Picture this: Citizen activists documenting the best and worst of their communities — exquisite seasonal changes, local flora and fauna, and also man-made eyesores, hazards and environmental depredations. UO graduate student Shannon Elizabeth Bell has recruited ordinary women in coal-mining communities to do just that.

A key component of Bell's dissertation in sociology involves “photostories” — photographs with brief explanatory narratives that tell compelling stories and potentially lead to meaningful political action.

Bell has collected hundreds of photostories to examine grassroots activism and the barriers that can inhibit community involvement. She employed a method called “Photovoice,” sometimes used in human service fields, but less commonly in sociology, whereby individuals use photos to tell the stories of their lives and surroundings. Visit Bell’s web site to see a gallery of photostories from this project.

In September 2008, Bell recruited a total of 40 women from five coal-mining areas in Southern West Virginia, where she had lived from 2000-2005, and gave them digital cameras. Their instructions were to photograph both positive and negative aspects of their communities over the course of eight months.

During monthly group meetings in the five communities, Bell projected each woman’s photos on a wall, and the participants shared and discussed their pictures. Then they wrote narratives to complete their photostories.

Some photos highlighted the beauty of Southern West Virginia with depictions of winter snow, fallen leaves and papaws — a kind of fruit also referred to as West Virginia bananas — while others documented community problems, including irresponsible mining practices, roads in grievous states of disrepair and egregious amounts of litter on roadsides.

Bell encouraged the participants to take action. For example, after some of the women created photostories documenting the problems caused by coal slurry waste, Bell connected them with the Sludge Safety Project and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, which promote the safe disposal of coal slurry and responsible mining practices Their issue: Waste leaching out of some coal slurry injection sites contaminates water supplies and causes health problems in nearby populations.

Eventually, a few of the women from one Photovoice group linked up with a Washington Post reporter and accompanied him to mountaintop removal mining sites. Some of the women also lobbied legislators, giving them photostory booklets about coal-related water contamination.

Bell assisted women who had photographed pothole-riddled roads in contacting their legislators, even accompanying two of them to the state capitol in Charleston, where they showed officials their photostories. The result: After more than 25 years of neglect, stretches of two of those roads will be repaved.

Participants are also compiling a book of their photostories about litter. With no state bottle bill to encourage recycling, residents often toss cans, plastic bottles and glass containers out of their car windows, littering the roadsides with trash. The women hope their book will inspire legislators to finally pass a beverage container law that has failed for the past seven years.