Janet Batsleer

Voices from an edge. Unsettling the practices of youth voice and participation: arts-based practice in The Blue Room, Manchester

The strengths and limitations of approaches to participatory and democratic practice rooted in voice have been discussed in relation to education and also ‘youth voice’. The paper seeks to make critical connection between the two debates, especially in relation to the persistence of practices of exclusion and marginalisation. Drawing on a two-year participant observation of a creativity-based project in Manchester, UK – The Blue Room – which worked with young men in the city centre who may have been engaged in selling sex, the article asks what it might mean for them to have voice. The widely discussed limitations of neo-liberal accounts of voice and choice are evident in this case, for the extent to which such a way of life can be thought to be freely chosen is a matter of intense debate. The possibility explored in this article is that arts-based strategies of pedagogic engagement might offer (to this group of young people and others) a hopeful (because complex, provisional and in process) form of voice rather than a tokenistic and controlling one.

What is youth work

With the proposed development of the ‘youth professional’ and the consolidation of graduate professional qualifications, this is an important time for youth work. This book sets out the current state of debate about youth work for those considering, or about to embark on, a degree course. Contemporary debates in youth work are explored, and help to give students a sense of its history and its future contribution. By combining the experience of its editors and the contemporaneous experience of the voices of contributors, this book provides an excellent introduction to work as a youth worker in the twenty-first century.

Responses of health and social care staff to South Asian women who attempt suicide and/or self-harm

This paper draws on a ten month British study completed in April 2001 investigating service responses to women of South Asian background who had attempted suicide or who self-harmed. The scope of the study is briefly outlined and an analysis of perspectives documented in the study is presented, drawing on research interviews with 18 staff from a variety of health and social care disciplines and with seven survivors of attempted suicide/self-harm. The implications of this analysis for improving practice are considered. Attitudes surrounding attempted suicide and self-harm are discussed. The issue of ‘race anxiety’ is also discussed. The factors seen by workers as contributing to South Asian womens attempted suicide are considered, with a particular focus on the difficulties caused in the delivery of services by common-sense accounts of cultural issues. Current approaches to the delivery of services to South Asian women are identified and analysed, showing how their current organisation can lead to circularity in referral systems and consequent non-intentional neglect of the needs of this client group. It is urged that proper consideration be given to the support and professional supervision of staff in this complex area of work.

Dangerous spaces, dangerous memories, dangerous emotions: informal education and heteronormativity – a Manchester UK Youth Work vignette

This article makes a connection between youth work spaces, emotions and some elements of memory, exploring the construction of spaces dangerous for social justice in both meanings of the term ‘dangerous for’. It investigates the contribution to social justice of lesbian and gay youth work and other non-heteronormative youth work in a British context and considers the spaces of youth work practice as both potentially threatening to the prospect of social justice and also as potentially ‘for’ social justice, that is, capable of proposing social justice and therefore replete with danger for current social relations. The argument seeks to engage with recent discussions of how collective subjectivities emerge and become politically active, of how lives become liveable and indeed what counts as a life.

Border crossings/translations: Resources of hope in community work with women in Greater Manchester

This article offers two case studies of community development work undertaken in Greater Manchester, United Kingdom, focusing on a Somali Womens Health Day and the work of a community arts project with Asian women, Black Issues in Community Arts/Karishma. The analysis of the operation of racialised borders and the role of womens work in mediating these definitions of community is taken as a critical aspect of community development. Theoretical development of ideas about community development across division and difference draws on recent feminist theory on themes of hybridity and community. In both the accounts of practice and the theoretical debates, translation is the central practice analysed. Este artículo ofrece estudios de dos trabajos de desarrollo comunitario que tuvieron lugar en Greater Manchester en el Reino Unido. Se centra en un Día de la Salud de Mujeres Somalias y en un proyecto artístico entre mujeres provenientes del subcontinente de India llamado ‘Temas de Raza Negra en Artes Comunitarias/Karishma’. Se considera que el análisis de la operación de fronteras racistas y del rol de las mujeres en mediar estas delimitaciones es un aspecto crítico de desarrollo comunitario. Se recurre a la teoría reciente femenista sobre temas de hibrididad y comunidad para el desarrollo teórico de ideas acerca del desarrollo comunitario a través de división y diferencia.

Non-Formal Spaces of Socio-Cultural Accompaniment: Responding to Young Unaccompanied Refugees--Reflections from the "Partispace" Project.

Drawing on research in progress in the Partispace project we make a case for the recognition of the importance of non-formal spaces in response to young refugees across three different national contexts: Frankfurt in Germany; Gothenburg in Sweden; and Manchester in the UK. It is argued that recognition of local regulation and national controls of immigration which support climates of hostility makes it important to recognise and affirm the significance of non-formal spaces and ‘small spaces close to home’ which are often developed in the ‘third space’ of civil society and arise from the impulses driven by the solidarity of volunteers. In these contexts it is important that practices of hospitality can develop which symbolically reconstitute refugees as hosts and subjects of a democratic conversation, without which there is no possible administrative solution to the refugee crisis. It is essential that educational spaces such as schools, colleges and universities forge strong bonds with such emergent spaces.

Precarity, food and accompaniment in community and youth work

Based on an ethnographic study of community-based learning and youth work in Greater Manchester, between 2013 and 2014, the use of food both as a response to precarity and a means of precaritisation is explored. The term ‘retrophilanthropy’ is used to analyse the paradoxical existence of social relations in community-based projects which feed whilst creating social abjection and divisions between the deserving and undeserving (in the practice of food charity of Foodbanks). This is contrasted with more ambivalent relationships encoded in food through youth work, termed contract and reward; enterprise and creativity; personalist orientations; and proto-universalist. It is argued that some aspects of these offer a prospect of more democratic forms of socio-cultural accompaniment and even a glimpse of the possibility of a more equal relationship to food.

Feminist Agendas in Informal Education

Feminist agendas have had a place in youth work from its earliest days through women’s involvement in philanthropic initiatives in the 19th century. These movements espoused women’s right to vote, and to support in employment and in motherhood. Later, in the 20th century, from the mid-1970s to the 1980s, connections emerged between activists in the Women’s Liberation Movement and the espousal of feminist practice in ‘Girls’ Work’. These connections are being recovered in the contemporary context of a new wave of activism, now global in its scope, challenging patriarchal controls and capitalist commodification of young women’s bodies, spirits and minds inside schools and through popular culture.

Youth work, social education, democratic practice and the challenge of difference: A contribution to debate

This paper highlights the contribution of theoretical discussions of social education in UK youth work to debates about ‘social pedagogy’, arguing that the analysis of power and difference, in particular the impact of gender difference, which has occurred in youth work is essential in discussions of ‘social pedagogy’ too. Since ‘social pedagogy’ has been discussed as a source for transformed visions of schooling, the paper extends and develops discussion of pre-figurative counter-practice and how it can be sustained through an engagement with difference, drawing especially on the work of Luce Irigaray. Ideas and practice associated with social pedagogy have been drawn on to illuminate a radical vision of the common school as a counter-practice to the neo-liberal credentialisation of schooling. Such approaches resonate strongly with so-called romantic models of youth work in the UK (Wylie, 2010) and their associated traditions of social education. The emphasis on the relational and the social in education might enable a fruitful engagement with feminist approaches especially that of the philosopher Luce Irigaray (1932–present) whose work forms the basis of the engagement with difference which is advocated here. Such an engagement with difference is essential to any democratic project which resists pressures simply to normalise, standardise and contain those involved in education.

The Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign: struggles and experiences of sanctuary

Ascension, Hulme, Manchester with the full support of the parish priest, Father John Methuen. Viraj is in sanctuary because he is threatened with deportation by the Home Office as an ’overstayer’, despite the fact that he will be persecuted in Sri Lanka as a supporter of the Tamil struggle. The Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign is a focus for many critical features of anti-racist activity in the late 1980s. Although the campaign enjoys widespread support, including that of the British Council of Churches and the Labour Party Conference, it depends for its survival on a consistent group of campaigners who sustain both the practical support to Viraj in the sanctuary and the work of wider political education and organisation. This article is based on discussions with some of those most active in the cam-