South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania share a history of colonial wars, violence and loss. The challenges faced by young people in these countries living in the urban and peri-urban communities identified as sites for this transnational project are inextricably linked to the historical injustices experienced in these regions. However, they also reflect an intersection of historical and contemporary challenges related to a complex matrix of the emotional legacies of historical trauma and present social conditions.

Some of the young people who will participate in the project have witnessed violence within their families and communities, and some have been victims of violence themselves. Some have experienced “everyday” traumatic challenges, where the ripple effects of contemporary encounters with violence, rather than the lingering impact of historical adversity, compromise their sense of safety and disrupt their overall wellbeing. In this project, we are concerned with breaking the cycles of the complex interplay of historical trauma and its transgenerational legacy as it plays out from the level of individuals to the collective and the cultural.

The project will invite young participants to envision, with our research teams, practices for a future of transgenerational wellbeing by fostering strong, sustainable and supportive relationships in their communities. The goal is to co-design practices and interventions with young people that integrate the richness of their cultural knowledge with research principles to foster empowering relational shifts.

Ultimately, our goal is to work collaboratively with young people in a way that will emphasise youth agency and build the young people’s capacity.

The research team and community partners will co-convene three participatory research and practice field workshops. These informational sessions will explore how young people react to challenging external and internal situations.

Project leaders will conduct focus group discussions with young people at each site to canvass their understanding of wellbeing, their experiences of wellbeing (if any) – i.e. activities they have initiated or participated in that have bestowed a sense of wellbeing – and what they need to promote wellbeing in their lives and communities. Photovoice, a data collection tool used to capture participants’ in-depth observations about their community through the artistic lens of photography, will be employed (Wang & Burris, 1997).

The aim is to shift the focus from transgenerational cycles of historical trauma by going beyond theoretical debate and asking rarely explored questions on how these generational cycles can be disrupted by creating opportunities for relational wellbeing that will translate into a positive transgenerational legacy.

The research agenda will shift the lens from a Euro-American-dominated knowledge base to new directions that take advantage of our position in the Global South.

1. To develop a theoretical framework for transgenerational wellbeing
2. To investigate young people’s understanding of wellbeing in different cultural contexts, and to identify the factors that contribute to their experience of wellbeing, and factors that contribute to the diminishing of a sense of wellbeing in their everyday lives
3. To examine the relationship between young people’s sense of identity on the one hand and the memories of the violent histories into which they were born on the other, as these memories are retold through stories and other cultural expressions; and to analyse the impact of this relationship between the historical past and young people’s present circumstances in their experience of wellbeing
4. To develop strategies and interventions relevant to young people’s cultural contexts in a way that will promote relational wellbeing
5. To promote capacity development for emerging scholars in African contexts by offering mentorship and interdisciplinary research training, using qualitative methodologies such as ethnography, arts-based research and media
6. To create a multimedia archive, including podcasts, video essays and art-based outputs, that showcases the shared and context-specific findings from each country, providing accessible platforms for communities to engage with the research outcomes
7. To generate policy recommendations and practical interventions that promote collective and transgenerational wellbeing in post-conflict and post-colonial societies, ensuring these are adaptable across different settings while remaining grounded in local contexts

The researchers will present their programme of action in the form of a change pathway, or an impact chain. The proposed monitoring and evaluation framework will be implemented in combination with a strategic learning plan, which will be co-created with the young people involved in the project.

At the end of year one and year two, young people from Ghana and Tanzania will be invited to reflective workshops in South Africa, where they and representatives from partner organisations in the three countries will discuss their insights and feelings about their wellbeing and how participation in the project has affected them.

In year three, the annual reflective workshop will take the form of a conference, attended not only by the research participants and partner organisations, but also by academics and practitioners working in the relevant fields. Representatives from u’GOOD will also be invited to the conference.

Through these dialogical workshops and the conference, the project team, young people participating in the study and other stakeholders will have opportunities to monitor and evaluate progress in the key results areas. The project team will produce annual interim and final reports to report on the progress.