Marginalised Youth and the Search for ‘Home’

Abstract

Young voices are underrepresented in research, policy, and practice. This visual essay showcases the photography of nine young people and examines through their work the concept of ‘home’ within the context of transitional and short-term accommodation for disadvantaged youth. Drawing insights from a collaborative Photovoice project undertaken with a not-for-profit youth support organisation (YSO) in 2023, we explore the possibilities for how applied sociological research can function as a form of social action. The young people extended the Photovoice prompt beyond the traditional sociological parameters of ‘home’, pushing the research to engage with nuanced understandings of how growing up with family complexity, instability, and poverty can shape their transitions to adulthood.

Introduction

The lack of a stable and safe home while young can have lasting negative reverberations across the life course (Ribar and Wong, 2022). Interventions to support young people into housing are therefore crucial. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child holds that young people have a right to express their views on matters that impact their lives. However, despite wide acceptance of this tenet, there is little attention to youth voices in research and decision-making processes in policy and practice (Waite et al., 2024). This includes the near absence of youth-led initiatives in homelessness support services (Day et al., 2023). These temporary accommodation services aim to function like a ‘home’ and may seek people’s preferences in terms of furnishing and the organisation of the space. Yet ironically, temporary and transitional housing can be tightly controlled living environments that do not encourage autonomy or facilitate dignity, let alone permit agency over place- or home-making (Hoolachan, 2020).

This raises a more fundamental question, what does ‘home’ mean? How is it imagined as part of one’s future if it was never part of one’s past? Contemporary understandings of home move between the physical, the material, and the affective (Parsell, 2012; Plage et al., 2025) but also the political. What vision of ‘home’ counts, and more pertinently, whose?

These questions were at the core of a Photovoice project undertaken with YSO.

Methods

For this Photovoice project (Stambe et al., 2024), we collaborated with YSO to draw insights from young peoples’ understanding of ‘home’ to improve their services, advocate for system reform, and inform the design of a new transitional youth centre. YSO employed a deliberate and inclusive approach to invite participation from the young people they support, ensuring representation from diverse backgrounds and experiences. The young people were remunerated with $30 gift vouchers for their voluntary participation in each research activity and knew they could withdraw at any time without penalty or impacting their relationship with YSO. The study had Ethics approval (HREC 2022/HE002245).

The research activities included a project-planning workshop, a photography period, three consecutive analytical workshops in which the photography was discussed, and an exhibition. We also offered a one-on-one follow-up interview to young people to provide opportunities to comment on the project processes.

Two male and 12 female young people attended the introductory workshops conducted at two sites in disadvantaged suburbs in South-East Queensland. Nine young people contributed photographs via the shared online platform. Eight participants attended at least one of the two analysis workshops, and three participants came to the final workshop where exhibition plans were finalised. Three young people attended the photo exhibition. One young person was interviewed as part of the follow-up about the research process. The research workshops were also scheduled for after school hours and YSO support workers provided transport for the participants. The third workshop and interview were done online to allow participants to attend. Not all participants could attend every research activity due to other commitments such as work or personal challenges. Research attrition was expected, given the instability and precarity of the young people’s lives (Mayock et al., 2012).

Two introductory workshops aimed to develop the purpose of the project and equip participants with the necessary skills. Attendees included YSO staff, researchers, participants, and professional photographers. The researchers facilitated the sessions, providing an overview of Photovoice. These workshops focused on empowering participants to find their own visual voices and use photography to express their unique perspectives on the project theme, fostering creative exploration rather than technical perfection. The professional photographers provided practical training, and personal safety and ethical considerations were also addressed.

While YSO wanted this project to focus on young people’s understanding of home, the topic was open for re-development. In the first workshop, the participants agreed to focus on ‘home’ and expressed an interest in using the prompt, ‘what does home look like and fell like for me?’. The young people had creative licence to explore how to communicate their messages, and one young person decided to include a drawing as part of her oeuvre.

During the three analytical workshops, the focus remained on creating a safe and respectful environment, empowering young people to analyse their photographs using SHOWED (Wang and Burris, 1997). SHOWED is analytical guide, taking contributors through a list of questions that gradually move from description (what is happening in the photograph) towards tapping into a photograph’s transformative potential (social and structural processes). Young people were asked to summarise the photograph into a caption. During the curation phase, very brief descriptions paraphrased from the workshops added detail to the visual messages for most of the photographs and provided a title for the exhibition and the overall project. The workshops were not audio-recorded in accordance with participants’ wishes; however, the research team documented key points through brief notes.

At the second workshop, the young people grouped the photographs into three themes based on a recurrent ideas and emotions. ‘Belonging’, ‘growing up’, and ‘change’ were identified as key issues resonating throughout the photographs. The researchers curated the photographs along the above themes. In the third workshop, participants reviewed the curation and proposed title and approved the three main themes:

• Living and feeling at home

• Struggle (life does not make sense)

• Belonging

Picturing ‘home’

The photographs reflect how young people perceive themselves and their circumstances, referencing and challenging stereotypes of homelessness (Schmidt, 2015). They capture more than just the absence of a home since they tell stories of space, belonging, and self-expression. ‘Home’ emerges as a feeling of stability, safety, and identity, a foundation from which they navigate the challenges of growing up. Like other visual projects with children (Snow-Hill et al., 2024; Varvantakis and Nolas, 2024), these images embody the political, urging viewers to confront the social forces shaping their reality.

By responding to the prompt What does home look and feel like for you? with photographs of survival, recreation, and escape, participants reframed the concept of home. Beyond shelter or belonging, home exists within material deprivation, temporary joys, and fleeting respite. For example, the photograph ‘The Mess Can Wait’ shows a mess being left on a table. Unlike the strict rules of shared or transitional housing (Hoolachan, 2020), a ‘home’ is a place where mess was accepted because it signalled a sense of belonging and return. In ‘Prisoner of the Mind’, the young person provides two images of ‘home’. There is the sleeping bag when they were sleeping rough, and then their current living arrangement that might provide ‘shelter’ but is not a safe environment. This subsequently has an impact on their mental well-being. The young people were poignant and reflective in their photographs, indicating a strong sense of social justice and responsibility. Their photographs invite the reader to engage with the uncomfortable, that is, the social forces that create their current reality. Similar to other visual projects with children (Varvantakis and Nolas, 2024), the young people in this study figuratively, and literally, embody the political. For example, the photograph ‘Please Return’ signals a sense of abandonment, suggesting a ‘home’ does exist for the young person but the responsibility is on society to provide such housing. Another example is ‘One Small Action Has a Big Impact’ where the waves represent the decision-makers, an adult or society, whose choices forever reshape the beach, which represents the young people. The young people acknowledged societal expectations and the resulting tension between their inner world (including their emotional needs) and the perceived expectations of conformity and emotional regulation. This led to feelings of uncertainty and stagnation when faced with difficult choices.

For these young people, ‘home’ symbolises what is missing: the absence that haunts them (Parr, 2024). This was poignantly captured by the metaphor of a ‘Grocery List’ of desired qualities. In this photograph, the young person juxtaposed everyday survival items, such as food, with other non-material items that are also just as needed for survival and indeed thriving, ‘love, care, mum off drugs’. ‘Home’ represented a feeling of belonging, stability, safety, and a secure foundation from which they could navigate the challenges of growing up.

Conclusion

The young people’s photographs reveal how small, simple things can profoundly influence their lives. Creating a sense of home goes beyond providing shelter; it involves privacy, dignity, and opportunities for communal engagement and decision-making. More importantly, ‘home’ is a space to make mistakes, learn, and be given multiple chances.

For service providers and policymakers, the photographs underscore how past traumas shape young people’s decisions, highlighting the need for curiosity about their ‘bad choices’. Young people require safe, trusting relationships with adults who can help them build decision-making skills, access resources, and navigate adulthood successfully.

The photographs remind us that, despite the challenges, these young people strive to create meaningful lives. Policy reform must balance their struggles and agency to enhance their safety, connection, and wellbeing now and into adulthood.

We acknowledge that the majority of participants were female and that this is likely reflected in the photography and the reflections on it. However, we do not seek to make nuanced arguments about how these experiences are gendered. This is a fruitful avenue for exploration in future studies. While the project aimed to inform and advocate, it also exposed the painful gap between the societal ideal of home and their lived experience. The photographs allowed young people to hold contradictory ideas together and refuse an uncomplicated understanding of ‘home’. Our research contributes to the literature by demonstrating how young people’s images describe ‘home’ as both an aspiration and an absence, something they knew they should have but had never fully known. For these young people, therefore, the material, relational, affective (Parsell, 2012), and political aspects of ‘home’ intertwine with the spatial-temporal realities of what ‘home’ was, is, or could be. These realities exist in tense dialogue with the absence of the socially normed ‘home’ across their past, present, and imagined future. We argue that applied social research must ‘think with’ these voices as relational and emergent in their distinct socio-historical context (Plage, 2023) to redefine home as a taken-for-granted ideal and an ongoing search for stability in an unstable world. We offer in these captioned photographs not a neat definition of what home is to young people facing social exclusion but a glimpse into their daily wrangling: their search for home.

Everyday struggles

10 cents. Collecting these to get a little bit of extra for things I want. The bottles look like people lined up as a depiction of society. Waiting to be knocked over in a Domino effect or as a wakeup call.

Unhealthy addiction

Smokes and vapes and (expensive) self-medication. Guilt about spending and doing something bad, but it helps me cope and get through the day.

An illusion of choice

The lights are where my peers are supposed to be. The path is going somewhere, everyone is going on one path, and I wonder – can I go there? This path seems to stop – is it a teenage pregnancy or another roadblock? Just another brick in the floor; I walk this lonely road. We need a more supportive environment.

I’ve done it again

Footprints going in different directions but following the wrong direction and repeating choices you know could lead you to a bad spot: I’ve done it again.

Prisoner of the mind

Where I came from and where I am living now. Living in a trapped house and a trapped mind, there is alcohol and drugs. Housing isn’t the only solution – the spirals and trauma continues. The person sitting in the middle, that’s me.

Please return

One small action has a big impact

The tide brings in stuff and takes things out. It is the stuff that leaves behind traces. Our actions have an effect, on yourself or other people and it never ends. The beach can be scary because the waves always knock you down. They can push you back, but they can also push you forward and help you. The shells on the beach: we experience so much trauma, and we don’t want to see it again, we just want to get rid of it.

The mess can wait

Living in a share house there are rules you have to follow. The living areas are not just for you. In your own home, you don’t have to worry about the mess. You have your own rules. This is your home. You don’t have to leave or be moved on. You will be back here again later, and the mess can wait until then for you to clean it up.

Grocery shopping

Hanging by a thread