Mixing media and methods

Youth in care are quite frequently the subject of research, as opposed to being the producers of research. PAR was chosen as a method that challenges the researcher-researched hierarchy, creating knowledge that values the lived realities of traditionally excluded people in society. Taking research beyond the academy (Cahill & Torre, 2007), the action component of PAR is integral to the method. Advocacy groups including Youth In Care Canada continually express that youth deserve more say in child welfare policies. By adopting PAR as a method, these desires for more say can be honoured. Moreover, current best practices in youth in care and former youth in care research suggest that cultivating belonging through peer relationships is integral to improved youth life outcomes (Snow & Mann-Feder, 2013). Through PAR, research subjects become co-researchers who work together and challenge social stigma.

Given the significant over-representation of indigenous youth in Canadian foster homes and group homes, indigenous research methods guided the research process. Indigenous research methods are made up of multiple epistemological and ontological beliefs, with a common theme of relationality throughout, drawing strongly on Wilson (2008), who emphasizes that research is ceremony, the importance of relational accountability, and that, ultimately, good research should change you as a person. Understanding accountability to youth participants shaped their role as co-researchers and supported designing a research project where youth capacities were enhanced by the very nature of the research process (through workshops, renumeration, skill-building, peer support, and public art shows).

Lastly, ABR methods were selected because, when traumatic memories are being considered, materiality has been shown to be a useful way to process issues. ABR can make meaning through narrative, poetry, performance, theatre, dance, film, visual arts, and music, and can be used at any and all stages of the research process, from idea generation, exploration, presentation, to dissertation (Leavy, 2008). Like all research endeavours, ABRseeks to develop new insight and knowledge that are relevant and applicable. What is so different about ABR is that theory and practice are more entwined; a living research praxis is created with the arts that acknowledges the body, the language of metaphor, emotions, and imaginaries through exploring pressing social research questions. Theatre of the Oppressed drama workshops (Conrad, 2010) and Photovoice (Castleden & Garvin, 2008) have been some of the most commonly used community arts practices in Canada. ABR excels at exploratory, descriptive, and process-based research topics, and, through these research methods, youth are telling their story in their own way, on their terms (Finley, 2008; Leavy, 2008).

Findings

Resilience as resistance

One of the most immediate themes emergent in the work of co-researchers was the desire to beat the odds stacked against them in life. These desires express a multitude of relationships and experiences to foster siblings, group home workers, social workers, family and self. Resilience framed as resistance was presented artistically as hip hop lyrics by one co-researcher, for example:

if life is what you make it then I really got a chance that’s my motivation when they tell me that I can’t so tell me that I can’t man, tell me that I can’t they told me what I can’t and look what it made me

Similar statements were made in photography works, spoken word, and silk-screen t-shirts. The immediate presence of this theme required additional readings on resilience, resistance, and vulnerability to better understand the work produced by co-researchers. Resilience comes through in the art and artist statements as resistance, as an intentional act of surviving in spite of the child welfare system. This manifestation of resilience from these young co-researchers is fundamentally different from a traditional definition. Place turns out to be integral to the knowledge produced, where the alienation produced through displacement in foster and group homes is more significant in an urban/suburban environment than in the Yukon. Thus, the north (or maybe smaller communities in general) exists as a protective factor against the alienation that the child welfare system produces through placement bouncing, as youth get to remain closer and connected to their cultural and spatial communities of childhood and adolescence.

Resilience as resistance is also seen through representations of indigenous culture and ontologies from indigenous co-researchers as an example of ongoing resistance against colonialism. This was present in both projects with indigenous co-researchers, but especially evident in Whitehorse, with the repeated use of clan animals in paintings and drawings, and the choice of materials and media including feathers, beads, sinew, and hide. Resilience as resistance is an interesting concept, a way to frame personal survival, if not success, in opposition to oppressive others. These others identified by co-researchers include child welfare agencies, specific social workers and group home staff, and unsupportive teachers. A conscious decision to seek a positive outcome not just for oneself, but as a demonstration of personal power against oppression has a relational connection to resilience, albeit one that is driven strongly by negatively predicted outcomes instead of hope for a better future.

Resilience is how subjects are to “be” in this precarious modern world (Evans & Reid, 2014). With regards to young people who have lived the trauma of broken families and ended up in the child welfare system, resilience is measured as the mainstream success of the young person such as stable housing, good employment, and academic success, despite the tremendous difficulties in their lives. There are strong critiques of this idea of resilience, tying it into the offloaded responsibility and entrepreneurialism of neo-liberalism. People who born into a precarious world have different response to precarity than those who presumed they would be protected, as Berlant explores in Cruel Optimism (2011). Expecting embodied resilience without support from people without significant material control over their lives (i.e., minors in care) is cruel in and of itself.