Alternative Education and the Social Coordination of Youth Work

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Alternative Perspectives on Youth and Schooling

Abstract

This paper describes an investigation of human service provision for young people who are homeless. The research combined community development activities with an institutional ethnographic analysis of “youth work” – that is, the policies, procedures, interventions, professional discourses, knowledge, and calculative technologies that coordinate young people and practitioners’ work in institutional settings. Data were used to discover what has happened when young people are described having “slipped through the cracks.” People’s descriptions of their institutional work reveal how policy, funding practices, the creation and use of case files, managerial technologies, ideas about risk and accountability, and knowledge about youth are textually mediated social relations that contribute the marginalisation of young people who are homeless.

Author

• Naomi Elizabeth Nichols, York University