Currently dspace-rest-python can only create items by submitting them directly to the archive, which requires admin permissions on a collection.
It would be nice we could create items in the workflow. It might be as simple as adding a submit_item function that uses the /api/submission/workspaceitems?owningCollection=<:collection-uuid> endpoint, which only requires that users have submit permissions to the collection.
See: https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/blob/dspace-7_x/submission.md