The goal of the project is to undertake a creative and interactive workshop to capture the youth voice in relation to young people's perspectives on serious youth violence. This project aims to actively engage with young people aged 13 – 25 years to understand their views, perspectives and give insight to their experiences, worries, fears and understanding of the current phenomena of youth violence within the city. Many young people in the city are impacted (in)directly by youth violence be that victim, perpetrator, sibling or peer. These voices must be a part of the conversation.
Participants will be given an introductory presentation and then provided with a plain school shirt and art materials which they can decorate however they like to express their views, thoughts, lyrics, poems, memorials, colours, that reflect their perspectives on violence. The end result with be an interactive exhibition for the entire city to see during the springtime 2025. For their time and participation, they will be provided with a polaroid of their work (as we will be keeping the shirts for the exhibition) and a £5 Love2Shop voucher as a thank you.
All shirts and information collected with be anonymised and kept securely within the university and used to contribute to a ‘youth violence reduction manifesto’ which will be produced and given to the appropriate entities including the Public Health Organisation and Bristol City Council to create an effective plan to reduce violence within our beautiful, vibrant and creative city.
The workshops will be free to access and available for any young person interested in sharing their testimony for the purpose of feeding into a larger piece of academic work.
The workshops will run from March through to April and there is flexibility to offer these sessions to large or small groups or 1:1 based on the needs of the young people who wish to take part.
Young people will be encouraged to share testimonies, poems, visuals and lyrics that express their views on this current phenomenon. Participants would need to be briefed with a max 15-20 min introductory presentation about the goals and aims of the project. (please see pitch attached for an idea of the goals)
There will be various workshops facilitated between March and April 2025. Please contact Tatiana Powell, Assistant Researcher , School for Policy Studies tatiana.powell@bristol.ac.uk to find out more and book a session