LGBTQI+ Futures and Wellbeing

Research on LGBTQI+ young people has tended to frame them predominantly as a group at risk, cataloguing harms, measuring disparities, identifying vulnerabilities. LGBTQI+ Futures and Wellbeing takes a different starting point. Led by Dr Eleanor Wilkinson and Dr Ames Clark at the University of Sheffield, and conducted in parallel across the UK, Sweden, Poland, Estonia, and Switzerland, the study centres what wellbeing actually means to LGBTQI+ young adults and what futures they imagine for themselves — in genuinely turbulent political and social times.

This study makes space for resilience, resistance, hope, and joy alongside hardship.

The Research

The UK strand of the project recruited 40 LGBTQI+ young adults from across the country. Participants were placed in groups of approximately ten for two five-hour workshops over a weekend, working with the same group across both sessions to allow trust to build and ideas to develop collaboratively. The workshops were deliberately structured not as interviews but as participatory research.

The three main themes explored were: what wellbeing means to LGBTQI+ young adults and what currently enables or prevents it; personal imagined futures, where participants would be living, who they would be with, what they hoped for; and collective visions of better futures, what a world in which LGBTQI+ lives can flourish would actually look like. These themes were explored through a range of creative methods: collaging, body mapping, digital storytelling, sketching, mapping, creative writing, manifestos, and zines. The workshops were designed to be fully participatory regardless of prior creative experience, with flexible formats and support available throughout.

Workshop discussions were audio-recorded and transcribed, with data anonymised at the point of transcription. Participants also worked alongside researchers and NGO partners to co-create strategies for advancing LGBTQI+ wellbeing, making the research not just descriptive but oriented towards action. The data will be archived in the UK Data Service, contributing to a long-term record of queer life in the current moment.

European Dimension

The same study is being conducted simultaneously by research teams in Sweden, Poland, Estonia, and Switzerland, enabling comparative analysis of how political and social context shapes LGBTQI+ young people's experiences of wellbeing and their visions of the future. At the end of the project, participants from all five countries are invited to an online event where each country presents its findings and creative outputs, a rare opportunity for LGBTQI+ young people across Europe to encounter each other's perspectives directly.

My Involvement

I participated as a Peer Researcher. Across both workshops I engaged with the creative methods, contributed to the group discussions and collective exercises, and produced creative outputs as part of the study. The title carries the expectation of genuine participation in the research process, and the possibility of further involvement in dissemination activities, including policy engagement events, digital storytelling, and co-authoring briefing reports or a youth manifesto — depending on what emerges from the project.