Transcript Microsoft PowerPoint - Bournemouth University Research Online

Connecting participatory methods
in a study of youth and risk
Wendy Cutts, Dr. Carrie Hodges, Dr. Lee-Ann Fenge
Bournemouth University
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Background
• Government policy emphasis the participation and inclusion of young
people (DfES, 2005,2006).
• Reform’s in young peoples services include an emphasis on
participation, youth action and youth-led services, youth councils and
a citizenship curriculum in schools (DfEs, 2006).
• Policy such as Youth Matters (2005) emphasise the influence of
young people in community capacity building.
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Background
• Tensions exist between target
driven top-down approaches
and more ground-up
approaches to engage with
young people (Milbourne,
2009).
• It is therefore important to
create spaces in which
marginalised youth are
encouraged to participate and
have their voices heard.
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The Word on the Street
• In 2007 Bournemouth University was commissioned by
Bournemouth Youth Service to survey young people in the 13-19
age group to explore their attitudes, opinions and experiences
(Cutts, Redmond and Taylor, 2007).
Two key findings :
• respondents had concerns about safety which were not always
borne out by the reality of their experiences.
• Young people felt that they were not listened to or had enough
influence in their neighbourhoods.
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Current project
• The Word on the Street has provided the impetus for this project
which aims to engage with marginalised young people to explore
their concerns about safety in their local communities.
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Scope of research
• Encourage support from the bottom up, not ‘buy-in’ from the top-down
i.e. participatory process of co-creating knowledge (Koch, et al., 2002;
Minkler et al., 2002)
• Places emphasis on critical insights of community collaborators (Cahill,
2007:327).
•
‘a voice’ for social change – participatory message development
(White, 2003; Lassiter 2005).
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Aim of research
• Work to involve young people
in community settings through
capacity building.
• Co-create knowledge and
understandings to explore
connectivity between youth
behaviour and attitudes
towards risk and safety.
• Influence decision makers in
order to encourage a change in
policy and reallocation of
resources.
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3 phases of research
Phase 1:
Desk research on access young people living outside large cities have
to cultural resources – ‘cultural capital’.
Phase 2:
Explore young people’s attitudes about the affect of media
Representation and prevailing attitudes in their local community.
 Poster exercise – representations of youth and security in the media to
explore how media images and representations are constructed.
 One on one interviews - explore the ideas behind the posters together
with individual experiences of safety in their local community.
Phase 3:
• Participatory multi-method approach with an overall focus on
collaborative ethnography.
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Phase 3: Collaborative Ethnography
• Combines ethnographic insight with participatory approaches to
enable the community to reflect on their life conditions.
• Culture influences not only the context of ‘conversation’ but also the
way in which ‘conversation’ takes place.
• “…“risk” is extremely contextual and fluent, what is or is not
considered a “risk” depends…on other things. Social relationships,
power relations and hierarchies, cultural beliefs, trust in institutions,
knowledge, experience, discourses, practices and collective
memories all shape notions about risk and safety” (Boholm, 2003)
• Necessitates an appreciation of challenges and tensions regarding
participation and open dialogue within the community as well as
definitions and attitudes towards risk.
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Collaborative and Performance
Ethnography
• Collaborative ethnography & ethnodrama (performance
ethnography) (Saldana, 2005).
• "Employs the traditional craft and artistic techniques of theatre
production to mount for an audience a live performance event of
research participants' experiences and/or the researcher's
interpretations of data. This research... can be conducted by
artists, scholars or even by the participants themselves... The
goal is to investigate a particular facet of the human condition
for the purposes of adapting those observations and insights into a
performance medium...”
(Saldana, 2005, pp. 1-2)
• Theatre, poster making, photography, dance, music etc., led by
psychologists, artists, community development specialists and
researchers.
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Learning lessons from Peru
• Asociacion Kallpa
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Collaborative and Performance
Ethnography
• Collective action for empowerment (Crabtree, 1998, p. 189) and
decision-making.
 allows young people to have a conversation about their experiences and
needs and to influence practice, policies and attitudes.
• Use of the Arts as a tool and a process.
 with potential to raise issues of insecurity, risk and marginalisation,
encourage wider debate and facilitate social change.
• Performance as a method as well as a subject of ethnographic
research.
• Performance ethnography as praxis “a way of acting on the world in
order to change it” (Denzin, 2003: 228).
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“Sin Vergüenza”
In 2008 Wendy Cutts met Frances Bartlett of ‘Sin Vergüenza’ in
Barcelona.
• Sin Verguenza - theatrical and cultural association founded in 2008.
• Received a Government Grant to work in schools including those
with special need and youth community centres.
• Work with young people in the age range 6-17.
• They showed an interest in working with this project and
subsequently bid successfully for funding from their local
government specifically for work with a visiting group of young
people from Bournemouth in Barcelona.
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Challenges of the research approach
•
•
•
•
Developing a methodology which is inclusive of marginalised voices.
Sampling issues and participant self-selection.
Establishing trust.
Identifying potential risks and ethical issues to protect community
members.
• ‘Drama’ (theatre, visual arts, music etc.,) takes place within and is
shaped by a particular cultural context. Therefore, need to find
artistic forms that are relevant to the particular community/group.
• Researcher(s)’, facilitators’ & community’s motivations, conflicts of
interest and reflexivity (White, 2003; Lassiter, 2008).
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•
Using the performance to influence or change practice of those living with,
legislating for or working with young people.
‘Text is often only linear and, therefore, temporal; in text the meaning must
be precise or risk disbelief. Working visually involves a significant shift away
from the often oddly lifeless and mechanical accounts of everyday life in
textual representation, towards sociological engagements that are
contextual, kinaesthetic and sensual: that live.’ (Halford and Knowles, 2005)
•
Producing a performance that is of artistic merit, showcases young peoples’
talent, entertains and informs in a language understandable to the audience
and performers.
Traditional methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory—that which is
subject to vision, sound, taste, smell; with the emotional—time-space
compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual;
and the kinaesthetic—the pleasures and pains that follow the movement
and displacement of people, objects, information, and ideas. (Law and Urry
2004: 390-410.)
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Dramatic influences
Community Plays
The cast moves the audience around through various techniques to
where the story is being told. Jon Oram, Artistic Director of Claque
Theatre of the Purbeck Community Play ‘Voices in the Stone’ describes
a process whereby:
‘the audience learns something about themselves because they have
been placed in situations rather than watched other characters
respond in theirs. We are discovering ploys to entice the audience in
such as stopping the play to reflect, involving the audience in ritual,
interjecting the play with probes and questions; practices more
associated with educational drama than theatre. In all this we have
to be determined not to bully but to edge the audiences in almost
unawares. (Oram, J)
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Dramatic influences contd
Participatory Theatre
Punchdrunk Theatre combined the promenade, mask and vignette as a
means of storytelling with a novel twist in The Masque of the Red
Death. Based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe it ran in London to
packed houses (or in this case a warehouse). The audience explores a
Theatrical environment ‘in which they are free to choose what they
want to watch and where they go’ Here it is the audience members are
masked!
So where could we find a similarly impressive venue?
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Partner (and possible venue)
Streetwise
‘a life sized, indoor, award winning, safety ‘village’ of scenarios
which are traditionally built ‘bricks and mortar’ scenes from everyday
life. The village includes a full sized two-storey house, a high street,
a park, a farmyard, a, electricity sub-station, a heath, a beach, a
building site and even Police and railway stations’
www.streetwise.org.uk
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Challenges of research approach
• Evaluating the effectiveness of ‘drama’ in influencing decision
makers e.g. an individual’s response to a drama will also be shaped
by personality, experience and cultural factors.
• Ethnodrama will not present ‘generalisable findings’.
 Aims to present ‘ideas to be considered’ (Eisner, 1998) and aligining them
to similar situations i.e. middle range/substantive theory (Grybovych &
Dieser, 2010 p. 30).
• Participatory evaluation of the overall project.
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FUNDING!
• The project process goes in circles – can’t get the funding to develop
the project until you have young people to work with and make bids
with and can’t get the young people involved until you know that you
can make it happen!
• Gatekeepers. People with access to groups of young people who
see them as theirs to work with and will want to own projects –
climate caused by competitive tendering and bidding competition.
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Funding continued
• Local support – unless local funding support is given it is often not
supported by fund holders. Local politics play a big part- the arts can
be seen by some as a ‘fluffy’ option. The Safer Stronger Partnership
and in particular the Police were keen to have dissemination by
performance. The money set aside was subsumed into another
initiative.
• ‘Sin Vergüenza’, our partners in Barcelona, have secured funding
from their local government to work with young people from
Bournemouth on this project. It is ring fenced but they are going to
have to give it back if it is not spent in this year and apply again..
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Current situation
There has been a lot of interest in this project because it offers
various opportunities:
• to find out whether young people young people’s attitudes to safety are
affected by what they hear or read in the media or by the prevailing opinion
in their local community.
• to find out whether young peoples’ perceptions of powerlessness in their
local community impact on their notions of safety.
• to allow young people the opportunity to have a conversation about their
experiences and needs.
• to influence the practice, policies and attitudes of those people living with
and working with young people.
• to empower young people to take part in the local decision making process
• to give young people the opportunity to gain new skills and showcase their
talent
• for young people to visit and work with young people in another country,
experience diversity and enjoy co-operative working.
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But to date…..
No funding in the UK
and
No artistic partner
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References
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Boholm, A (2003). The cultural nature of risk: Can there be an anthropology of uncertainty?
Ethnos, 68, pp. 159-178.
Cahill, C. (2007) Including excluded perspectives in participatory action research, Design Studies,
28, pp.325-340.
Conrad, D (2004) Exploring risky youth experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory,
Performative Research Method. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 3 (1).
Crabtree, J (1988) ‘Mutual Empowerment in Cross-cultural Participatory Development and Service
Learning: Lessons in Communication and Social Justice from Projects in El Salvador and
Nicaragua’. Journal of Applied Research, 26 (2), pp. 182-209.
Cutts, W., Redmond, M. and Taylor, G. (2007) The Word on the Streets, Bournemouth:
Bournemouth University.
Denzin, Norman K. (2003) Performance Ethnography, Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of
Culture, Thousand Oaks: Sage.
DfES 2005 Youth Matters, Green Paper, Nottingham: Department for Education and Skills.
DfES 2006 Youth Matters: next Steps, Nottingham: department for Education and Skills.
Eisner, E. W. (1998) The enlightened eye. Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational
practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Grybovych, O & Dieser, R (2010) Happiness & Leisure: An ethnodrama, Act 1. Leisure/Loisir, 34
(1), pp.27-50.
Halford,S and Knowles, C. (2005) More Than Words: Some Reflections on Working Visually.
University of Southampton and Goldsmiths College
Koch,T., Selim, P., & Kralik, D. (2002) Enhancing lives through the development of a communitybased participatory action research programme, Journal of Clinical Nursing, 11, pp.109-117.
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Lassiter, L. E. (2008) When We Disagree: On engaging the force of difference in
collaborative, reciprocal and participatory researches. Paper presented at the 107th
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco,
California.
Lassiter, L. E. (2005) The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Law, J.& Urry, J. (2004) Enacting the social. Economy and Society, 33,3: 390-410.
Milbourne, L. (2009) Valuing Difference of Securing Compliance? Working to Involve
Young People in Community Settings, Children and Society, 23, pp.347-363.
Minkler,M.& Wallerstein, N. (2003) Introduction to community based participatory
research. In M. Minkler & n. Wallerstein (eds) Community-based participatory
research for health, Jossey-Bass, San Franscisco, pp.3-26.
Pifer, D. (1999) Small town race: A performance text, Qualitative Inquiry, 5 (4), pp.
541-562.
Reason, P. (1994) Participation in Human Inquiry, London: Sage.
Saldana, J., (2005) Ethnodrama An Anthology of Reality Theatre, AltaMira Press.
White, S. A. (2003) Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower.
London: Sage.
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References
www.claquetheatre.com
www.punchdrunk.org.uk
www.streetwise.org.uk
www.kallpa.org.pe/
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