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The Realities of Researching Alongside Virtual Youth in Late Modernity: Creative Practices and Activity Theory

Published in the leading interdisciplinary journal for studies of youth, edited by Professor Andy Furlong, University of Glasgow, this paper examines some of the fundamental issues of researching with and alongside young people, using empirical evidence from the Inter-Life Project. The aim of the Inter-Life Project was to investigate the use of virtual worlds and creative practices to support the acquisition of transition skills for young people to enhance their management of important life events. The project used multi-method analyses of virtual environments and its development of Activity Theory to provide an analytical lens, and combined creative practices from Art and Design with informal learning in Education. Inter-Life http://tel.ioe.ac.uk/inter-life was part of the ESRC/EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Programme, which itself was the final phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). Impact details are available at http://www.tel.ac.uk/category/impact. The TEL Programme was featured at the Royal Society: http://tel.ioe.ac.uk/2012/11/tel-at-the-royal-society/ and a film of the Programme is also available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FBC496ggF0&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PL9FB06867C28D5F07. The ESRC/EPSRC-funded Inter-Life Project developed a ‘Virtual Research Community’ in Second Life™, to investigate how young people can work creatively to develop their own agency and subjectivities. We reflect on these challenges as they articulated with the ‘Inter-Life’ project’s aims. They include the need for more empirical evidence of the realities of young people’s lives with ICTs, and for re-theorisation of their subjectivities in ICT settings. We interrogate the challenges of participatory research in such settings, and the role of creative practices and virtual spaces in finding a voice and being a participatory researcher. In the second part we illustrate the realities of researching in a virtual world, through the lived experience of young people who worked with us. We explore how Activity Theory might assist in the methodological and analytical work of researching young people’s creativity in a virtual world.