Crǝativethnographies (1) Exploring new ways to co-produce young people’s geographies using arts, fiction and so-much-more-than-that (RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025)

This event is part of the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025

Organised by:

• Convenor, Panel Chair: Itta Bauer, University of Zurich

Description:

This session aims at bringing together people – including geographers and social or educational researchers – who share three interests:

• First, they collaborate, learn, study or work with children or young people.
• Second, they have experience and/or interest in ethnographic research designs that involve young people with diverse backgrounds.
• Third, they are open-minded and eager to explore how we might fill “crǝativethnographies” collaboratively as a methodological approach that combines art-based, fictional and other creative ways to express individual as well as collective experiences, views and challenges.

The intention of this gathering is to respond to previous research with similar foci (e.g. Cole & Knowles, 2001; de Freitas, 2003; Gilles & Robinson, 2012; Kill, 2022; Leavy, 2013; Mendus & Connelly-Mendus, 2024; Rizvi, 2019, Stafford, 2017; Watson, Morgan & Bull, 2021). We may take this session as an opportunity to explore if “crǝativethnographies” is a useful term to extend these approaches or move to somewhere else.

The interactive short paper format of the session has been deliberately chosen to share ideas on not yet fully cooked up, ongoing, but also finished projects that combine interests in arts, ethnography and young people. Hopefully, this brings together conceptual, methodological and empirical work from different social and spatial contexts.

Presentations may, for example, focus on

• suggesting fresh ideas how to create an inclusive network of people interested in “crǝativethnographies” reaching out beyond academia?
• elaborating empirical examples where creative educational spaces in play groups, schools, youth clubs or more informal or online gatherings enable new ways to fathom out the chances, challenges and threats that young people experience during creative acts and performances.
• interrogating established concepts in terms of ethnographic work or art-based ethnographies with young people and their participation, collaboration and responsibility in these projects.
• exploring creative ways in which young people engage in activism and/or fight for environmental, social or other forms of justice.
• implying an art-based research design in different stages of the research process
• illustrate how young people and researchers (or teachers) use social media and hybrid forms of interaction and communication to publish their arguments and publicise their actions.
• engaging with conceptual ideas and their consequences, such as “fiction as research practice” (Leavy, 2013) and fiction (or other art) as research output.