*WAIT-LIST* - Visual Storytelling: Affirming our Common Humanity

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This interactive workshop explores photography as a powerful tool for social change—one that affirms our shared humanity, challenges stereotypes, and invites empathy across differences. Through readings, guided discussion, and reflection, participants will learn how photographs can humanize complex experiences, amplify marginalized voices, and foster connection within and across communities.

Grounded in ethical, community-centered practices, the workshop emphasizes photography not as extraction, but as collaboration and relationship-building: an act of seeing, being seen, and honoring lived experience.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Understand how photography has historically shaped public narratives—for harm and for healing.
• Examine how photography has been used to deny, distort, or erase a person’s humanity, particularly in systems of punishment, surveillance, and social control.
• Learn ethical approaches to photographing people and communities with dignity and consent.
• Reflect on their own perspectives and biases, and how these shape what they see and capture.
• hare photography projects that are particularly powerful in affirming shared humanity and the reasons.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Deborah Espinosa is a legally trained photographer and educator who uses visual storytelling to advocate for the rights of people from poor and marginalized communities. She leverages visual storytelling to raise awareness about little known injustices; to inspire action, including legal reform; and to highlight our common humanity. Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, blogs, photo essays, short films, annual reports, marketing and fundraising materials, and galleries. Espinosa has worked in Brazil, Burundi, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Malawi, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, and the United States.

Images © Deborah Espinosa