Description
ABSTRACT
Youth and Community Work encompasses and navigates across a spectrum of realities, voices, and experiences; from young people participating, to the Youth and Community Workers practicing, to stakeholders, and members of wider society. One of the key values of Youth and Community Work is to enable authentic youth voice and participation to take place (National Youth Agency, 2021), supported, and underpinned by social justice and anti-discriminatory practices (Chouhan, 2009). Youth and Community Work aims to enable young people to have their say around issues that directly impact them and their communities. To aide young people to explore their lived realities and offer opportunities to have their voices heard, is one way to achieve this. Auto-ethnographic and collaborative auto-ethnographic methodological processes can be hard hitting and emotive but positively challenging. Youth and Community Work has adapted, over time, to ensure that the needs of young people are met, aiming to redistribute power amongst societies at local, national, and international levels. In order to ensure that research approaches in Youth and Community Work do the same, contextual methodological frameworks used in practice must encourage these opportunities; this article demonstrate ways in which auto ethnographic and collaborative auto-ethnographic can achieve this.
