Collective insights from making visual narratives of collage: Embracing enabling research methods with Afghan youth in Toronto neighbourhoods


Mehdia Hassan, University of Toronto

The art form of collage allows young people to build bridges across differences, fostering knowledge sharing and meaningful discussions about the co-existence of multiple perspectives (Anzaldua, 2002; Sameshima et al., 2019). In some ways, the process of collage-making also mimics the process of narrative-making, which helps youth participants better conceptualise how to coherently string together different lived experiences. Collage-making allows young people to accessibly assemble, reconfigure, and build new relationships between various lived experiences because it permits the layers of important themes, ideas, and patterns to relationally emerge from the collective dialogues and reflections (Sameshima et al., 2019; Davis, 2008). It also encourages critical self-reflection, collaborative dialogue, and visual storytelling in non-linear ways, across temporalities and spaces (Davis, 2008). Understandings and experiences of space are action-based, through embodiments, as hands are used to tear, rearrange, cut, and paste items for the collage (Roberts, 2018). Furthermore, collage, as a critical reflexive tool, supports a directed collaboration approach in research with youth, as it enables young people to have direct control over how they express and present their narratives (Freeman and Mathison, 2008; Farmer, 2022). Therefore, collage can be seen as an “enabling method,” since it allows youth to engage in research meaningfully and equitably, as young people’s worldviews have been rarely acknowledged in their education (Farmer and Cepin, 2017). In this paper, I demonstrate how making visual narratives of collage with Afghan youth in Toronto served as an enabling research method, through the various transformative impacts it has had on how youth participants see themselves as learners, artists, and co-researchers, in my doctoral fieldwork.. As a community arts facilitator for the past decade, with a background in visual arts, I drew from my artistic skills gained from my creative practice and experience with community-engaged research to facilitate a series of three 90-minute collage-making sessions with Afghan youth across the Toronto neighbourhoods of Rexdale, Scarborough, and Thorncliffe Park. Participants produced original collages that responded to how they saw themselves as learners outside of the school classroom; this was followed by three 90-minute focus groups, where participants shared their collages and learning experiences with each other. I also share collective insights of the process of collage-making, including how Afghan youth participants found the creative process to be transformative for them. The collage-making sessions fostered a more equitable research environment for meaningful dialogue and the co-production of knowledge, contributing to decreasing power dynamics between the researcher and the Afghan youth participants (Sameshima et al., 2019). Collage allowed for democratic engagement with Afghan youth, who may not necessarily identify as “artists,” and decreased their anxiety towards art-making, since it is a medium that everyone can engage in, regardless of artistic skill level (Butler-Kisber and Poldma, 2010; Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013). Afghan youth participants were able to express and evoke memories of verbally inarticulate emotions and feelings that they had not realized before, emerging from various “A-ha” moments from collective discussions on their learning experiences (Davis, 2008). Through the act of collage-making, as an enabling research method, youth participants are remaking their own belonging and relationships to their everyday spaces by repurposing what is already there (Roberts, 2018; Farmer, 2022). While it is never guaranteed, the possibility of social justice transformation through the creative arts still exists and is shaped by the various social contexts in which the arts are produced (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013; Anzaldua, 2002).  

This paper will be presented at the following session: