Reflections on a community-based participatory research project with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children

This chapter offers our retrospective methodological reflections on a community-based participatory research project that employed a photovoice approach with seven unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) living in foster care in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the project was to better inform potential foster carers about the group’s needs and the reality of their lived experiences, to see if this would have an impact on foster carers’ perceptions or willingness to offer such children a placement in the future. The young people made posters of photographs that they had taken during a series of activities and workshops that we had developed and engaged in with them and in their foster home and community settings. The posters were shown at community events and exhibited in community spaces during refugee week. Over the course of our project, we learned many lessons and faced many challenges around facilitating and developing these sorts of relationships with the UASCs. In this chapter we offer these lessons and challenges to future researchers in this area in the hope that our reflections will facilitate knowledge development and further research in this important area