Imagining resistance? reflecting on the role of creative practice in facilitating young people’s capacity to represent and document their own experiences of resistance

While “resistance” is often used to describe “fighting back” against oppression and subjugation, for young people the word resistance is often used by safeguarding professionals to refer to negative, disruptive behaviours rather than evidence of their creativity, agency and strength in the face of oppression. In this paper, we share findings and reflections from Imagining Resistance, a three-year multi-disciplinary project that explored how young people in England (n=20, aged 13–25) who have experienced sexual abuse, violence and exploitation engage in processes and acts of resistance. Imagining Resistance set out to utilise photovoice (Wang and Burris 1997), a qualitative research method centred on photography, in a series of creative workshops with young people. However, our approach changed over the course of the project, influenced by O’Neill’s (2012) concept of “ethno-mimesis”, which involves collecting ethnographic data alongside the creation of visual and poetic responses to prompts offered within flexibly structured creative workshop settings. This shift occurred as the young people pushed back, resisting the intended methodology while remaining open to other creative arts methods. This enabled us to think more critically about how the use of participatory and creative arts methods can facilitate emancipatory research practices that are responsive to young people’s developing understanding of resistance and their experiences of reimagining resistance as a fluid, generative and hopeful collective endeavour.