ACAR – PAVR Award: Past Winners

Greg Constantine has dedicated nearly 20 years to documenting the persecution of the Rohingya ethnic community from Myanmar. His years in the field and his resulting books, publications, exhibitions and public and academic lectures demonstrate his innovative research methods and his determination to call attention to human rights abuses across the globe and to make a difference in the lives of those with whom he works.

Laura Porterfield’s scholarly and community approach, along with her teaching, speaks to her life’s work and mission on unpacking and dismantling colonialism and racism within urban education. In her individual research agenda, Laura has focused on Black girls’ visual learning and discourse. In her article in Visual Studies (2017) entitled, “(Re)Seeing Black Girls: Intersections of Liberalism, Difference, and the Hidden Curriculum” she explored race and gender norms with Black girls and the “visual learning for young Black women in and around urban schools.” This work is a key example of how Laura’s work pushes against concepts of racism and sexism, and how working in partnership with youth, one can inform and build methods of visual activism for the community.

David is an exceptional storyteller and researcher, able to communicate the complexities of environmental and social issues to a variety of audiences. Through his leadership, the HERD: Inuit Voices on Caribou study was able to document over 80 perspectives about caribou across Labrador, analyse this knowledge through both a qualitative and multimedia approach, and engage community members in an equitable and transparent research process that centred community voices.

In 2005, Wesley Shrum founded the Video Ethnography Laboratory at Louisiana State University, one of few such centers in the U.S., devoted to teaching, producing, and disseminating video ethnographic materials by both faculty and students. With his long-term collaborators in Kenya, Ghana, and Kerala (India), Dr. Shrum began to regularly incorporate video in presentations and movies for distribution. He has spent the last two decades arguing that the U.S. and Europe are not to be regarded as standards for comparison for Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Tara’s work demonstrates a sustained commitment to advocacy within both visual research and visual journalism. Among many other activities, she is co-Founder and Board Member of Authority Collective (AC), an organization created in 2017 to resource women of color visual media makers, and to intervene in the gatekeeping networks of power within visual media industries. In her work as a visual journalist, visual ethnographer, and multimedia curator Tara adopts creative strategies to anti-racist work, using visuals to reimagine marginalized individuals and communities.