Paper short abstract:

Our project focusing on young people's work & housing in Ethiopia and South Africa built in 'invited collaborative' opportunities. This paper investigates collaborative media outputs and key project events, querying their unevenness, operation, meaning, temporalities and emotions.

Paper long abstract:

A Youth Futures research project focusing on young people's work/housing nexus in Hawassa, Ethiopia and the Ekangala area, South Africa built in opportunities for invited collaboration with youth participants (see Rubin et al, 2022 and project website). This paper focuses less on the primary data collection for the project (also in part collaborative - see Rubin et al 2022) and instead investigates our efforts to collaborate through the production of varied media outputs (podcasts, stories, videos, poetry, song etc), selected by the youth participants and facilitated through our project. It examines the possibilities and limitations of these invited collaborative spaces and processes, noting how practicalities and wider politics of knowledge production shape final outputs and their meaning. It considers also the operation, mishaps and unfolding of arguably less collaborative interventions (including the partial use of official photographers with some participants) and consequent project/public events (two project workshops, one policy workshop, three in person exhibitions and an online exhibition) where much of these media outputs were exhibited and narrated. We argue that although collaborative research is often lauded as less extractive and more empowering for participants, our work reveals it is often uneven in its benefits, raising uncomfortable questions about how to end or sustain relationships post research completion, flagging that the temporalities of collaboration are complex. The paper queries what collaboration with youth in practice reveals across these multiple spaces, what collaborative outputs are produced and their attendant emotional registers, and for which audiences this collaboration is meaningful.