Elevating Black Women's Experiences in Physics Graduate Programs through Photovoice

Black women are severely underrepresented among physics PhDs awarded. Several programs have been implemented to support students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to earn physics PhDs as well as to support women in physics. Black women live at the intersection of marginalization in physics through both race and gender. Thus, programs designed to support individuals along one of these dimensions without an intentional intersectional focus may leave Black women's needs unknown and unmet. In this project, supported by the American Physical Society Innovation Fund, we leverage photovoice methodology to partner with Black women enrolled in physics PhD programs to describe their journeys towards a physics PhD. In photovoice, participants as co-researchers are provided a prompt and time to take photos and generate photo captions that respond to the prompt. We conducted individual interviews with participants using Wang and Burris's SHOWED approach, where specific prompts are provided to aid participants in discussing the root causes of the experiences captured in their photos as well as identifying lessons to share with others and potential allies to work towards change. This talk will focus on why we selected and how we adapted photovoice for our research goals.