Seeing Gaslighting: Photo-Dialogues and Structural Injustice

Abstract

Extending photovoice methodology, I describe a process of seeing structural injustice through photo-dialogues. In a collective context where state and society collude in normalizing and extending injustice through both law and systemic gaslighting, the problem of exposing injustice with images involves issues of common sense, language, institutions, and access to various forms of power. “Seeing gaslighting” reveals a process that manipulates perception to obscure systemic inequality and injustice and produce complacency and/or inability to perceive complicity in an unjust system. Photo-dialogues engage the sensory and affective rather than evidentiary aspect of images of injustice.