In our previous blog post we spoke to how conversational approaches might be supplemented by an ethnomethodological approach in our work with young people in the Good Shepherd Centre. Our concern has been to avoid replicating dominant methodologies targeted at ‘at-risk’ youth, which can risk amplifying limited portrayals of young people in secure care. Existing characterisations include the vulnerable and apolitical recipient of support services; the object of compassion in abstracting national policy constructions, or, within deficit-based social care practices, the dependent victim requiring legal protections, trauma counselling and psychosocial support.
We have tried to think creatively about approaches that might allow these young people to be subjects in their own right. Picking up on some of the best practice we have witnessed around the young people, we have prioritised a strengths-based lens, continually asking the methodological questions: how can individual capacities be unearthed, shared, witnessed and understood with sensitivity and compassion? How can knowledge be produced about these young people, with their involvement as both agents and subjects? What does child-centred methodology look like in practice? How might it be difficult for these young people to speak about hope? And how can research create both a space for expression and help create a climate of possibility?
We are finding that participation in the daily life of the centre is enabling us to more aptly bear witness to and convey the subtle challenges and opportunities for hope in secure care. It is also supporting a far more nuanced understanding of the complexity and humanity of each young person. In the past few weeks, we have considered the participatory activities we have used, and could potentially use, to allow for young people in secure care to share their experiences. Some of the activities so far include a language and representations workshop where young people offered their opinions on how they are being represented in relevant literature and reports on ‘at-risk youth’ and secure care, in which young people seemed grateful for the opportunity to have their voices heard on how they and their situations are being portrayed and spoken about. We also made participatory videos in which young people took the lead in questioning staff at the Good Shepherd Centre about their hopes. Everyone involved, both young people and staff, commented on how it was interesting and useful to flip the power dynamics around and position young people as the ones asking questions. Also, perhaps demonstrating a need to check for authenticity, one of the questions the young people wanted to ask of all staff was what brought them into their work in secure care? Other questions included what they would say to young people who had lost hope and what gave them hope in their own life.
We have plans in the coming weeks to facilitate an arts-based, non-verbal exploration of hope through mural making, and then to support young people in making a documentary that will explore what hope means to them. Our intention here is that we will be able to maintain a strengths-based approach towards exploring hope, whilst allowing young people to engage with this topic on their own terms and in ways that suit their unique needs – and also that preserve their right to unexamined inner lives in research contexts.
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