diversity; to hope for religious spaces to create better room for anger, doubt, and correction; and to hope for our photovoice experience to be experienced by all of those around us.

Photo 6. From left to right stands Amy, Miller, Jessica Reece, Delaney Sall, and Jenna Allman. Jessica, our Civic Media Specialist, led these three college students in our summer internship program.

Works Cited

Patel, Eboo, Jennifer Howe Peace, and Noah Silverman. 2018. Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field. Beacon Press.

Patel, Eboo. 2022. We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.

Williams, Roman. “What Is Interfaith Photovoice?” 2021. Interfaith Photovoice. Accessed September 12, 2022.