Rooted in Community: Photovoice Study Empowers Participants as Co-Researchers

In the Quiet of Everyday Life: Indian and Pakistani Lives in the GTA is a new public exhibition running October 9 -17 at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Led by Psychology professor Hema Ganapathy-Coleman, the project offers an intimate window into the diverse experiences of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in Peel region.

Tanya Rohrmoser

Oct. 1, 2025

Undergraduate Research, Faculty Research

For Professor Hema Ganapathy-Coleman, research begins with a question: How is daily life lived when separated from the country and culture of one's origins? What do these quiet, everyday acts reveal about identity, belonging, and resilience?

These are not abstract questions. They emerge in concrete moments: an immigrant Indian parent driving an hour each way every weekend for a child's dance or music class, lighting a prayer lamp at dusk, gathering at a mosque on Fridays. These everyday choices reveal something deeper about how immigrant families transmit values, culture, and identity across generations.

“I’ve always been interested not just in what parents do, but why they do it,” she explains. “Everyday life gives a good window into what they’re thinking, what motivates them. I find that we feel everyday life is very mundane; it’s this quiet thing that happens and we just live it. But daily life is deeply political in many ways. We are hemmed in by structural forces like socio-economic class, caste, gender, and race, and we're also shaped by the expectations and possibilities within our ethno-cultural communities. At the same time, the things we do every day are choices we make. Everyday life is a big deal.”

Ganapathy-Coleman is a developmental psychologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UTM. She also directs the Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities, a hub for scholarship, public dialogue, and community engagement that works to enhance comprehension of the region and foster the development of future South Asia scholars.

For more than 25 years, her research has focused on the lived experiences of Indian immigrants in North America, using qualitative and ethnographic methods grounded in collaboration. Her early research took her from Baltimore's large Indian diaspora to Terre Haute, Indiana, where a small but close-knit community of Indian and Pakistani professionals had settled. Twelve years ago, she moved to Canada and joined UTM, a shift that brought her into one of the largest South Asian communities in North America — particularly concentrated in Peel Region, where Brampton and Mississauga together form one of the most significant South Asian population centers outside of South Asia itself.

Ganapathy-Coleman began teaching courses in Diaspora and Transnational Studies, later transitioning into cross-cultural psychology. Students would show up to her office hours, not just to discuss course material, but to share personal stories. They spoke about therapists who misunderstood their cultural backgrounds, about feeling invisible in psychological research, and about the challenges and rewards of growing up in Canada with immigrant parents or grandparents.

So, she invited them in as collaborators — deepening a participatory approach she had refined over decades. Through the Research Opportunity Program (ROP), undergraduate students joined her project as research assistants. Many had deep ties to the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi community in the GTA. They helped shape the study, recruited participants, and brought their own lived experiences into the research process.

“We gathered Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh participants — immigrants across gender, social class, and generational lines,” she explains. “And I planned to use standardized scales, questionnaires, in-depth interviews, as well as participant and non-participant observations.”

But first, Ganapathy-Coleman wanted to know what the participants themselves thought she should be studying. That is where the PhotoVoice project began.

Research Team including Community Members and RAs

Shifting the Power: PhotoVoice as Methodology

PhotoVoice is more than a research method — it is a deliberate challenge to traditional power structures in psychological research. Instead of researchers extracting data from passive subjects, PhotoVoice places cameras and narrative control directly in participants' hands. This methodological choice reflects Ganapathy-Coleman's commitment to community-engaged scholarship and challenges psychology's historical tendency to study marginalized communities without including them in knowledge production.

“We brought them to campus and asked them to use their smartphones to take photographs of their lives,” she says. “We asked them to capture the people, places, events, objects, experiences, and hardships that characterize their everyday lives.”

Fifteen participants submitted nearly 300 photographs, each one captioned and discussed in group sessions held on campus. For many, it was the first time they had been invited into an academic space not as subjects, but as collaborators.

“They talked about their families, the memories they were making, the places they were visiting, the foods they were eating,” she shares. “Based on what they told us and showed us was important, I designed a series of interview schedules that we are now using to collect data from more members of the community. My undergraduate research assistants tried out these interview protocols and provided invaluable feedback on what works and what does not.”

Students present research at undergraduate research fair — Prof. Ganapathy-Coleman's ROP students pose in front of a poster based on her research project. Under her supervision, they conducted interviews, analyzed and interpreted the data. They presented at this year's Undergraduate Research Fair, organized by the Office of Experiential Education.

Ganapathy-Coleman is currently working with a second group of students on this larger, multi-year study. Together, they plan to interview 120 participants over a five-year period. Each participant begins by keeping a detailed seven-day diary of their routines. These entries then shape a series of personalized, in-depth interviews.

Her approach is slow, intentional, and deeply collaborative. It is also reshaping how South Asian immigrant communities are represented in research.

"The main objective is to get a holistic, fine-grained understanding of the Indian and Pakistani community here in the Peel Region through a psychological lens," says Ganapathy-Coleman. "But psychology's frameworks weren't developed with immigrant experiences in mind, so the experiences participants describe often fall outside psychology's traditional concerns. When participants talk about maintaining sacred spaces across borders, or navigating questions of cultural authenticity, I need geography and philosophy — not just psychology — to make sense of what they're saying." This interdisciplinary approach reflects her conviction that immigrant experience exceeds what any single discipline can capture.

Photographs from the PhotoVoice project will be on display in the exhibition In the Quiet of Everyday Life. The images showcase families gathered around meals, children at prayer, snow-covered cars, citizenship ceremonies, and quiet moments of reflection. Each image is accompanied by a personal narrative.

The exhibition opens at UTM on October 9 and runs through October 17 before expanding into community spaces in Mississauga and Brampton. A digital version is also in development.

“It is my invitation to people to see Indian and Pakistani immigrants differently,” says Ganapathy-Coleman. “They're often lumped together under the category of South Asian and stereotyped as culturally homogenous, maybe a little unwanted. There’s quite a lot of hatred on social media aimed at these communities.”

“But through this exhibition, I want to show that they’re working, playing, praying, gardening, studying. They live varied, intentional, and meaningful lives. And we don’t usually get to see that.”

She hopes students, community leaders, participants, and their families will attend the opening.

"My teaching, research, and own experience as an Indian immigrant have aligned in profound ways," she says. " What the generosity and openness of the community has shown me is that representation matters — not just being included in research, but having control over how their lives are interpreted and shared."