Virtual social media spaces, a relational arena for ‘bearing witness’ to desistance

Abstract

This paper considers the benefits of participating in a Photographic electronic Narrative (PeN) project funded through a mid-career fellowship scheme and hosted at an independent, part community funded resettlement scheme (RS), located outside of the prison estate in England, for men released on temporary licence (ROTL) and others on community sentences referred through probation (trainees). After two years, two interrelated and significant outcomes have emerged, firstly, that the PeN project through the co-creation of blog posts, has given trainees an opportunity to imagine future selves (Giordano et al 2002, Hunter and Farrall 2018), with the research encounter a means of bearing witness to this and the trauma of criminalisation (Anderson 2016). Secondly, creating and posting PeN project blogs has created a virtual space for these imagined future selves to be articulated and crucially, it gives trainees’ families, friends and the wider community a means of also bearing witness to trainees’ desistance narratives (Anderson 2016).