Exploring Identity and Space Through Portraiture

This interactive seminar will introduce portraiture. Portraiture is a qualitative methodology that blends phenomenology, narrative inquiry, ethnography, and art. By emphasizing the importance of voice, context, and participant-researcher relationships, it aims to capture the complexity, nuance, subjectivity, and depth of the human experience. Drawing from my DPhil research, I demonstrate how portraiture illuminated the ways medical students with multiple dimensions of identity negotiate professional identity development in the United States. I also consider how medical education spaces influence their identity transformation. Using interviews, self-portraits, and photo-elicitation, portraiture enabled me to construct a layered understanding of how complex identities are lived within social and spatial contexts.

In the second half of the seminar, participants will create self-portraits, either with materials provided or through digital collage on their own laptops, to reflect on their personal and professional identities. Together, we will consider how identities influence the way we exist in the world and the meanings we construct in our research. No artistic experience is required; only curiosity, openness, and a willingness to engage.

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