Flipping the Script: Amplifying Youth Voice through a Youth-Curated Instagram Live Speakers Series

Background: Successfully engaging youth in social change and research hinges upon creating opportunities for involvement that are convenient, easily integrated into youths’ busy lives, and housed in youths’ spheres of interaction. Although youth have participated in online discussions through social media for some time, the need for such virtual spaces has magnified in importance as youth have experienced heightened social disconnectedness amidst the pandemic. Moreover, youth lack forums for meaningfully and safely expressing their perspectives on issues and systems that directly impact their lives, but which are too often built without their input. The goal of this project was to advance youth-led dialogue and knowledge co-creation through a youth-curated Instagram (IG) Live speakers series titled The Real TO.

Methods: Purposive sampling engaged youth affiliated with a university-based, youth-focused research lab and its community-based service provider partner organizations. The lab is housed in a faculty of social work in a large North American city. Its efforts focus on issues impacting youth across a range of equity-deserving domains, identities, and lived experiences. Youth researchers from the lab were invited to participate as Real TO curators, facilitators, and discussants, and to lead outreach to community-based partners to identify other interested discussants. Eight IG Live episodes were planned and hosted, with youth developing each episode’s topic, identifying featured guest discussants, and crafting questions to guide each conversation. Following the series, all who participated (as curator, facilitator, guest discussant, others active behind-the-scenes, and as IG Live audience members) were interviewed about their experiences in and reactions to The Real TO. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Constant comparative analyses were conducted by six coders and progressed in three stages, including open, axial, and selective coding.

Results: Episodes featured topics including youths’ navigation of life after high school, the young mom experience, youths’ relationships with loved ones in the carceral system, the effects of online learning, the immigrant newcomer youth experience, queer practitioners’ navigation of workplaces as youth themselves, resources needed by youth who are homicide survivors, and youths’ substance use as a coping method for mental health challenges. Qualitative data revealed that curating, facilitating, and participating in such conversations yielded a sense of agency, feeling truly “heard” by an audience of both youth and adults, and presented a unique opportunity to critique systems and advance destigmatizing dialogues with others. Though participants indicated moments of feeling vulnerable and wondering if they had “over-shared,” they felt safe, supported, and a sense of solidarity from the audience’s reactions (e.g., chat comments, emoji reactions). Participants noted that they felt IG Live made sharing their story more accessible and comfortable, as they did not have to go anywhere to participate and could do so from a comfortable space of their choosing.

Conclusions: This project demonstrated promise in creating novel, youth-curated venues for facilitating critical dialogue on issues that youth identify as key priorities for change. Such dialogue can be made accessible and comfortable, especially for youth, if facilitated thoughtfully through online spaces such as IG Live.