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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.