Doing the Snap: Storytelling and Participatory Photography with Women Porters in Ghana

This article describes the use of participatory photography to examine the lives of women migrants who work as head porters in urban Ghana. African markets are one of the few public spaces dominated by women, and this article analyzes how visual methodologies can successfully interrogate hierarchies of labor and the social marginalization of head porters known as kayayoo . Focusing on the sensory storytelling with photographs, this essay demonstrates how porters use photo‐narratives to situate their notions of industriousness, resilience, and embodied transportation. Storytelling with photographs analyzes how everyday habits reflect the marginalizing structures of Ghanaian markets and the way migrants assert their presence despite their outsider status.