Howard Sercombe

The gift and the trap : working the "Teen Brain" into our concept of youth

Progressive developments in scanning technologies over the last decade have led to a surge of new research into the structure and function of the brain and into differences between the brains of teenagers and other adults. This work has not been free of controversy, notably around the question of deficits in the capacity of young people concerning risk-taking behavior. In a previous article, Michael Males mounted a challenge to this body of work, arguing that it exaggerated the propensity of young people to take risks and ignored the impact of external contextual and sociological factors. In responding to Males’s article, this article not only supports his concern about deficit models of adolescence but also explores the way that the new brain science takes us beyond the century-old binary between biological determinism and social constructionism. It calls for renewed scholarly effort to develop theory and discourse that will allow us to think about young people’s responses in terms of the interaction between biology, experience and social context, and individual agency.

Bullying and agency: definition, intervention and ethics

Respectme is a human rights organisation working to reduce the impact of bullying in Scotland. In this work, some useful conceptual and practice frameworks have emerged, distinguishing between aggression, as legitimate, if sometimes unpleasant, dominance behaviour and violence, which is unethical action involving the intent to harm. Bullying pushes beyond dominance/subordination to render the person not just subject but abject: incapable of finding any peaceful place in the social structure or any capacity for agency or effective action. This distinguishes bullying from other relationships of violence, and calls for intervention which promotes the restoration of agency in the person being bullied. ‘Hitting back’ and ‘letting them sort it out’ are discussed in this context. This also has implications for the definition of bullying. While emerging definitions of bullying have been useful, they have also been broad. At a practice level, we have ourselves generally avoided definitional questions as part of a non-labelling strategy. However, the increasing penetration of bullying discourse in legal and workplace contexts (with potentially serious implications for the accused and for host organisations) requires more careful specification of what bullying is and what it is not. Here again, we believe the concept of agency can prove useful.

A service, a ‘way of working’, or a profession? A discourse analysis of community education/community learning and development in Scotland

Community-based informal education, like other practices, is fundamentally shaped by the discourses under which it is constituted. In Scotland, since 1975, the practice has been formally established by government policy as an amalgam of youth work, adult education and community development under a discourse of informal education. This combination carries its own internal tensions alongside the continually contested relationship between the field of practice and the State. This study analyses key documents in order to chart the shifts in discourse around the constitution of Community Education/Community Learning and Development since 1975. The analysis reveals the force of managerialist discourses which transformed understandings of the practice from post-war welfare state discourses as a service, to its reshaping as technique under New Labour. Current discursive work is directed to its reconstitution (still somewhat ambivalently) as a profession. This ‘re-professionalisation’ connects with similar movements in medicine, social work, parole and teaching which are attempting to reduce the costs of actuarial disciplinary techniques (in record-keeping, reporting and the generation of outcome data) by returning professional trust and judgement to practitioners.

The Ernst triadic model: a good start?

As a sociologist and youth worker, I have been interested for some years in the contribution of neuroscience to a number of social phenomena, and to the expanding interface between social science and neuroscience (and other disciplines within the new generation of biological sciences, such as epigenetics). The dialogue with clinical youth work practice and with sociology, rather than psychology, sometimes involves quite different insights and perspectives. For example, neuroscience can itself be seen as a cultural product, in its epistemological assumptions, and in the production of neuroscientific narratives about the nature of human experience.