Perspectives on participatory research: An attempt at co-writing with young people in situations of forced migration

This article emerges from a series of participatory and creative research workshops that we participated in as organisers/researchers and participants/co-researchers. The workshops were part of an ongoing research project on young people’s experiences of migration and (im) mobility across borders. Research for the project is ongoing in five countries - France, Greece, the UK, Canada and South Africa - and this article is based on part of the research carried out in eThekwini-Durban, South Africa. We wanted to co-write this article to try and move towards a fuller co-creation of knowledge, going beyond just participatory activities and research and bringing participation into the space of dissemination of knowledge within academic spaces. We write from our different positions as three researchers of different backgrounds and five participants/co-researchers who took part in the workshops. We hope that this attempt to co-write an article will show our different perspectives on the research process and allow us to highlight the different outcomes, results and forms of knowledge produced for all of us. It is rare that participants in research get to comment afterwards on how they felt during the research process, but we feel that this is a vital step in doing research that is less extractivist and which takes seriously the question of restitution of research results.