The power of the podcast as a youth participatory research method

During the UK general election, we saw the two main parties trying to speak to the question of the power of youth. While Labour’s manifesto stated their aim to “increase the engagement of young people… by giving 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote”, the Conservatives annoyed many with their plans for a year of compulsory national service for 18-year-olds.

What is clear from the responses to both these political proposals is that young people have a voice and want to be heard. In this blog post, I will explore the journey that I have undertaken with Leeds City Museum's Preservative Party to discover the power of the podcast as a participatory research method that enables young people to speak out. This project resulted in Whose Power?, a podcast launching in July 2024.

Why we chose podcasting

The Preservative Party are a group of 14 to 24-year-olds established 12 years ago by Leeds City Museum’s Community Outreach Team, through active, careful and effective recruitment processes working with many of the youth support services in the city. Given the group’s diversity, traditional forms of articulating learning and transformation come with additional barriers.

I am currently in the final months of an AHRC research, development and engagement fellowship, called Empowering Women; Co-producing Histories of Women and Energy in the Home. The project as written aimed to use Leeds Museums and Galleries collections as a catalyst for participatory action research to ask:

• What can we learn from historic social and gendered drivers for change at a moment when we all need to transition to a post-carbon energy supply?
• How does co-production empower young people, often our contemporary leaders in climate activism?

Together, we have produced a range of outputs including the Whose Power? Energy Change in the Home exhibition at Leeds City Museum (January-April 2024). The group’s collaboration with me as a researcher thus far has enabled them and their facilitators to better understand their curatorial practice as collaborative research, and to begin to articulate the impact of participatory methods on both their own practice and development, and on their audiences’ understanding of museum collections.

Given the specific needs and vulnerabilities of the group, some do not want to be shown in film and photography. For others, formal education failed them, and so in order to rigorously evaluate, understand and evidence their work, we found many of the established methods of recording participatory practices unhelpful/impossible. They asked me to find a method that prioritised their voices. I therefore made a request to the AHRC to repurpose some of our funding to learn about podcasting.

How we created the podcast

We commissioned Research Podcasts and began an exploratory process. The Preservative Party meets every Thursday from 17:00 to 19:00 at Leeds City Museum. Given the nature of the individuals and their diverse lived experiences, I have learnt to work to their timetable, needs and energies and adjust all planning accordingly. Likewise, with guidance from the group and their facilitators, I have developed an ethics and safeguarding process of iterative consent to provide a supportive environment of trust. Chris and Krissie from Research Podcasts joined our weekly sessions to listen and learn about how different this work is to their usual academic podcasting practices.

Key to all of our work has been enabling the young people to have control of the process. This has meant adjusting production timetables, building in multiple new processes to ensure care, a clear sense of personal ownership and control and consent. We held a podcast training day at HELIX, a new digital education space at the University of Leeds on a Saturday when it is not usually open, which allowed us to carefully introduce the technology and studios.

By the time we reached the two days of recording in May, every member of the group felt included and the process was entirely built around their individual needs and requests. The recording process was experimental. Research Podcasts would usually use a script, but this would not have worked for our processes. Instead, we used a set of collaboratively agreed conversation prompts and, having been selected as presenter, I was able to lead our conversations based on my knowledge of, and relationship with, individuals after 18 months of working together.

The results of the project

It is clear from the final results that the podcast is not only an output; it is an active space of reflection and development for participatory techniques.

Series 1 consists of five episodes, each of which has been edited and approved by the individual young people involved. Each episode consists of a conversation between me and pairs of group members, exploring how the Preservative Party, their work and our project on power has changed their understanding of research, their perception of their own power, and their advice to others wanting to do participatory youth work in museums.

With support, we have learnt about and created the audiograms, one member has composed our theme music and the senior mentor on the project is leading on the social media campaign across X and TikTok (@presparty). The delivery of each of the key requirements for a podcast series has required careful thought and conversation to help map these onto the needs and ambitions of the group,

The emergent results to date are exciting, using opportunities that have specifically come out of a participatory project that is a partnership between the university and Leeds Museums and Galleries. For young people who want to speak up, but who are restricted by their social, educational, economic and personal experiences, the podcast has begun to emerge as a powerful tool for effective participation.

We now want to fund and produce Series 2 to consciously explore, evaluate and communicate the impact of this innovative method that allows young people to be key voices in advocating for community involvement in museums.