Stories to connect with: disadvantaged children creating phygital community objects to share their life-narratives of resilience and transformation

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This project is a collaboration between Barnardo's, children and young people who are active in Barnardo's services, academics from five disciplines at two universities, and well-known children's authors. The core group of Barnardo's young people will be trained as co-researchers to collect stories from other children and young people who access Barnardos services about their lives and experiences of overcoming adversity. The stories elicited from children will inevitably draw on their own 'funds of knowledge' (Gonzalez et al 2005), giving credence to their own experience and encouraging others to empathise. We expect the consequent building of social capital via authorship and dissemination to contribute to young people's capacity in accessing and improving services. This process will be carefully managed with input from trained care workers and community researchers. The stories will be refined and revised in workshops with well-known children's authors (Melvin Burgess and Adele Geras) who have agreed to participate in the project (Burgess has adopted a 'found fiction' approach in 'Kill All Enemies' 2011). The resulting stories will be inspirational for other children and young people and their families, some of whom would benefit from Barnardo's or other children's services. In order to connect with these other families, the stories will be transcribed, re-written, narrated, and placed in phygital (physical-digital) objects, designed by the young storytellers themselves in collaboration with digital design academics from Lancaster University Imagination Lab. The phygital artefacts, which might vary in size and take any form as determined by the C&YP (e.g. a hand-held animal, a life-size tree, a dustbin, a wizard), will be located in positions in the community identified by the participants and Barnardo's as having the most potential for impact on a wider audience. The stories will have the potential to be interactive, personalised and take the form of written and/or spoken language.Working within an appreciative philosophy, the children and young people will generate their own stories and elicit affirmative stories from other CYP reflecting their resilience, strengths and achievements in negotiating the challenges of their particular and often difficult circumstances. These 'stories to connect with' will act as counter-narratives to those which usually circulate about children in contact with and 'on the edge' of engaging with children's social services and will challenge preconceptions and assumptions about people who access services, both in the media and in children's literature (Dahl 1993; Booktrust 2006). Placing these stories within bespoke objects which in themselves connect and challenge other people will enable the stories to travel outside of the social, geographical and political locale in which they have been produced and to connect more widely in both the virtual and physical world. It is our belief that being 'on the edge' creates a particular context and potential energy and that the CYP's phygital story objects can act as pores in the boundaries of the 'edge' through which communication can take place and lead to a softening of the boundaries between different elements of the same geographical community.The phygital artefacts will be trialled and evaluated by members of the public in at least three different community settings: a school; a shopping centre; and a Barnardos centre. The refined artefacts will then be launched at a community event, before being located (semi-)permanently in areas considered by the whole team to be the most effective for disseminating the stories to diverse audiences within the community.