Emerging Minds is a new network helping children, young people and families benefit from mental health research.

Professor Deborah Chambers is from Newcastle University’s School of Arts and Cultures. She has been working with colleagues from seven other universities to establish the new Mental Health Network.

The network is seeking the best ways of helping children, young people and families benefit from mental health research. Academics from many disciplines ensure an innovative, cross-disciplinary approach. Contributors include researchers in health, arts, design, humanities and physical science.

The network will bring researchers, charities and other organisations together to address important mental health research questions.

• A social justice story: read more about Emerging Minds

We are researching the dynamics of activism in Latin America, with focuses on youth and education.

Dr Patricia Oliart is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies and Head of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. During her research, she has fostered the creation of opportunities for collaborative work with and between collectives.

Such collaboration favours a common organisation of ideas and learning. It allows members to reflect on perceptions, experiences and opinions. This leads to the development of interpretations and concepts that feed back into the collectives.

• A social justice story: read more about youth activism

Urban planners and designers regularly involve residents in decisions. They consult residents about new buildings, transport and green spaces. The quality of this engagement varies. But planners and designers acknowledge that residents know best about where they live.

So why are planners not reaching out to young people? Why are young people not able to influence the visions and plans for their futures? We know they are curious, creative and enthusiastic - so why are we not drawing on this as a resource for making better cities, when we need it most?

Including young people in urban planning

Our youngest residents will be the ones that inherit the cities we shape today. Our children will be the people who endure our decisions and bear the burden of global challenges like the climate emergency.

This is a pressing social justice issue, and it mirrors young people’s marginalisation elsewhere in society. Youth across the world are organising school strikes and getting climate action to the top of the political agenda. We cannot say that they are uninformed or indifferent.

“Young people’s exclusion from urban planning is a pressing social justice issue. The climate strikes show they want their say on their future. They have important things to offer, and we should be designing better ways to listen to them and put their creative ideas into action.” Sean Peacock

Streets for People

In response to this issue, we invited young people to take part in a live urban design project in Newcastle. The city council set up the Streets for People project in 2014 to improve three neighbourhoods of the city. But despite calling itself Streets for People, no children had shaped these improvements, or even knew about the project.

We designed and ran our own engagement process in two local primary schools. With the help of digital technologies, we invited children to reimagine their neighbourhood. Working with 9- and 10-year-old children, a key part of our work was translating the project into something more inviting and engaging. But we were not there to do a planning consultation. We wanted the children to take charge of their futures with their imagination to solve real-world problems for themselves.

Working with the children

We held three different workshops involving two Year 5 classes:

1. We took the children to four local streets under scrutiny in the project. We asked them to think about current problems and gather ideas for future changes.
2. We used Make Place, a digital mapping tool designed in Open Lab, to enable the children to ‘pin’ their problems and ideas on a map and discuss them.
3. We held a ‘Town Hall’ meeting to discuss their ideas with project leaders. This served as a unique opportunity to enact social change by bridging the classroom and the urban design project.

“Our research invited young people to weigh in on important changes happening in their neighbourhood. The project’s youth-centred methods gave 9- and 10-year olds the chance to scrutinise the proposals and put forward their own visions for the future. It demonstrated the value of engaging with youth for making our cities healthier, more inclusive and more sustainable.”

Valuable insights

We gathered valuable insights from our engagement, which we discuss in a paper we presented at a leading computing conference. What stood out for us was seeing the groups work together. They prioritised issues that were most important to them and came up with realistic ideas that could be put into practice. Digital technologies helped them to articulate their visions and aspirations for the future of their area.

Our work gave a new dimension to the project. Young people and adults exchanged ideas and worked together to reimagine their neighbourhood. This has continued in Sean Peacock’s PhD research. Sean is exploring the value of digital technologies in enabling young people to imagine better futures for their cities.

The research was funded by the EPSRC, through the Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics (EP/L016176/1), Digital Economy Research Centre (EP/M023001/1) and MyPLACE (EP/K037366/1).

• Sean Peacock is a PhD researcher based in Open Lab and the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
• Dr Clara Crivellaro is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computing
• Robert Anderson is a Senior Research Software Engineer in the School of Computing and the creator of Make Place

We're working with Southwick Neighbourhood Youth Project (SNYP) to examine key social justice issues.

Southwick, in Sunderland, has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the city. Dr Robin Finlay and Professor Anoop Nayak are working with children and young people in the ward to identify their needs and the challenges that they face.

Working with marginalised young people

We collaborated with the Southwick Neighbourhood Youth Project (SNYP) to access and work with marginalised young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Through collaborative planning with SNYP, we formulated a co-produced research agenda. The agenda will examine key social justice areas around young people, poverty, social exclusion and place.

In turn, this will help to support and evidence the work of SNYP to the local area. Building on SNYP’s existing understandings with young people, we will examine their perceptions of belonging and future aspirations. This will allow us to examine a range of social justice issues facing young people in Southwick, such as:

• poverty
• unemployment
• anti-social behaviour
• substance abuse

We will investigate how issues such as these impact on their sense of belonging.

We will increase our understanding of young people’s perceptions of youth work and the volunteer sector. We will examine:

• how young people perceive SNYP
• what they think its role in Southwick is
• how its outreach should work
• how services for young people and services for young people should be advanced

The project will address the challenges that children and young people face in deprived neighbourhoods. It will help to improve service provision for SNYP.

• Robin Finlay is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Anoop Nayak is Professor in Social and Cultural Geography in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University