#WE SPEAK: exploring the experience of refugee youth through participatory research and poetry

Despair and a sense of hopelessness have been uninvited fellow travellers for many refugees. Despite the myriad challenges facing refugee populations there are numerous barriers to accessing services in a South African context. This is especially true for refugee youth who often fall through the gap of support given to adults or children. This paper explores the benefits of following a narrative, reflexive approach to participatory action research with refugee youth living in Durban, South Africa. We conducted a series of workshops with a focus on creating safe dialogical spaces, identity and values, agency, social connection and performativity using a Critical Reflexive Framework. What emerged early in the research was a sense of despair due to challenges like poverty and xenophobia, making daily life stressful and unsafe. This was coupled with feelings of hopelessness in a future lacking in possibilities. When these feelings are not dealt with it can result in psychological distress and involvement in a range of antisocial behaviours. However, by following a strength-based methodology in creative interventions to re-member abilities, opportunities can be created for rendering hope and agency. The experience is explored through the voices of participants using narrative dialogical analysis and poetic inquiry.     

Exploring the value of involving experts-by-experience in social work research: experiences from Slovenia and the UK

The evidence base for the methodological validity of conducting participatory research is becoming established. This article reviews the experiences of two researchers undertaking Ph.D. studies in Slovenia and UK, respectively, and considers the value of involving service users and carers in social work research. The Slovenian research involved user-researchers who developed research tools and undertook qualitative research. The first author explores the co-researchers’ impact on the research process and its outcomes, identifying both individual and collective empowerment of the co-researchers. The English study involved people from diverse backgrounds, who developed a recovery training programme for carers of people with schizophrenia. The second author describes how the steering group, and the carers who participated in the programme were impacted by the research process and experienced a sense of empowerment and how they influenced the development of new knowledge through the reflexive cycle. The authors draw out the commonalities and differences in our research that add to the existing evidence base supporting the development of participatory inquiry. We conclude by affirming the value of user participation in research in leading to the empowerment of users, the development of new research perspectives, and in contributing to theory in social work research and practice.     

The work of art in the age of hip hop reproduction: Ice-T and the cultural capital of keeping it real again in Kings of Vice (2011) and Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (2012)

In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T has faced a particularly intricate challenge in “keeping it real”. At this point in the twenty-first century, the credibility of hip hop’s harder core seems to have been undermined by the distance gangsta rap has travelled from the street realities that gave it birth in the 1980s to the millionaire enterprises that have emerged since. A “rapocracy” of incredibly successful rappers and producers, most of them associated with gangsta rap (such as Diddy, Dr Dre, Jay-Z and Russell Simmons), has taken the gangsta ill-logic of exploiting the street for maximum profit to the extreme. Ice-T’s intervention in this dynamic has been to try to remind us of hip hop’s more “auratic” origins while acknowledging that the past is indeed a different country. The turn to authorship of books and making of documentary films in the context of a post-2008 economic meltdown environment constitutes an imaginative way to revivify the creative possibilities of the gangsta. The very title of Ice-T’s 2012 documentary film, Something Out of Nothing: The Art of Rap, betrays an almost nostalgic yearning for a purer age and the form that erupted out of it. This same retrospective paradigm for thinking a better way forward for gangsta aesthetics is also at the heart of Kings of Vice. Ice-T’s inventive return to origins shows us how even at a moment of its maximum commodification, gangsta culture (precisely because of its contradictory relationship to capitalism) can provide a uniquely critical perspective on a deregulated world.