Abstract:

As part of the European project “ETFU – Empowering the Future” for the transfer of innovation carried out from 2011-2014, we present here some of the results of this research experience developed by a team of professionals from diverse cities such as Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, Postdam and Barcelona. The main purpose of this project was empowering young people through arts and new media developing and implementing a vision, strategies and innovative tools for trainers and organizations that wanted to evaluate and improve their practices, and of course, to transfer those good practices to other contexts. In order to do so, one of the main tools we used and contextualized to our practices was Action- Research which was adapted in creative ways in each city to systematize the reflection process and the gathering of valuable information from the experiences with youngsters, professionals and the arts and media.

During the research process we learned a lot about how to develop best practices with youngsters and the arts and media to empower them, and then in this paper, we want specially share the voice of the youngsters and the professionals that participated in the ‘Powerlabs’ (PL), as we called each one of the enriching experiences in each cities; therefore, we did in-depth interviews with youngsters and professionals from each PL and asked them about their experience on participating in the PL, their experience in working and participating in ‘action research’ (AR), and their reflections in their empowerment process. In this sense, we want to share some insights on the reflections the youngsters and professionals made during the interviews that give us their personal point of view on empowerment and the value of arts and new media to accomplish their goals.
At the end, the goal of this paper is to distil some ‘good practices’ out of all the PL’s in working with youngsters towards empowerment through art and media.

Keywords:

Youth empowerment, arts, new media, action research.