Giulia Carabelli

Researching young people’s orientations to the future: the methodological challenges of using arts practice

Visual and arts-based methods are now widely used in the social sciences. In youth research they are considered to promote engagement and empowerment. This article contributes to debates on the challenges of using arts-based methods in research with young people. We discuss the experience of a multidisciplinary project investigating how young people imagine their futures – Imagine Sheppey – to critically consider the use of arts-based methods and the kinds of data produced through these practices. We make two sets of arguments. First, that the challenges of participation and collaboration are not overcome by using apparently ‘youth-friendly’ research tools. Second, that the nature of data produced through arts-based methods can leave researchers with significant problems of interpretation. We highlight these issues in relation to the focus of this project on researching the future.

Young people's orientations to the future: navigating the present and imagining the future

ABSTRACT This article discusses the findings of the Imagine Sheppey project (2013–2014) which studied how young people are ‘oriented’ towards the future. The aim and approach of the project were to explore future imaginaries in a participatory, experimental, and performative way. Working with young people in a series of arts-based workshops, we intervened in different environments to alter the space as an experience of change – temporal, material, and symbolic. We documented this process visually and made use of the images produced as the basis for elicitation in focus groups with a wider group of young people. In this article we discuss young peoples future orientations through the themes of reach, resources, shape, and value. In so doing, we reflect on the paths that our young respondents traced to connect their presents to what is next, what we call their modes of present–future navigation. We explore the qualities and characteristics of their stances within a wider reflection about how young people approach, imagine, and account for the future.

Walking, recording and collaborative mapping: how can we advance PD methodology by engaging with heritage?

The aim of this workshop is to implement and evaluate an approach to transdisciplinary interaction, designed to address spatial planning in an inclusive manner. We propose to engage participants from different fields in an exercise of walking, recording and mapping as one combined participatory design (PD) methodology. Specifically, we reflect on the possibilities of pluralizing approaches to heritage making, by looking at how PD methodologies could be applied in this field. The workshop takes form as a participatory walking and data-collecting exercise with the finality to reflect on how creative processes that feed into fields determined by expert discourses, such as heritage making policies, could be enriched with the tools and methodologies of PD. Discussions about heritage are increasingly crucial to contemporary politics of remembrance and memorialization, which often intersect with wider political discussions on urban inclusion and diversity. Accordingly, and considering the main theme of the PDC 2018 conference, the workshop aims to foster a critical dialogue on how PD methodologies can support the creation of more inclusive urban environments that celebrate diversity and facilitate the development of alternative approaches to the making of heritage. During the workshop, the multidisciplinary approach to challenge and break into dominant institutionalized discourses is tested, discussed and refined. Moreover, we establish how this methodology could be implemented in response to wider concerns of PD and spatial planning.

Imagining, Planning, and Building Mostar After the War

This chapter introduces the city of Mostar. It provides a short but comprehensive overview of the physical expansion of the city from its Ottoman foundations to the post-war ethno-national polarisation. It accounts for how, under the international supervision of the European Union, Mostar became the case study for the implementation of reconciliation strategies that led to a forced reunification in 2004. The chapter discusses how the representation of Mostar as ‘united’ or ‘divided’ affects the ways in which the city is administered and planned, creating contradictions between the international and local visions for the future of the city.

The Everyday Life of Mostar

This chapter explores the everyday of Mostar to discuss empirically and conceptually how the ethnic division is constantly negotiated and reinvented. Merging data and experience from the author’s fieldwork, the chapter accounts for the practice of meeting up for coffee as one of the main characteristics of Mostar’s everyday life where (often) contested narratives of ethno-national belonging emerge. By highlighting the fluidity of the everyday, this chapter discusses how the totalising ideal of ethno-national subjectivity is negotiated and reinterpreted, which reveals the possibility of transformative politics within quotidian practices as potential spaces of resistance.

Grassroots Movements and the Production of (Other) Space(s)

This chapter engages with organised spaces of resistance. It introduces the history and activities of the Youth Cultural Centre Abrasevic to elucidate the political commitment of the centre in fighting nationalisms and segregation. However, this chapter concentrates on the aims, visions, and projects of Abart, a platform for art production and urban research, to explore the ways in which the artistic practices they promote challenge Mostar’s spatial divisions. Thus, this chapter looks at the organisation of festivals, and the design of site-specific art interventions in public space, to assess the extent to which art is an effective tool for urban transformation in deeply divided societies.