Photovoice A Focus on Dialogue, Young People, Peace and Change

This paper explores how dialogue was introduced by the author through a model of praxis called ‘Young People Peace and Change.’ It was developed through community-based research, and further supported by evidence from school-based youth work, with young people in two cities in England. The paper focuses on the role of dialogue as part of Photovoice, linked to the duality of our praxis to provoke consciousness and action. It is an exciting and innovative theory-driven approach that actively seeks to help young people identify, understand and transform pressing issues and challenges of peace in their everyday lives. The work emerges from the belief that part of the solution to young people and violence is embedded in their common concerns and aspirations for peace, which can be elicited by bringing them safely into dialogue. Furthermore, the project seeks to cultivate real change by helping young people to ‘speak’ and self-advocate through a range of methodologies including photography, photo-elicitation and public engagement, to inform youth serving systems. ‘Young People Peace and Change’ has been awarded and recognised for successfully engaging a significantly vulnerable community of young people (including those at risk of violence). It has great potential for replicability and wider implications for practitioners, students, policy makers and research

A Local-Global Approach to Critical Peace Consciousness and Mobilisation as Disruptive Counter-Narratives

This paper examines opportunities for peace, as a dichotomy between the actual and re-imagined state of the world, using a Critical Peace Education (CPE) framework, and a Global Youth Work (GYW) pedagogic approach. Drawing from similar and shared constructs presented by CPE and GYW, such as developing local human rights and participatory citizenship, teaching consciousness-raising in and out of schools, and scrutinising how the theory and application of CPE and GYW can influence structural and cultural violence, this paper asserts the need to re-engage with the more radical roots of CPE and GYW as having potential for new stories in peace studies and education that resist the status quo using knowledge and action. The authors are keen to disrupt simplified representations of peace, and uniformity of what is meant by peace, in CPE and GYW theory and practice, and the implications this has both for the social reproduction of inequality, and for youth workers and young people. Secondly, the paper will redress how peace can be understood and acted upon as critical dialogue with young people to unpick and transform experiences for agency. This paper will contribute to a greater understanding of re-imagining peace in everyday life, and the relationship between peace and practice, as part of a decolonised post-critical approach, supported by examples for how youth workers and young people have actively worked towards opportunities for peace in the duality of praxis and consciousness in their everyday life

Young people, situated learning, and peace praxis at the margins of everyday life

In the literature, peace is often depicted in relation to conflict or war-affected areas e.g. the troubles in Northern Ireland or Colombia. By contrast, this study does not prioritise epistemologies of peace validated in spatial and conceptual spaces of ‘conflict-affected peace’, such as ‘everyday peace’ and ‘peacebuilding’. Instead, it has drawn attention to the possible polemologic vestiges of peace; and questions why peace is rarely investigated independently, and so often organised around encoded conflict narratives (Freire & Lopes, 2008; Gleditsch, et al., 2014; Stallworth-Clark, 2006; Van den Dungen & Witner, 2003). Building on previous findings, the study has examined how young people understand peace as part of their everyday life, and how they understand their knowledge of peace as praxis. Influenced by participant action research, built around an original approach to photovoice, data were gathered longitudinally over two and a half years, from 21 inner-city young people (aged 15-24) in the Midlands, England. Using participatory photography, interviews, and dialogue groups, young people were offered genuine opportunities to take part and actively share their ideas and solutions for peace, both in and outside of the research. Throughout the study young people engaged with wider audiences speaking out about peace in their lives with their peers, families, professionals and senior management; and the researcher showcased their viewpoint to generate a groundswell of interest about peace, including curricula development, teaching, youth and community work, and consultancy. The findings offer three key emergent themes. The first was characterised by how young people have understood peace as being more than ‘deficit peace’, characterised by non-binary peace, ahistorical peace, and change and peace. The second theme focused how young people understood peace as unreflexive and deliberate peace affirming tactics (PATs), consisting of how they spoke about their relationships to people around them, and how they are socialised into peace skills; and their deliberate and random tactics for peace as social coherence shaped by ideas of equality, respect, and social justice. PATs also highlighted the importance of participant’s self-initiated peace as self-regulatory and transformative; formulated as natural self-care, wellness, and coping. The third theme emerged from the participant's concerns and aspirations for peace and illustrated how young people understood their knowledge of peace as self-representation and advocacy tactics (SRATs). SRATs carried messages about the importance of taking action for peace, such as ripple acts, voicing, and seeking a community response. SRATs also demonstrated how young people critically confronted their issues of peace as critical literacy in the taken-for-granted-ness of their everyday language, and their everyday understanding of everyday life. The study makes an original contribution to knowledge by shedding light on the ways young people understand peace, and what this means for the conceptualisations of peace in peace studies; and by giving careful attention to the continuum of peace as structure and agency in the minutiae of everyday life. Two, the study uncovers evidence of how young people’s knowledge of peace contributes to peace, and through a learning process in the context of research; that is, what young people do with what they know, which is rarely documented longitudinally. Three, methodologically, the thesis was influenced by Participatory Action Research and built around an original approach to photovoice (PV) to elicit young people´s perspectives and concerns. What is innovative is that it offered opportunities for participation within and outside the scope of the research, creating safe spaces for self-introspection, dialogue with peers, and for action by which young people engaged their communities. This thesis supports the idea that PAR can be a valuable tool in education, youth work, and peace work; and is ground breaking in its attempt to bring youth work, contemporary critical peace education, and public engagement together. The study has shown great potential for replicability, including engaging with significantly vulnerable communities, such as young people who are marginalised or at risk of violence