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

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