In fall 2025, fifteen graduate students from across the Institute gathered on Friday afternoons to share photographs that document their lived experiences through their academic journeys. These images became catalysts for critical reflection on the environments that make graduate student belonging possible or strained. What emerged was more than a collection of images. It was a powerful expression of what it means to belong. 

Photo by Estelle Rita. “Twice a week, every week, we make breakfast.”  

Each photograph served as a starting point for deeper reflection, revealing the environments, relationships, and routines that shape graduate student life. Through these moments, students examined where belonging is nurtured, where it feels fragile, and how it evolves over time.

 This project emerged from the recognition that belonging is central to retention, well-being, and holistic success, and that traditional assessment tools alone cannot fully capture graduate students’ lived experiences. By validating student voice as evidence, photovoice serves as both a research method and community-building intervention, making it especially powerful in this moment.

 Photovoice is an arts-based, participatory action research method that enables participants, referred to as “co-researchers," to represent and enhance their community through photography and storytelling. The approach recognizes participants as experts on their own experiences, engaging them in examining the very conditions that shape their academic lives. This dual role not only deepens the authenticity of the findings but also shifts the traditional dynamics of research by sharing authority with those most affected. Over the month-long program, co-researchers submitted 76 photographs and stories and came together for three dialogue and problem-solving sessions.

Project co-leads, Dr. Stephanie Selvick, assistant director in Belonging & Student Support, and Allie Teixeira Riggs, Ph.D. candidate in Digital Media, saw photovoice as providing an exciting pathway for graduate students to create something visual and tangible that positions them as active stakeholders in shaping campus culture. Dr. Selvick received a Georgia Tech Arts Catalyst Grant to support and upscale the spring activations. 

"Being awarded the Georgia Tech Arts Catalyst Grant enabled us to intentionally involve graduate students at every stage of the thematic analysis and exhibition development process, creating a multi-semester immersive learning experience," says Selvick.

Photo by Nikole Withakay: “We were skipping with joy when we finally saw Tech Tower!”  

After the dialogue sessions, Dr. Selvick and Riggs led a group of graduate students in conducting thematic analysis and participatory design using the qualitative dataset. The digital design team drew inspiration from the cohort’s insights, translating them into a cohesive visual direction. Prismatic—the overarching design direction and foundation for the exhibition title—speaks to how graduate students constantly negotiate between contexts and identities, showing up as a researcher, grant writer, spouse, co-worker, parent, event coordinator, or other selves. 

Looking back on this process, Riggs reflects, "What surprised us most was how blended and blurred belonging and non-belonging were in the graduate student experience. A sense of belonging with a lab group, friends, family, or the Georgia Tech community was often still tinged with conditionality, fleetingness, precarity, and an overwhelming sense of contingency on maintaining research productivity." 

Photo submitted by Burnout: “Setbacks and simple mistakes, weeks of work undone.” 

The digital media exhibition represents this finding visually, by depicting belonging and non-belonging as twin sensations that are entangled, blurred, and overlapping.

Dr. Selvick was struck that more than half of the submissions connected belonging to everyday structures and physical environments, such as pedestrian walkways, commuting patterns, labs, bathrooms, and public transportation.

For example, Banana writes, "I want to tell others that the feeling of belonging is not only about being included socially, but also about how our daily environment shapes our experiences. Long commutes, late nights, and the endless traffic slowly take away time, energy, and connection." 

Photo submitted by Banana: “There is beauty in these simple, ordinary moments under streetlights after class.”  

What makes graduate students' experiences of these environments distinct is the timing. Many students are leaving labs, walking across campus, or commuting home late at night, regular occurrences that co-researchers say amplify feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Photo submitted by Opal: “Campus empties out, still and sterile, yet I'm still here.” 

Prismatic: Belonging in View is on display in the Interactive Media Zone (IMZ), located across from the Library INFODesk, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., March 9 until March 23. Campus and community members are invited to the opening reception program on Wednesday, March 18, at the Scholars Event Theater in Price Gilbert Memorial Library (Room 1280).

You can RSVP at tinyurl.com/prismaticRSVP. 

All co-researchers in this study are de-identified with selected stage names displayed next to their photographs.