Under the rhetorical banner of transformation: an exploration of how young people with care-experience encountered and experienced the projects funded by the Life Changes Trust, Scotland

Abstract

This thesis explores narratives from young people with care-experience who encountered and experienced the projects funded by the Life Changes Trust (LCT) and labelled ‘transformational’. The LCT funded projects, included Champions Boards projects, in which young people with care-experience could meet decision-makers to discuss issues and decisions that could affect young people with care-experience. They also included Home and Belonging projects, in which young people with care-experience could, amongst other things, work with other services and local authorities to explore the implementation of a trauma informed approach and Creative and Active Lives projects, in which young people with care-experience could take part in leisure activism such as physical activities, visual art sessions and theatre. This thesis demonstrated how some of the LCT-funded projects provided young people with a safe-space where they encountered others with care-experience, who recognised them as equal and ‘on a par’ with them (Fraser, 2000:113). This safety enabled them to explore and (re-)signify the meaning they ascribed to their experience, care-experience, and care-identity. The thesis also exemplifies how some young people saw their care-experience as potentially helpful and encouraging to others. Drawing on Skeggs’ concept of respectability, this thesis complicates the notion of ‘helping others’ and foregrounds how some young people with care-experience construct a caring positionality with which they can distance themselves from stigmatised constructions of the care-experienced identity. The thesis, furthermore, underlines the work young people with care-experience do to discern, challenge, counter and negotiate the stigmatised assumptions from professionals whom they encounter in the context of the LCT-funded projects. These findings were inspired and developed with the use of literature reviewed in chapters 2,3 and 4. These chapters outline how the word transformation has been operationalised by different scripts (such as a neo-liberal or a critical pedagogical script); explore the productivity of emotions in reinforcing the different positionalities of people; and, taking a historical turn, consider the ways in which care-experience has been framed by different institutions in Scotland since the 19th century, respectively. These literatures opened-up an empirical field of investigation which understands the experiences of young people with care-experience of the LCT-funded project to be complex and situated in a neo-liberal context. Overall, this thesis makes the argument that the LCT-funded projects were deeply meaningful for the interviewees of this study, as they encountered others with care-experience and could re-signify their own experiences and care-experienced identities, and also challenge the stigmatised assumptions held by others whom they encountered in the context of LCT-funded projects.