Assignment 1: Short Essay

1000 words including references

For this assignment, students should:

Take (or use) an original photo that represents a ‘gendered place, space or object’

Write a short essay reflecting on how gender is depicted in your photo and its potential impact on health outcomes for people and populations. Consider, for example, the ways in which gender norms, stereotypes,

socialisation

and power dynamics influence health behaviours, exposure to, or experiences of illness, access to health services and care.

Your reflection should draw on relevant subject materials (gender, social and health theory, intersectionality, gender analysis, masculinities) to critically examine how the social processes depicted in your photo reinforce or challenge gendered health disparities.

Use the following prompts to guide your reflection:

What did you take a photo of and what inspired you to take it?

Did you set out to capture this image or did you discover it by chance?

How does your photo reflect gender as a social construct (remember to consider when and where the photo was taken)?

How do you think the gendered elements captured in the photo might influence health and why?

What other social determinants of health (e.g. age, disability) might influence health in this context?

Select one of these social determinants and explain how it intersects with gender to influence health and health outcomes?

What is something new you discovered or learned about gender in the world around you through this assignment? How, if at all, did it make you look at the world or the people around you differently?

As this is a reflection piece it is not expected that students need to undertake extensive additional research or reference literature outside of the subject reading materials and lectures. The emphasis is on your personal response to, and application of, course content using the photo as a prompt.

Assignment Instructions

Getting Started: Where do you ‘see’ gender in the world around you?

For this assignment, you can use a phone or camera to snap a photo when you see something that represents a gendered place, space or object.

Below is a photo I took some years ago when buying a bottle of wine from a shop around Mother’s Day. As an example, it could be used to reflect on gender norms around drinking and its impacts on health.

Alternatively, you can go to a specific place to take a photo that you know is a gendered space such as a sports ground, club or park, school, shop, advertising poster or banner. The below photo is from the toy section of a large store. It could be used to reflect on gendered representation in toys and impacts on occupational and health behaviours.

Or finally you may wish to use an existing original photo that represents ‘gender’. It can be a current photo or one from the past. It might be from your home country, from a holiday or from when you were younger.

Privacy and safety considerations

We suggest that students avoid taking photos of people that could identify them. If there are other people around in public places, consider taking photos at a distance sufficient to obscure individual identify or use phone editing functions to ‘blur’ faces or specific locations or use retouch options to remove identifiable information entirely.

If you wish to use a photo that features family or friends, please ask permission first. And note this in the assignment.

Please do NOT take or use photographs of a sexual nature, nudity or illegal activities or use stock images

Note that only the subject coordinators will be viewing the photo submitted as part of this assignment.

Additional resources

This assignment borrows from the principles of photovoice – a qualitative, participatory research method developed initially by health promotion researchers in the 1990’s (Wang and Burris, 1997). It is now a well-known and used methodology, and the following are examples of research projects that have used photovoice to explore issues around gender. Feel free to explore these as source of inspiration!

These must use and 4 more

SheShaka: addressing gendered and cultural barriers to participation in surfing. https://socialequity.unimelb.edu.au/research/sheshaka-addressing-gendered-and- cultural-barriers-to-participation-in-surfing

Gender, voice, power: exploring local insights on the impact of climate change and advocating for gender inclusive features with women’s cooperatives in Zanzibar - https://photovoice.org/gender-voice-power/

Moletsane, R. (2022). Using photovoice to enhance young women’s participation in addressing gender-based violence in higher education. Comparative Education, 59 (2), 239-258

Dixon, K., Fossey, E., & Petrakis, M. (2022). Using photovoice to explore women's experiences of a women-only prevention and recovery care service in Australia. Health & Social Care in the Community, 30, e5839–e5847

McKenzie, S. et al, (2023). Men’s accounts of anxiety: a photovoice study. Qualitative Research in Health, 4.

McIsaac, J. (2021). Picturing femininities and masculinities: Using visual methods to explore gender relations. Methods in Psychology, 5.

https://www-journals-uchicago-edu.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/doi/abs/10.1086/494680

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953611003509?via%3Dihub

https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.22374/ijmsch.v2i1.5

Marking Rubric