Jenkinson, J., Khan, F., Earnshaw, J., Kettle, A., Wahid, M., 2022.

Reclaiming the Narrative: Portrait Youth

Reclaiming the Narrative (RTN) was a participatory arts-based collaboration between local young Muslims, the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies (Fatima Khan), the British Muslim Heritage Centre and the Manchester School of Art (Alice Kettle). Working together, we used collage, ceramics, textiles, dress and photography to explore and understand how young people negotiate their identities within an era of structurally embedded and endemic Islamophobia.

RTN collaborated with the Portrait Youth (PY) project at Manchester Fashion Institute (Jo Jenkinson, John Earnshaw) to explore identity with young people using dress, styling, and photography. An innovative model that not only allows a new way of engaging with identity-making practices, but one that decentres the researcher and privileges the young Muslims' agency within the research process.

This exhibition showcases the RTN workshops and portraits from the RTN x PY collaboration by the acclaimed photographer Maryam Wahid, hosted by project partners, the British Muslim Heritage Centre. The event was part of the ESRC festival of social science.