Sampling

I constructed a purposeful sample of images instagrammed by UNICEF’s official account over a six-week period in 2015. The target populations of interest in this article are girls and young women of school-going age—5 to 25 (UNESCO n.d.: n.p.). I selected images featuring a girl or girls as the primary subject/s of the photo for analysis. I collected these images manually at one time to reflect a non-probabilistic sample of photographs from UNICEF’s official Instagram account. I archived a total of 38 photos at this stage. I removed four photographs and their accompanying captions from the sample because the sex of the primary subject of the photo was unclear or male, or because the subject was an adult, and to remove duplicates. I further refined the sample to focus on only the images and accompanying texts that aligned with two of UNICEF’s priority areas—Child Survival and Development, and Social Protection and Inclusion. I chose to focus on the images that aligned with these two areas because they were over-represented in the sample. The final sample consists of 28 photos and their accompanying captions.

Content, Context, and Subject Position

After refining the sample, following Miles et al. (2014), I created a matrix to log descriptive characteristics of each photo and accompanying text. This matrix, as suggested by Christmann (2008) detailed the foreground and background content which included setting, place, and composition of each image; whether the photograph was a candid shot or a portrait; whether the subject was photographed in pose or in action; along with information about the compelling policy event referenced in the image or text. All posts included in the sample are captioned. UNICEF uses hashtags (for example, #Liberia) to placemake its agenda within each image and accompanying caption.

Agenda Setting, Policy Framing, and Compelling Policy Events

After organizing the images and captions for analysis, I then sorted the data into categories representing two of UNICEF’s priority areas as mentioned above, Protection and Social Inclusion, and Child Survival and Development. I selected these two over-arching categories because they best reflect the content and context/s of the images and accompanying captions included in the sample. Education is designated as both a stand-alone and crosscutting thematic area in UNICEF’s agenda. All but two of the posts included in the sample reference education in the image or in the caption. I used the captions that accompany each image to identify alignment with UNICEF’s priority areas; UNICEF’s response to a compelling policy event; how education is framed; and the ways in which girls are constructed as target populations. Compelling policy events refer to humanitarian crises, natural disasters, or social conflicts that provide a context for UNICEF’s work. Two compelling policy events are reflected in the data sampled for analysis—the Ebola epidemic of 2014 and UNICEF’s humanitarian action in Africa throughout 2015, and Cyclone Pam, which struck Vanuatu in 2015. UNICEF’s focus on its work in reference to these two compelling policy events underscores the placemaking function of new media tools by international organizations.

Narrative Voice

I applied Kirk and Magno’s (2009) visual analysis of girls as imaged subjects as an analytical framework to interrogate how girls’ lived experiences are used to frame UNICEF’s work. UNICEF captions photos using two types of narrative voice, organizational voice and subject voice. UNICEF uses organizational voice to craft the policy message that accompanies each image. Subject voice uses a direct quote attributed to the photographed subject. These categories were incorporated so as to reflect Kirk and Magno’s recommendation that UNICEF and UNGEI “give greater attention to participation strategies for engaging children and youth and their communities engaged in image and message production” (2009: 28).

Girls’ Participation and Framing Compelling Policy Events

A girl’s aspiration to become a doctor is reflected in another image and caption instagrammed by UNICEF during the collection period. This image features a posed portrait of Lydia, identified as a 15-year-old girl from Nigeria. She is standing in a mixed-age school classroom, holding a blue folder with UNICEF on the front cover. Lydia is quoted: “When the shooting started, we ran in panic into the mountains … I always feel scared when I think of what happened.” The caption explains that Lydia is attending a “UNICEF-supported school in a camp for internally displaced people in Yola,” after her village was attacked by Boko Haram. Organizational voice is used to narrate Lydia’s lived experience fleeing her village, hiding in the mountains, and the trauma she experienced resulting from the murder of her uncle and cousin during the attacks. The caption reads “Lydia is attending school every day in Yola and wants to be a doctor. ‘I want to help my community.’” Like Abier, Lydia’s access to schooling is framed as a pathway to achieve her future goals.

Placemaking and Education Policy Agenda Setting

A focus on UNICEF’s curriculum work emerges in the Protection and Social Inclusion area of its agenda. Two posts highlight an arts-based curriculum implemented in Liberia. The curriculum was developed through a partnership between UNICEF and the Liberian government. It aims to raise awareness of gender-based violence using an illustrated book. In one post, a group of early adolescent children is pictured in front of a chalkboard. The children, two of whom are girls, are holding a copy of this book. The caption explains that they are reading it aloud as an in-class exercise. In the other image, a group of all female students in early adolescence is pictured dancing in a classroom. It is unclear if the UNICEF supported arts-based curriculum is in use in either of the instagrammed photos, though both captions reference the curriculum.

Education is used to frame the experiences, outcomes, and opportunities for girls in all but two of the instagrammed photos. These photos picture girls on their way to school, seated at a desk, or engaged in schoolwork in a classroom. The school is the background in the majority of these photos, further reinforcing the policy focus on girls’ access to formal schooling and their right to education as target populations. Securing girls’ access to formal schooling is promoted as a dominant policy frame, and UNICEF’s work to support teacher training and resources is highlighted in regional context. In all but one post, UNICEF reinforces the protective function of schooling as a safe place for children affected by violent conflict and displacement.

Girls and young women, as target populations (see Schneider and Ingram 1993), are most frequently constructed as daughters and schoolgirls. UNICEF’s promotion and provision of education in emergencies is the dominant policy frame in all the photos in which mothers and daughters are imaged. Mothers and daughters are pictured in three of the photos included in the sample; one features a posed portrait of a mother and daughter and two are candid photographs of mothers and daughters going about their daily routines. In a candid-action photo a girl is crying in her mother’s arms; the camera captures an emotional moment between them, which is contextualized in the caption. The young girl is identified as six-year-old Rosol and her mother as Neveen. The caption includes, “For Rosol, school is a painful reminder of the violence she experienced during the conflict.” One unique characteristic of this photo and its accompanying text is that it complicates the idea that schools are always safe places for children, especially girls and children in conflict and emergency settings. The framing of education within this Instagram photo and caption distinguishes it from the other posts included in the sample. In all others, securing girls’ access to formal schooling is the dominant policy frame constructed through both image and text.

Photo Reportage: “Mercy’s Story”

Imaging girls as students reshapes their identity as schoolgirls, and highlights the ways in which childhood is increasingly organized by educational status and opportunity (Bloch et al. 2006). There are four instagrammed images included in the sample that tell the story of a single girl subject. The subject is referred to as Mercy, a nine-year-old girl living in Liberia whose mother passed away during the 2014 Ebola epidemic. I draw from elements of photo reportage and photo story to explore UNICEF’s collection and dissemination of these four images. Citing Wolny-Zmorzyński (2007, 2011), Kędra defines photo reportage as consisting of “at least three photographs, ordered sequentially, of which one indicates the place where the event happened, the second specifies the time, and the third one presents the photographer’s (visual) commentary to the event” (2013: 28). In contrast to photo reportage, Kędra describes photo stories as consisting of 8 to 12 photographs, taken by a single photographer, on a specific issue or theme. The collection of instagrammed photos that tell Mercy’s story falls short of the range noted by Kędra but meets the other two criteria. All four photos are taken by the same photographer, as evidenced in the photo credit at the end of each caption.

These four images and their accompanying captions bring together the three policy tools I observe through UNICEF’s use of Instagram: placemaking; imaging compelling policy events; and organizational voice. Taken together, the photo reportage of “Mercy’s Story” constructs a policy narrative that placemakes UNICEF’s work to advocate for schooling access in emergencies. Table 1 details each photo and accompanying caption included in UNICEF’s photo reportage of Mercy’s story.

Mercy’s lived experience is constructed using organizational voice and not her own. She is described in the captions, as detailed above, as a nine-year-old girl whose mother passed away during the Ebola epidemic of 2014. Despite the focus on Mercy as the primary subject, she is never quoted directly. Mercy’s photo story is unique among the other photos and captions in the sample because it does not explicitly reference UNICEF’s role. In all other photos in which Ebola is the compelling policy event, UNICEF explicitly references its activities to improve school sanitation and hygiene, train teachers, and provide psychosocial support and transitional housing for students. Three of the four photo captions direct the user to UNICEF’s website for “more on Mercy’s story.” Though indirect, I argue that the inclusion of the link-in bio appropriates Mercy’s story to promote UNICEF’s agenda.

The Ethics of Imaging Girls as a Target Population

My analysis of the data sourced from UNICEF’s Instagram account suggests that girls’ education policy needs are not constructed as unique or distinct from children’s. Their policy needs are framed as access to schooling, without much attention being paid to the policy contexts that enable (or disable) their educational opportunity and mobility. With the exception of one girl, those imaged in the instagrammed photos are reported to be living in temporary housing for displaced persons because of civil unrest, health risks, or natural disaster. Girls are uniquely vulnerable targets for violence and exploitation during crises, and locating them by name, face, and in place could, potentially, increase their risk.

The use of photo reportage through “Mercy’s Story” reflects Kirk and Magno’s guidance that images of girls and girls’ education should show “policy in action” (2009: 26), and not girls in stand-alone, decontextualized settings. This particular case could be strengthened by increasing Mercy’s engagement and participation. She is a passive subject in the photos; her story is told by employing a single narrative using organizational voice to describe her lived experience. UNICEF requires that photographers and partners “avoid categorizations or descriptions that expose a child to negative reprisals—including additional physical or psychological harm, or to lifelong abuse, discrimination or rejection by their local communities” (UNICEF n.d.: n.p.). Here, organizational voice may have reduced Mercy’s risk of re-traumatization. However, by not including her own words to tell her story, UNICEF’s photo reportage has constructed Mercy as an “object of rescue” rather than a “subject of agency” (Giorgis and Farrah 2015: n.p.).

New Media Ethics in Education Policy Research

Returning to the third research question, which focuses on the ethical challenges of using image-intensive new media data in education policy research, I conclude that Instagram can be leveraged as a powerful policy tool to frame girls’ education policy goals in development and humanitarian aid contexts. I suggest two guiding practices for researchers using new media data in education policy research.

Interrogate Images as Agenda Frames

Imaging target populations reinforces normative constructions of gender, childhood, and vulnerability (Schneider and Ingram 1993). This creates a double-bind for policy actors because often the images that are most compelling reproduce developmentalist discourses about girls and women as yoked target populations with the same policy needs (Burman 2008; Anderson 2016). Constructing women and girls as a yoked target population conflates their unique and distinct policy vulnerabilities. Education for All (EFA) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) advanced girls’ educational access as a pathway to women’s empowerment (Anderson 2016; Monkman and Hoffman 2012). MDGs 2 and 3 reinforced the access-focused education policy targets set through EFA Goals 2 and 5; the first of which focused on achieving gender parity and universal primary education while the second aspired to eliminate all gender barriers at all levels of education by 2015. UNICEF was a principal actor in MDGs 2 and 3, and in EFA (Jones 2006). As Lombardo and Agustín (2012); Unterhalter (2005, 2012), Kulawik (2009) and Lather (1986) have pointed out elsewhere and in different contexts, this may have unintentionally reinforced the structural and institutional inequalities that inform those binary constructions because they do not attend to the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, and place that influences how education policy problems and solutions are framed

Imaging children as vulnerable populations is not a new practice in policy and development sectors. I argue that new media expands and accelerates policy discourses because it has the potential to reach larger and more diverse networks compared to the reach of old media (Alessi and Alessi 2008), and modes of discourse circulation like annual reports, policy briefs, and commissioned white papers, for example. This expanded and accelerated access to image-intensive new media data requires new approaches to positionality and reflexivity in qualitative research.

The images and texts that UNICEF constructs and circulates through Instagram are not agenda-neutral. The ways in which girls are constructed as a target population through UNICEF’s Instagram account suggest an integrated and intentional approach to new media policy discourse dissemination. All images include a photographer credit and copyright that explicitly communicate that the images reflect UNICEF’s organizational brand and agenda. The inclusion of photographer credit and copyright is important for researchers engaging with new media; it situates UNICEF’s Instagram content in the public domain, and it provides researchers with assurance that photographs were taken in accordance with UNICEF’s guidelines for reporting on children (MediaWire/UNICEF 2005; UNICEF n.d.).

Situate Data in the Public Domain

One of the strengths of using new media as a policy tool is that it enables dynamic interaction between and among policy actors. This dynamic engagement between organizations and individuals further complicates sampling protocols and the assent and confidentiality of imaged subjects as well as individual-users. The interaction between organizational and individual-users through new media creates the need for adapted research protocols to avoid potential threats to individual-users’ privacy and confidentiality. The essential question is whether individual-users’ participation in new media communicates assent to participate in research and policy analysis. I posit that participation does not communicate assent because of the potential threats to privacy and confidentiality for individual-users. Researchers should consider users’ expectations about how their comments will be used in new media forums. In other words, just because an individual posts a comment to a photo posted by an organization like UNICEF this does not necessarily mean that she or he has assented to have those comments used in academic or policy research. The absence of protocols for individual-user generated data leaves no mechanism for individuals to revoke consent for the use of their data in research. Individual-users’ engagement with organizations’ official accounts can be, and are often, de-identified.

The inclusion of new media data sourced from individual-users accounts in research makes it possible to link individuals through comments and diffusion metrics—indicators that proxy reception. For Instagram, these metrics include the number of likes and user comments on each post. This potential for disclosure of individuals’ privacy and confidentiality creates specific ethical concerns for researchers engaging with new media. A guiding practice to ensure that images are within the public domain is to sample directly from organizations’ official accounts and not individual-users’ accounts. The inclusion of comments made by individual-users to posts from organization accounts degrades the boundary between the public and private domains.

The incorporation of diffusion metrics to proxy reception presents additional challenges related to credibility and data integrity. A guiding practice for researchers to address potential threats to credibility and data integrity is to consider how their collection strategy might affect the diffusion metrics for individual posts, as well as their subsequent interpretation. As an example of these guiding practices in use, the analyses presented in this article rely exclusively on organization-user data sourced directly from UNICEF’s Instagram account. I used a single-point collection strategy to build a sample from this account. To maintain data integrity, I chose not to include diffusion metrics in my analysis because the single-point collection strategy could, potentially, inflate the number of likes and comments on older posts. Diffusion metrics can be used to indicate the speed and spread of discourse diffusion, but I argue that they are not especially useful to understand individual users’ sense-making and negotiation of complex policy discourses.