Participatory Photography for Reproductive Justice: Recommendations From a Community Collaborative Pilot Project Incorporating Care as an Ethical Foundation

Reproductive justice is a framework diversely applied to interrogate and challenge broad structural factors which constrain individual reproductive choices. This framework necessitates an intersectionally-aware and rights-based approach, which prioritises working with local communities and centres the reproductive experiences and needs of overlooked, devalued, repressed or marginalised populations. This paper considers the suitability of participatory photography as a tool for researching reproductive justice and describes a pilot project exploring reproductive justice challenges and opportunities in Northern England. We share our approach to co-design, collective interpretation and dissemination, offering methodological insight by incorporating care as an ethical foundation of the research. We consider the strengths and challenges of our approach, reflecting on relationship building, trauma-informed engagement of people with lived experience, informed consent, equitable inclusion, power sharing, and ‘empowerment’. Finally, we suggest recommendations for future participatory projects.