Visualising Voices: Photoyarn as a Decolonial Tool for Centring Indigenous Girls’ Lived Experiences in Qualitative Research

This paper examines Photoyarn, an Indigenous adaptation of photovoice, as a methodological tool for amplifying the voices of Indigenous girls in Zambia during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2024, twelve participants from Chongwe (Lusaka Province) and Solwezi (North-Western Province) used photography and yarning to represent their experiences of education under school closures. Photoyarn counters extractive research by combining participant-generated images with yarning, a dialogic practice grounded in relational accountability, to support participant-led storytelling and analysis. Rooted in Indigenous epistemologies, it recognises knowledge as relational, storied, and community-grounded. Three interconnected analytic spaces illustrate how the method enables participant-led theorising and relational analysis. Education Interrupted shows how participants used Photoyarn to narrate educational rupture and reconstitute belonging through home study. Invisible Labour reveals how the visual-dialogic process surfaced reflections on domestic work as both constraint and site of learning. Indigenous Resilience highlights how cultural knowledge - herbal remedies, storytelling, and craftwork - emerged as expressions of health, patience, and informal pedagogy. Across these spaces, Photoyarn operated as a decolonial practice of co-theorisation, enabling participants to interpret their educational realities through culturally grounded lenses. The paper advances Photoyarn as a decolonial methodological approach that integrates visual storytelling and relational dialogue to support participant-led theorising. It contributes to participatory and Indigenous research by demonstrating how culturally grounded visual methods can foster collaborative knowledge-making and epistemic justice in crisis-affected contexts.