Authoring Our Own Stories (AOOS) and the IAA explored 40 young working-class lads’ (11-25-years-old) experiences of growing up in and around the former coalfields of Barnsley. The research focused on three spheres – education, employment, and community – and explored the lads’ orientations towards, and lived experiences of, these spheres.

For generations growing up in the deindustrialised coalfields, their present is not disembodied from the past, it shapes the present-future in multiple and complex ways such as the nature and conditions of the labour market, orientations towards school and work, school-to-work transitions and so on. There is, though, little research and information co-created with young people on the ways in which the past shapes their experiences of education and employment and their aspirations. The research operated, therefore, through a lens of co-creation with and for working-class young people, placing the lads’ lived experiences of education, community and employment in the former coalfields of Barnsley at the centre.

Read the full article and see the images here  Blog Graffiti Event (002)