Biography
Dr Tiffany Fairey is a visual sociologist and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow working on the role of images and image-making in building peace and dialogue.
Co-Founder and former director of the award-winning charity PhotoVoice, Fairey is an expert in photovoice and specialises in participatory visual methods and community photography histories and pedagogies. Since 2017 she has been working on the major interdisciplinary project Art & Reconciliation. She was PI on Izazov, a Changing the Story project with young Bosnian film-makers. She is Photovoice Associate for EveryDay Peace Indicators and over 2020-21 is working on an Everyday Peace FotoVoz project in Colombia with the Colombian Truth Commission and conflict affected communities. In 2019, she worked on Surfacing Time, a participatory photography initiative with the Batwa people and Kigali Centre for Photography.
Fairey completed her PhD in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths College and was previously based at The Photography & the Archive Research Centre, University of the Arts London. She lived in Latin America for 9 years and is on the advisory boards of Post Conflict Research Centre and Voice of Freedom. She is a member of King’s VEM Network. Her work has been recognised with various awards including the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal for outstanding advance in photography for public service (2010).
Research Interests
- Arts-based, participatory and inclusive peace-building
- Dialogue, reconciliation and conflict transformation
- Visual and action research methods (specialist in photovoice and participatory visual methods and approaches)
- Participatory and community arts and media
- Ethics in collaborative and participatory approaches
- Arts evaluation and impact
Tiffany’s current Leverhulme Fellowship research project, Imaging Peace, examines the critical and overlooked relationship between photography and peacebuilding. Images work as potent and persistent forces in our accelerated visual age yet despite significant scholarship on images of war and violence there very little is known about the visuality of peace. Focusing on localised, community based and participatory photographic practices in post conflict settings her research considers the role of images and image-making in peacebuilding, dialogue and reconciliation processes and asks what contribution do images make, not only to representing peace, but to actively shaping and embedding it.
Publications
- Fairey, Tiffany & Rachel Kerr. 2020. ‘What Works? Creative Approaches to Transitional Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina.’ International Journal of Transitional Justice. Vol 14, Issue 1, p142-156
- Fairey, Tiffany & Orton, L (eds). 2019. ‘Introduction: Photography As Dialogue’. Special Issue: Photography As Dialogue. Photography & Culture. Vol 12, Issue 3.
- Fairey, Tiffany. 2019. ‘Building a history of citizen photography: The TAFOS Story’. Photography and Culture. Volume 12, Issue 1
- Fairey, Tiffany. 2018. ‘Whose Photo? Whose Voice? Who Listens? “Giving”, Silencing and Listening to Voice in Participatory Visual Projects’. Visual Studies 33 (2): 111–26.
- Fairey, Tiffany. 2018. ‘Participatory Arts and Peace-Building: Embodying and Challenging Reconciliation’. In Participatory Arts for Invisible Communities: PAIC; Irena Sertić (Ed), 204–14. Omnimedia. (4,916 words)
- Fairey, Tiffany. 2017. ‘These Photos Were My Life: Understanding the Impact of Participatory Photography Projects’. Community Development Journal 1 (19).
Teaching
Fairey developed PhotoVoice’s participatory photography training and has run numerous courses on participatory visual methods with visual practitioners, NGOs and universities in the UK and internationally.
Further details
See Tiffany’s research profile, Academia page and website.