Research Project
Creative Participation and Co-design Research Methods
Dr Dawn Woolley
I am an artist and a research fellow at Leeds Arts University. My research focuses on social media platforms, examining the impact that harmful content can have on users. I use creative participatory methods when working with community groups to learn about their experiences and co-create resources to share the findings with others. This article describes a recent participatory project to show some of the challenges, advantages and good practices aligned to this method.
In 2025 the Online Objectification (OO) team (Prof Sally Dibb, Prof Magdalena Zawizsa, Dr Katie Thompson and Margot Q. Lefevre) were awarded a feasibility study grant by INCLUDE+ to work with Getaway Girls in Leeds to understand girlsâ experiences of objectifying content online. INCLUDE+ is a network dedicated to exploring and fostering social and digital environments where everyone can thrive. Following the INCLUDE+ funding process, the OO project was designed to âtake tiny and mindful steps towards digital equityâ, by gaining a deeper understanding of the experiences of girls when navigating and participating on social networking sites and co-creating resources that help to build resilience against harmful content.Â
The project was developed and managed using the funderâs  IN+ Principles to ensure that our work was ethical and meaningful. The guiding principles are meaningful digital inclusion, collective care, responsiveness, diversity, sustainability and a holistic approach. We prioritised the participantsâ specialist knowledge by co-designing all aspects of the research process with them. The project centred the voices, experiences and creativity of girls, values that are at the heart of our community partner Getaway Girls. Getaway Girls is a charity based in South Leeds that aims to empower girls and young women to lead safe, healthy and fulfilled lives. Since 1987 they have supported over 20,000 girls and young women to learn new skills[SB3] , build confidence, resilience and aspiration. Getaway Girls focus on empowering girls and young women to support each other through recognising their talents and lived experience.
Our shared values meant that we quickly agreed processes which helped to keep the time-limited project on track. However, with more time there would be benefit from working with community partners that approach issues in different ways to help us test and further develop our methodologies. Our commitment to valuing the skills and knowledges of the participants and staff at Getaway Girls meant that we asked them how they would do things and followed their advice. For example, Flavia Docherty the CEO of Getaway Girls, suggested that the participants would be more comfortable talking with the youth workers at Getaway Girls as they know each other and already have open and honest conversations together. The OO team developed a list of prompt questions and trained youth workers to do the interviews, resulting in rich, informal conversations.
Our intersectional approach aimed to tease out the multiple power dynamics that affect experiences on social networking sites and how they impact self-expression, community engagement, participation and wellbeing. Wellbeing and care are at the centre of this project. By focusing on and sharing coping mechanisms and resilience-building actions, we aimed to help participants practise self-care and facilitate their own caring communities online.
Co-design
From the outset, the project was co-designed and co-created with participants, workshop leads and youth workers at Getaway Girls. The participants were encouraged to take ownership of the research and determine its focus. A key measure of our success was the participantsâ approval of the intervention, and the extent to which they considered it relatable and authentic. Throughout the project we were conscious of the power relations between the academics, the community partners and groups of participants. We built time for reflexivity into the project schedule and checked-in with youth workers throughout the project so that we could remain responsive to the changing dynamics within the groups.
At the start of the project, I led ice-breaker collage workshops with three groups at Getaway Girls to meet potential participants, tell them about the project and answer questions. I asked them: what social media/networking platforms do you use, what types of content do you look at and what types of content do you post and/or respond to? On large sheets of paper, the participants used text and collage to show their experiences on social media.
In collage, visual elements are given new meanings through their placement in relation to each other. Collage can be used for cultural critique because it enables materials from different spaces and discourses to come into conversation and decentre dominant views. It is also an embodied practice that expresses the personal meanings and experiences of the person or group that creates them and materialises unconscious connections through intuitive arrangements of forms. This is particularly pertinent when using collage to examine intersectional identities and affective experience (Woolley et al. 2026).
For example, one participant collaged together multiple pairs of eyes facing in different directions to represent their experiences of being visible on social media. The two masculine appearing pairs of eyes look directly at the camera/audience whereas the three feminine pairs of eyes look elsewhere. The men appear confrontational and in control, whereas the women seem unaware they are looked at or unable to manage the gaze of others. When viewed together, the eyes appear omniscient, viewing all angles at once. We see this as an apt visual metaphor for surveillance on social networking sites. Another participant placed a large male figure overlapping a smaller female figure. The scale and placement imply gender imbalance, which is reiterated by the word âinequalityâ written next to the collage.
The collages made during the icebreaker session and the experiences discussed while making them informed the focus of the interviews and workshops in the next stage of the project. They also introduced some of the common experiences that were described by the participants during the interviews including visibleness, surveillance and difficulty controlling who can see and comment on their content.
I led the workshop stage of the project with Flavia and the workshop leads: Paulette Morris, a singer and songwriter, Denetta Copeland, an artist and creative writing teacher and Marcia Brown, an artist, community practitioner and art teacher. I supported the workshops and provided material from the interview transcripts that expressed common experiences.
In the workshops we used collage, drawing and creative writing activities as a process of reflection, creative speculation and analysis. In the first two workshops led by Copeland and Morris, the girls worked individually and in small groups to create poems and raps using the texts. We used audio recorders to record the girls rehearsing, revising and performing their poems. Workshops 3 and 4 were led by Brown and focused on creating artworks to accompany the poems. In workshop 3, participants created sketches using silhouette figures and magazines. In workshop 4, they worked together to create large mixed media collages that combined and refined their individual ideas. Group B focused on the impact of objectifying content. To express the idea of negative content and its effect, several of the participants used wavey lines to imply things going into the body and radiating out of it. In their large collaborative canvas, the participants used arrows to show the directional flow of influence and impact.
Group A focused on the things girls can do to build resilience and support each other. They decided to use a figure positioned to face into the future, annotated with the word resilience. Behind the figure are people cut from magazines connoting peer support and community, and text cut from magazines stating, âfacing the futureâ âblack beautyâ âno gatekeepersâ âheroesâ and âfind your joyâ. This figure is not experiencing an oppressive flow of objectifying content and negative feelings but is surrounded by positive influences that help them move towards resilience. The canvas expresses participantsâ vision for a social media platform in which they have agency regarding the content they see and who interacts with them.
Creative activities are a method for creating data and a way of encouraging conversations on a given topic. We find that making artworks about sensitive subjects has a distancing effect that allows participants to share negative experiences in a safe way and often enables them to have conversations about them that might otherwise feel difficult. The conversations were led by youth workers who are trained to safely navigate these experiences and followed Getaway Girlsâ safeguarding processes.
To collect the rich data produced during the workshops we recorded and anonymously transcribed the conversations and carried out content analysis on the poems and artworks the participants created. The workshops spanned a 4-week period which gave an intensity to the creative process but felt a little rushed, particularly finding time for reflexion and selecting materials from each session in preparation for the next. Co-creation can benefit from a slow-paced cycle of collection, creation and reflexion, allowing time for discussion and experimentation.
Participants said that they enjoyed the creative activities and felt proud of the artworks they produced. During a reflection session towards the end of the project, one participant also commented that the conversations they had made her realise that they were all having similar negative experiences which made her feel less alone.
To create a digital resource that we could share on social media platforms we employed Louise Atkinson to produce an animation (intervention) using the participantsâ poems and artworks. Atkinson is a multimedia artist experienced in leading participatory art projects and academic research. Finding the right person for this part of the project was crucial to ensure that the participantsâ voices and creativity remained central in the animation. Louiseâs brief was to animate the workshop materials rather than use them as an aesthetic guide to ensure that the final output was genuinely co-created. At key stages of the co-design and production we consulted with the participants and revised the animation based on their suggestions. Louise and I had regular meetings, and the animation went through numerous iterations. Co-creation is time-consuming and labour intensive, so good working relationships and a shared understanding of the objectives are vital. In stage 3 of the project, we tested the efficacy of the animation in a psychology experiment. A different group of 285 16â18-year-old girls watched the animation, and we measured if they were more likely to report objectifying content on social media as a result. The results were positive, indicating that our animation resonated with this age group.
When the animation was finished I returned to Getaway Girls with Paulette Morris and 5 self-selected participants to record the audio track for the animation. Including the voices of some of the participants added depth and brought the animation to life. During the recording session the participants experimented with tone, inflection and style of speech to emphasise the meaning of their words. It was agreed that the animation would begin with individual voices describing negative experiences that are often experienced in isolation. As the narrative moved on to methods of building resilience and support the participants spoke in unison to express the feeling of empowerment when sharing experiences.
To celebrate the participantsâ artworks we exhibited the canvases, animation and supplementary audio work in an exhibition at B-Space Gallery at LAU. During the opening event one of the participants gave speech about the importance of the project and the value of their involvement in it. We asked for feedback from Getaway Girls to help us develop and improve our participatory practices. Flavia said the project was: âan example of real partnership and co production ⌠Getaway Girls have loved being part of the whole process and the opportunity to amplify young womenâs voices and influence changeâ. Navira, one of the youth workers who interviewed some of the participants and supported the workshops said that âHearing the young womenâs stories from interviews to the workshops allowed us to understand some of the pressure they face online. This in turn has helped inform the way I work with young peopleâ.
Leading a participatory research project with co-creation at its heart can be difficult. It takes a long time to build trust with participants and collaborators. Participatory projects can also be expensive because fair payment for participantsâ time and expertise is vital in ensuring equitable relationships. However, the benefits of co-creation are manifold. Creative workshops produced nuanced and complex artworks that supported and enriched the information that came from the interviews. The creative activities were also conduits to deep conversations about difficult subjects. In a reflection session participants noted that they were now more aware of how much objectifying content there is on social media and talked about it with friends and family members. This demonstrates that facilitating conversations with young people about objectifying content online empowers them to think more critically about the content they see. This project shows that co-creative participatory methods can produce authentic and effective outcomes when they centre the creativity and voices of the participants.
Effective participatory work requires the researcher to relinquish control and embrace unpredictability. Reflexivity and openness of communication should underpin all aspects of the research to ensure that everyone involved is valued and able to contribute in a way that works for them. Projects are successful when participants and community collaborators trust that the researcher will work for the benefit of the community and treat their stories, ideas and artworks with care and respect.
The project report, animation and other resources can be viewed here: https://includeplus.org/feasibility-study/online-objectification/
Woolley, D., Are, C., Brown, G., Clinch, S., Dalton, B., Steeds, M., ⌠Wilson, A. (2026). Collaging together-apart: representations of queer joy in digital spaces. Journal of Gender Studies, 1â25. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2026.2654174