Participatory methods on the move: Assembling creative research through young people's affective relations with place

In contrast to research that identifies ‘what’ physical activities young people do, this paper explores ‘how’ co-creation methods (photovoice,film-making, public exhibition) can be used ‘with’ young people to co-create youth oriented accounts of leisure mobility through stigmatisedcommunity spaces. Specifically, we draw upon critical and creative insights, from the first author’s PhD co-creation research carried out in atown in the South West of England. We highlight co-creation as a knowledge practice that is more than a novel method for addressingrelations between affect, inequality and place. This involved working with young people to photograph, film, edit, narrate and publicly exhibitembodied accounts of their community to evoke the complexity of affective experiences (shame, fear, pleasure, belonging, etc). Our approachmoves beyond the representationalist assumptions of conventional humanist research to produce a social change oriented ‘creative researchassemblage’. This creative research-assemblage shaped how young people engaged with processes of co-creation in collective, individual andaffective ways. This paper further reflects upon co-creation as a material means of mobilising change and (re)presentating research. Inparticular, we consider the affective relations generated through the exhibition event as part of producing different capacities (flows, relations,human & non-human). We situate this research within new materialist debates to think through some of the onto-ethico-epistemologicalassumptions that underpin the ‘doing’ of co-creation in leisure research as inventive practice.