A Participatory Action Research Approach to Imagining Healthy Futures with Migrant Youth in Glasgow

My study frames young migrants' negotiation of their imagined futures within a participatory action research (PAR) approach to creative engagement of community archives across Glasgow. Addressing youth in Scotland's lack of planning for or contemplating future adult lives as a community health concern, this research offers new insights for understanding how young people from diverse community contexts use the past to shape their understandings of their futures. In turn, this will reveal the potentials of thinking through how youth's imagined futures inform their present community health priorities and concerns within an ethnically, linguistically, and transnationally diverse community context in Glasgow. This project applies a participatory action research methodology to equip young migrants with the tools needed to read the archive and respond by developing their own creative project outputs to address issues of concern to them in their daily lives. By aiming to clarify how community archives across Glasgow may be activated to spur thinking around biographical and societal futures amongst the doubly marginalised population of migrant youth, this research contributes to understanding how the temporal arcs of past, present, and future are embodied in creative daily practices and, in turn, how PAR processes of youth engagement with the past inform youth's understandings of their future opportunities, hopes, and challenges. Investigating the imagined future is a critical route for inquiry which seeks to redress present injustices because, as Paolo Freire argues, the future is 'constantly taking place' and 'only exists to the extent that we change the present.' This project offers a novel approach to youth empowerment which harnesses the potential of participatory heritage investigation to leverage existing sociocultural assets and support youth to engage with, challenge, and re-write current representations of their community's heritage in an act of future-making.