Research As a Space of Youth Citizenship: Exploring the Potentials and Limits of Co-Production

Recently, there has been a growing interest in participatory methodologies that seek to research with young people, recognising them as co-researchers and employing strategies to ensure that they can express their perspectives on their lives.

While co-production holds potential to enhance understandings of youth lives, it is still often problematic. Young people are commonly excluded from key stages of the research process, power-sharing is often more tokenistic than transformative, inequalities among youth are unconsciously reproduced, and aspirations of long-term relationships and impact are constrained by project-based timelines and institutional demands.

Promises and limitations of participatory methods are commonly assessed focusing on knowledge production, while less attention is paid to their implications for youth citizenship. This session shifts the focus from co-production as a methodology for producing knowledge on youth, to explore youth experiences of citizenship within research. If citizenship involves participation in decision-making and the capacity to shape shared concerns, then participatory research may be understood as a distinctive site of citizenship: a space in which young people experience, enact and learn citizenship.

We are interested in papers that examine how participatory research can create opportunities for democratic learning and the enactment of citizenship, as well as how it may also negatively shape young people’s experiences of citizenship by disappointing their expectations, silencing their voices or “domesticating” their practices of engagement. We expect the session to contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between research and citizenship, and of the impacts that research may have on young people’s lives.