Challenges arise from a plethora of lived experiences, for example a lack of trust and the emotionally time-consuming work in fostering relationships before, during and beyond co-production workshops. This impacts co-production as a rational, outcome-focused activity and requires a focus on the socio-economic and geographical contexts of participants’ lives.

Our experiences of co-production with young people underscored the need to be flexible and adaptable in seeking to engage them, particularly when addressing barriers to participation. One such challenge has been the language barrier when we worked alongside young people who are asylum seekers or refugees.

Whilst interpreters were available, in person or on the phone, for co-production workshops, their presence permeated the workshops as a disruption. In one session, there were two in person translators speaking different languages and one on loud loudspeaker through a mobile phone. The simultaneous presence of multiple interpreters, speaking at once, created a disorienting environment, making it difficult to follow conversations and creating chaos.

Reflecting on the experience, along with support workers from the charity, a decision was made to use emojis as a way of encouraging representations from young people, moving away from an onus on English. Emoji sheets that depicted a diversity of mood states such as laughter, anger, sadness, sickness, sleepiness, were purchased and presented to young people at the workshop. The use of emojis presented a concrete way for communicating as all young people identified with emojis as a form of communication.

Emojis worked in different ways during the sessions. They allowed for young people to express how they felt in a manner that presented an understanding of the emotional tone at the start of sessions, became incorporated as part of participatory activities, and at the end of sessions, providing valuable feedback.

Using emojis furthered discussions around key themes that were presented to young people, and collaboration between them became more apparent as they moved about emojis and sought to expand through writing. Co-production workshops became multi-modal as emojis were combined with text.

Our co-production was focused on establishing research priorities based on the experiences of marginal young people. We sought to avoid prescriptive, restrictive or tokenistic inclusion of marginal young voices and challenged barriers based on language. Rather, emojis enabled us to work within the underlying principles and values of co-production as they relate to agency, equality and research inclusion.