Prismatic: Belonging in View

An Exhibition of Participatory Action Research

Activities: Photovoice, Participatory Action Research, Exhibition Design

"Prismatic: Belonging in View" presents visual and narrative accounts of campus belonging at Georgia Tech, where connection, overextension, and isolation intersect in graduate life. 

In Fall 2025, I partnerned with Dr. Stephanie Selvick of Georgia Tech's Belonging and Student Support department to gather fifteen graduate students at Georgia Tech to share photographs investigating their academic journeys. These images prompted critical examination about the environments that foster or challenge belonging in graduate life. Recognizing that belonging shapes retention, well-being, and holistic success, the project used photovoice to foreground perspectives not fully captured by traditional assessments. An arts-based participatory research method, photovoice invites participants to document and interpret experiences through inquiry, photography, and storytelling, offering a snapshot of a cohort’s lives and routines at a specific moment in time. In Spring 2026, our digital media design team, Daksh Kapoor, Thaîs Angelina Alvarenga, and Shamim Shoomali, then translated the cohort's photographs and narratives into the “Prismatic: Belonging in View” exhibition at the Georgia Tech Library's Interactive Media Zone. This exhibition traced how environments, relationships, and academic expectations shape the graduate student experience in an expansive digital media showcase. 

This project was generously supported by the division of Arts, Belonging, and Community at Georgia Tech, as well as a Georgia Tech Arts Catalyst Grant.

In the Fall semester of 2025, we brought together 15 graduate student co-researchers across 5 colleges and 12 programs at Georgia Tech, and we spent a month together, gathering on Friday afternoons, to share photographs and stories representing their experiences with belonging on campus. Pictured is our final session, where co-researchers thematically arranged and chose photos from the process to share during our Spring 2026 exhibition. 

Exhibition design

showcasing our photoset

To showcase the photos from our cohort, we facilitated a participatory design process where we led Digital Media students at Georgia Tech, two of whom were members of our cohort, to create an exhibition at the library's Interactive Media Zone. 

Through our participatory design process, we built individual consensus, visually represented the cohort's data, and worked towards a design vision that spoke to the collective graduate student experience. 

To kick off the design process for the exhibition of our cohort's photos, we started by gathering inspiration.

Each of the designers on our team created individual mood boards, rooted in the photovoice data.

To guide our designers, we encouraged our team to identify three design principles that would shape their thinking. Designers then found or created inspiring images for each principle.

After designers individually identified inspiration, we conducted a visioning exercise to find thematic intersections and define our shared design pillars: Prismatic, Branching, and Monochrome. 

Prismatic captured the contextual and fractal aspects of identity and belonging;  
Branching, captured how healthy networks and communities of belonging branch and grow;  and Monochrome evoked how connections can decay from the isolation of non-belonging.

As a result of this process, we established a clear Look and Feel for the exhibition, intentionally rooted in the cohort research, that captured our design pillars through aesthetic choices. 

Exhibition details

demonstrating our Look and Feel

Below we share a few examples of the design decisions we made, as well as how these visual choices embody our photovoice research.

In a prism, white light splits into spectral components, or the bright, saturated colors that you see in our design. We chose the theme of a prism for its parallels to the different lenses that graduate identity can be viewed through. To fully embody this theme, we chose a corresponding color scheme and title that would reflect this.

Co-researchers emphasized that “good communities, rather than staying insular, branch outward and grow.” In our design, the topographic lines represent these healthy networks of community belonging that branch outward and grow. The monochromatic grey background represents the opposite: feelings that co-researchers described as “decay,” or isolation, preventing them from seeking out networks of belonging.

We featured blurred red and cyan colors, with thematic highlights: yellow for structures of belonging, green for networks, and magenta for conditional belonging (our three themes). The blur between colors represents the most concrete finding of our project, that graduate student experiences of belonging and non-belonging are blurred, overlapping, and mutually informing.  

We showcased this blurring by surrounding each photograph with a gradient that would contain a percentage of red (for belonging), cyan (for non-belonging) and a specific secondary color to reflect the thematic cluster.  

Final exhibition

showing at the interactive media zone 

Below are images from our final exhibition at the Georgia Tech Library's Interactive Media Zone. For the opening of the exhibition, we featured a panel discussion, where visitors could hear from the co-researchers on their experiences and the three themes of belonging. 

As one co-researcher put it: “Being a graduate student isn't all about school or research. There's ‘belonging’ as a grad student, but then there's ‘belonging’ as a human in this world. Also, belonging isn't binary, it's a gradient, a spectrum.”

Structures of Belonging highlights how everyday structures and material environments shape the context in which belonging is made possible or strained.  

Networks of Belonging centers how graduate students cultivate social, relational, and ritual forms of connection that generate networks of care and mutual support.

Conditional Belonging recognizes the feelings of precarity and contingency that often accompany graduate life, where belonging is experiences as something to be earned through productivity or achievement, rather than as simply inherent.  

At the exhibition opening, we shared the work with the Georgia Tech community and brought our co-researchers together for a panel to discuss their experiences. 

Altogether, this project allowed us to build a space for graduate students to come together across programs and fields, find support, build community, and process the significant changes happening in higher education that were impacting the graduate student experience. Our exhibition then gave back to this graduate student community, allowing for time, space, and tools to reflect, recharge, and build something tangible and beautiful from these shared experiences.

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