Organiser: Barnes, Cliona
Title: Hearing young voices. Conducting participant-led research with young people. For researchers, academics, youth workers, journalists, teachers and other interested parties.
Institution: University of Limerick
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Date: Wednesday 1 December 2010
Time: 14h30 – 17h00
Venue: B1005A

This workshop is offered as part of the official launch of an Irish Social Sciences Platform (ISSP)-sponsored research report entitled ‘Young Masculinities, Class and Community: A Comparative Perspective across Local Boundaries’. This report, carried out by Dr Cliona Barnes in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge in Society (ISKS) at the University of Limerick, details the research processes and key findings from a small scale, participant-led, qualitative study focused on the daily lives and experiences of young Irish men aged between 15 and 16 from diverse social backgrounds.

Of particular concern, both for the research and for this workshop,  is the continuing and narrow emphasis on negative and ‘spectacular’ media portrayals of young people which focus solely on negative topics such as deviance, social dislocation and ‘dangerous’ youth sub cultures.  This workshop demonstrates the necessity of listening to young people, highlighting key findings drawn from the directly voiced experiences of the young men. These findings emphasise both the similarities and differences in the lives of young men across social class boundaries, disrupting common media portrayals of young middle-class and young-working-class lives as being fundamentally different.  It also highlights the damaging reliance on social class-based stereotypes by both groups of young men whereby a lack of experience of the lives of the ‘other’ restricts understanding and generates fear and mistrust across groups and communities.

Through a combination of task-based activities and group discussion, the workshop will explore the ways in which participant-led research can challenge stereotypical views of social class difference among young people, and can also disrupt and challenge narrowly focused media representations and portrayals of youth in contemporary Irish society.

The workshop will run for 90 minutes and, in order to ensure adequate space for discussion, places will be limited.

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