Sister Speak: Photovoice as an Approach to Understand the African American Breast Cancer Experience

Pictures and stories are important ways to capture lived experience. For African American breast cancer survivors, both provide vehicles to understand what the illness experience means and how it is lived. Photovoice, as a qualitative methodology, is a useful way to discover nuances of embodied experience otherwise hard to chronicle.

The Sister Speak Study, a Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) project attempts to understand how African American women experience breast cancer. Using mixed methods including Photovoice, this study offers a way to explore illness as an individual and group experience. Drawing on images, stories and writing developed by breast cancer survivors, this study suggests how these methodologies can be employed to understand what “surviving breast cancer” really means for African American women.

As a community-based research project focused on the embodied experience of breast cancer, this study shows how pictures, stories, and writing can especially engage African American survivors in dialogue about breast cancer. It also demonstrates how these tools can benefit survivors' thinking, consciousness raising and talking about lived experiences. Lastly, it underscores the added value of art-inspired qualitative research to understand complementary & alternative health practices African Americans use for breast cancer.