Abstract
Children and youth often demonstrate resilience and capacity in the face of disasters. Yet, they are typically not given the opportunities to engage in youth-driven research and lack access to official channels through which to contribute their perspectives to policy and practice during the recovery process. To begin to fill this void in research and action, this multi-site research project engaged youth from disaster-affected communities in Canada and the United States. This article presents a flexible youth-centric workshop methodology that uses participatory and arts-based methods to elicit and explore youth’s disaster and recovery experiences. The opportunities and challenges associated with initiating and maintaining partnerships, reciprocity and youth-adult power differentials using arts-based methods, and sustaining engagement in post-disaster settings, are discussed. Ultimately, this work contributes to further understanding of the methods being used to conduct research for, with, and about youth.Keywords: youth, disaster recovery, engagement, resilience, arts-based methods, participatory research
Highlights
Youth Creating Disaster Recovery & Resilience (YCDR2) is a crossborder initiative aimed at learning from and with disaster-affected youth 13 to 22 years of age in Joplin, Missouri, in the United States, and Slave Lake, Calgary and High River, Alberta, in Canada
Beyond the practical and theoretical advances of the work, which are described elsewhere (Cox,et al 2016; Fletcher et al 2016), the project offers a number of methodological contributions and lessons learned about community and youth engagement and processes that simultaneously highlight the capacities of youth, generate data, and provide novel options for knowledge mobilisation in disaster research and practice
This article, describes the YCDR2 engagement and research process and elaborates on the opportunities and challenges associated with establishing youth-community-academic partnerships in postdisaster contexts
Summary
Youth Creating Disaster Recovery & Resilience (YCDR2) is a crossborder initiative aimed at learning from and with disaster-affected youth 13 to 22 years of age in Joplin, Missouri, in the United States, and Slave Lake, Calgary and High River, Alberta, in Canada. Since the 1990s, these methods have increasingly been identified as an effective tool for democratically engaging children and youth in the research process – from design to implementation to dissemination of results (Alderson & Morrow 2011; Christensen & James 2008; Hart 1992; James & Prout 1990) The impetus for this shift was inspired, in part, by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was instrumental in establishing that children have the right to participate in age-appropriate decision-making processes that affect their lives, families, schools and communities (Checkoway 2011). Wong and colleagues call for participatory methods and typologies that recognise the range of developmental needs and evolving capacities of youth and the degree to which youth and adults share power, responsibilities and decision-making in a project
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