Framing the unseen: feminist Photovoice and intersectionality in shaping urban exclusion and agency for ESEA women

This article advances feminist urban and methodological scholarship by reconfiguring Photovoice, a method that invites individuals to use photography to explore and communicate their lived experiences, as both a participatory method and a feminist spatial intervention. Focusing on the urban experiences of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) women in Scotland, the research explores how racialized hypervisibility and systemic erasure emerge as concurrent, spatialized conditions that shape experiences of exclusion, identity, and agency. Employing Photovoice as a feminist methodology grounded in situated knowledge and epistemic justice, participants’ images and narratives highlight how urban space is negotiated, contested, and reimagined through everyday acts of resistance. The analysis centres the lived knowledge of ESEA women, revealing how intersecting forms of oppression are materially and symbolically embedded in the built environment, and how layered exclusions are inscribed across the lived geographies and everyday spatial experiences of the city. In response, the study demonstrates how grassroots solidarities, community interventions, and everyday navigational practices operate as feminist spatial strategies that challenge dominant urban narratives. In doing so, this work contributes new theoretical and methodological insights into feminist understandings of space, intersectionality, and participatory praxis, offering clear implications for more inclusive urban policy and planning.