“There’s No Place Like Home”: Empowering Diverse Researcher Perspectives in Collaborative Research on Empowering Homeless Youth

Keywords: empowerment youth conflict education

Abstract: Conflict education intervention and research for youth populations centers on issues of empowerment, safety and agency – particularly for marginalized youth in urban centers. This round table session starts with short presentations from members of a research team collaborating on a funded research project, Youth Conflict Specialists [YCS] developing a cohort of 16-18 year olds who are homeless and/or systems involved (foster care, domestic violence, juvenile justice systems) to become conflict intervention practitioners and trainers for work with homeless families. This session explores diverse lenses (visual imagery methodology, narrative creation, physical mapping and access technology, decision-making processes) through which the team researchers study how homeless and systems-involved youth experience safety, trauma, and power and how/whether conflict education impacts their experience, The session includes two discussion sessions on navigating tensions of these diverse perspectives and gaining best practice insights from session participants.