Conference Program

The present contribution will address a methodological reflection on the CLICK project “Connecting Families, Educators and Policymakers to Improve the Well-Being of LGBTIQ Children Through an Intersectional Approach”. The project seeks to enhance the well-being of LGBTIQ adolescents (14-18) by addressing gender-based violence and discrimination through an intersectional, child-centered, multi-actor framework involving youth, families, educators, and key policymakers.

Community-based participatory research (Fine & Torre, 2019; Puckett, 2017) aims to center the lived experiences of minoritized individuals and is widely employed in psychosocial field to actively engage queer individuals (Clements et al., 2025).

Our contribution will reflect on the meaning of constructing democratic research with adolescents whose lives and accountability are shaped by age-based discrimination and intersecting inequalities of gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability, as well as their need for protection (Mayo & Rodriguez, 2019). Rather than assuming adolescents’ participation in action-research as inherently emancipatory (James, 2007), we will explore the ethical and methodological challenges of making their participation meaningful, safe, active, and rooted in social justice.

CLICK adopted an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods design combining focus groups, surveys, and semi-structured interviews. Adolescents were engaged through diverse creative and dialogical tools intended to re-center their perspectives and recognize them as experts of their own lived experiences (Giorgi et al., 2021). The project also established a Children Advisory Board, where adolescents were recognized as key consultants, ensuring the rigorous implementation of the research, the soundness of the results, and the effectiveness of the outputs. We will discuss how facilitation practices were intended to decentralize adult authority and how institutional constraints (i.e., ethical committees, protection obligations, and funding frameworks) simultaneously enable and limit youth democratic participation.

We will discuss the need to balance between fostering visibility and active participation on the one hand and ensuring privacy and safety on the other. Therefore, a focus will be placed on the procedures for informed consent and confidentiality (Martínez Muñoz & Velásquez Crespo, 2021). Addressing discrimination, violence, and identity requires navigating consent, GDPR-compliant data management, and child protection protocols while keeping in mind the physical and psychological safety of adolescents who may have not yet disclosed their queer identity to their families or schools.

We will conclude by addressing questions of justice and co-construction of knowledge. While the needs and perspectives of young people, their well-being, and community resistance are key components of the project, transforming adolescents’ narratives into policy recommendations can raise significant issues of interpretation, intellectual ownership, and potential epistemic extractivism (Furman et al., 2019). A central inquiry will be to determine who speaks on behalf of whom in dissemination processes, and how the voices of young people are translated into institutional language.

Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, we will discuss how enabling adolescents to “speak” in research is not merely a matter of technique, but of democratic accountability. Within this framework, participation becomes a space where democracy is practiced, contested, and redefined. A reflexive model of child-centered research could conceptualize democracy not as a normative peripheral concern, but rather as an open-ended methodological challenge.