Call for Papers: By Youth, With Youth, or For Youth? Creative Participatory Methods in Health Geography
Are you attending The International Medical Geography Symposium (IMGS) 2026 in Toronto? EDGE Lab’s Rebecca Jackson and Justine Pineault from the Université de Sherbrooke are hosting a session about using creative participatory methods in studies about health geography and youth populations.
Interested in submitting an abstract for the session? Check out the full description of the Call for Papers below. Submissions are accepted until February 20th, 2026.
More details about IMGS 2026 and special sessions are available on the conference website: https://event.fourwaves.com/2026imgs/pages/c37af4e2-2f00-4d01-bbdd-fe2ae70380b8
Session Background.
Youth is a crucial period for health, since many physical and mental health trajectories are shaped by the political, economic, social and built environments in which they grow up (McGorry et al., 2025). However, young people’s voices have often been dismissed within academic research due to assumptions surrounding their agency and their competency to communicate ideas (Aldridge, 2014). Hence, there is a need for approaches which accommodate young people and allows them to represent themselves in research on health and place. Creative participatory methods have emerged as one potential tool for geographers aiming to achieve this goal, serving as an adaptable, flexible and context-specific means to creatively explore the thoughts and experiences of youth research participants across a range of settings (Grant, 2017). Examples include, but are not limited to, methods which implement creative media such as drawing, theatre, or photography, and approaches which use these techniques in-situ such as photovoice and photo-elicitation.
These methods can offer many advantages for the participants as well as their community, such as allowing young people to express themselves without the need for words (Literat, 2013) and offering therapeutic value through the creative process (Duara et al., 2022). Moreover, creative participatory techniques can reduce power imbalances between researcher and participant, give participants agency and ownership over the production of data and give them space to shape and negotiate how they are researched (Duara et al., 2022; Alexander et al., 2020). Finally, these techniques can be implemented within participants’ own environments, meaning that researchers can gain specific and rich information on local issues, which empowers communities and gives insight on how to create interventions adapted to different settings (Alexander et al., 2023). While these innovative methods offer many advantages and can be used to support more traditional methods such as interviewing (Trell and van Hoven, 2010), issues and challenges remain with regard to the application of these methods and their scope. The participatory nature of these techniques are dependent upon their design and implementation (Duara et al., 2022) and ethical dilemmas can arise from issues associated with confidentiality, navigating the line between researcher and participant, and creative ownership (Grant, 2017). Combining these challenges alongside the additional resources needed to implement these approaches, creative participatory methods can prove difficult to effectively and successfully employ within health geographies research. Yet, given the benefits for both the individual and the community, it is necessary to explore how creative, participatory methods can be used to build a nuanced and vital understanding of young people’s experiences of health and place.
Scope of the call.
This session invites submissions of papers documenting experiences of conducting research with youth and young adults using creative participatory methods. Presentations may answer the following questions or beyond:
● How do creative participatory methods support the theoretical and methodological development of health geographies?
● How can creative participatory methods be applied to studies of health within youth populations (with empirical examples)?
● How can we learn from our disciplines to enhance our use of creative, participatory methods within health geographies?
● What are the practical advantages and challenges in applying these methods?
● How do you balance the level of youth participation and engagement within the confines of academic research?
● How can these methods be used in translating research into practice?
Interested in sharing your work during the session?
Please send a 250-word maximum abstract to the session organisers, Rebecca Jackson (rebecca.jackson@nottingham.ac.uk) and Justine Pineault (justine.pineault@usherbrooke.ca), by February 20th 2026. We particularly encourage submissions from PhD candidates and early career researchers, as well as submissions from youth who have lived experiences as participants of research using creative participatory methods.
Cited References:
Aldridge, J. (2012). Working with vulnerable groups in social research: dilemmas by default and design. Qualitative Research, 14(1), 112-130. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112455041
Alexander, R., Gallant, K. A., Litwiller, F., White, C., & Hamilton-Hinch, B. (2020). The go-along interview: a valuable tool for leisure research. Leisure Sciences, 42(1), 51–68. https://doi-org.nottingham.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/01490400.2019.1578708
Alexander, S.A., Shareck, M., Glenn, N.M. (2023). Capturing the Lived Experience of Place in Health Promotion Research: In Situ Methodologies. In: Jourdan, D., Potvin, L. (eds) Global Handbook of Health Promotion Research, Vol. 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20401-2_11
Duara, R., Hugh-Jones, S., & Madill, A. (2022). Photo-elicitation and time-lining to enhance the research interview: exploring the quarterlife crisis of young adults in India and the United Kingdom. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 19(1), 131–154. https://doi-org.nottingham.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/14780887.2018.1545068
Grant, T. (2017). Participatory Research with Children and Young People: Using Visual, Creative, Diagram, and Written Techniques. In: Evans, R., Holt, L. (eds) Methodological Approaches. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 2. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-020-9_19
Literat, I. (2013). “A Pencil for your Thoughts”: Participatory Drawing as a Visual Research Method with Children and Youth. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 12(1), 84-98. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691301200143
McGorry P, Gunasiri H, Mei C, Rice S and Gao CX (2025) The youth mental health crisis: analysis and solutions. Front. Psychiatry 15:1517533. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1517533
Trell, E.-M., & van Hoven, B. (2010). Making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active research methods with young people. Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 188(1), 91-104. https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/2522