Abstract
The following chapter discusses some of the key issues arising in performing research. It draws on a collaborative participatory action research project exploring the experiences of young people, who would be considered disadvantaged, in austerity England. The findings were disseminated through the medium of theater that was also filmed. The project proved a success in several ways: giving some young people a voice they had not had before, building confidence and critical consciousness, and impacting profoundly on the audiences through offering a more proportionate insight into the struggles young people endure, under the impact of forced austerity to that found in mainstream media and political representations. However, the intent and actuality of this project proved, in the end, to be mismatched, suggesting that the co-construction of knowledge is complicated by power relations, trust, and the foregrounding of the crucial issues of ownership, consent, and control. Ethical problems arose in relation to committing some of the stories to film. In particular, the issues of anonymity were not fully thought through, and it was only realized afterwards that some young people’s well-being might be compromised by experiencing their essence drift into the ether of the Internet for posterity, crucially out of their control.
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Hughes, G., Cooper, C. (2017). Critical Pedagogy and the Risks Associated with Performing Lifeworlds. In: Evans, R., Holt, L. (eds) Methodological Approaches. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 2. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-020-9_24
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