Safety and Surveillance Photovoice Study

Timeline: 2022

Role: Research Assistant

Supervised by: Tawanna Dillahunt, Alex Lu, Social Innovations Group

TL;DR: Conducted a 3 month Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) photo voice project with a Detroit nonprofit, Eastside Community Network (ECN), to understand Detroit residents’ perceptions of safety and surveillance. Published: CHI 2023, DIS 2023.

Skills: Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Community Organizing

Publications

[c.2] Lu, A.J., Sannon, S., Moy, C., Brewer, S., Green, J., Jackson, K.N., Reeder, D., Wafer, C., Ackerman, M.S., Dillahunt, T.R. (2023). Participatory Noticing through Photovoice: Engaging Arts- and Community-Based Approaches in Design Research. In Proceedings of ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. ACM, New York, NY, USA. [Best Paper Award, Top 1%]

[c.1] Lu, A.J., Sannon, S., Moy, C., Brewer, S., Green, J., Jackson, K.N., Reeder, D., Wafer, C., Ackerman, M.S., Dillahunt, T.R. (2023). Shifting from surveillance-as-safety to safety-through-noticing: A photovoice study with Eastside Detroit residents. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA. [Acceptance Rate: 28%]

About

The City of Detroit announced a public-private-community partnership, Project Green Light (PGL), in 2016 as a measure to reduce and prevent crime. Under this partnership, local businesses pay to install a Green Light camera at their establishment in exchange for the city's 24/7 surveillance. PGL employs facial recognition to "deter, identify, and solve crime," which has become contentious in the academic community. Despite known racial bias in facial recognition technologies and incidents of misidentification, the City of Detroit lauds the program's success.

In response to PGL, our team looked to understand Detroit residents' perception of neighborhood safety and surveillance through Community Based Participatory Research. I worked with Ph.D. Candidate, Alex Lu, to develop a photovoice research project with Detroit nonprofit partner, Eastside Community Network. We engaged with 11 Eastside Detroit residents over the course of the three month study. During this time, we hosted workshops about the history of photovoice and surveillance technologies, office hours to support the photo taking process, especially with our older participants, and community conversations around sentiments of neighborhood safety, crime, and surveillance. The study culminated in a public photo exhibition (pictured below), where our participants discussed their photos with the greater community and shared experiences with residents across generations. Findings from this work recently appeared at CHI 2023 (presenter) and DIS 2023 (best paper) and future work can be found [Here].