What is it about?
In many ways, this paper is my response to research 'failure'. Instead of a transformative experience for young people at a school which had been deemed to be 'failing', the project's end goal, of a celebratory profiling of the young people's digital story telling and community mapping, simply didn't happen. This paper is my attempt to trace back where it went wrong.
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Why is it important?
This paper explores through a theoretical framework of Arendt which research failure and lack of transformative change for young people may occur. It is important because it highlights how short-term our research goals and set up are - and explores how these presentist assumptions undermine knowledge and understandings of social exclusion.
Perspectives
Whilst my personal sense of loss and failure partly motivated this paper, I found a theoretical framework from Hannah Arendt was crucial to help me explain what had happened. Arendt's notion of 'webs of social relations' and how these are also deeply historically and geographical embedded, helped me to understand some of my 'presentist' assumptions which unraveled in the course of the research.
Dr Bronwyn Elisabeth Wood
Victoria University of Wellington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Excluded citizens? Participatory research with young people from a ‘failing’ school community, Children s Geographies, May 2015, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2015.1043515.
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