Re-examining Social Work Roles and Tasks with Foster Care

In order to promote developmental outcomes with children and young people and to nurture their positive health and well-being in foster care, social workers and case managers are required to direct professional attention toward both the child or young person and her/his daily living environment(s)—at home, at school, and in the local neighborhoods in which they live. When viewed from an ecological perspective, foster care environments are represented conceptually as a nested cluster of settings ranging from immediate life spaces and networks of relationships in a foster home, at school, and in a neighborhood, to organizational contexts holding a statutory duty of care for children and young people assigned looked after status, along with national policies and statutes which frame foster-care environments. This article explores how social-work roles and tasks with children and young people in foster care change as Social Workers transition from case management roles within state, provincial, or local authority departments to become Supervising Social Workers, or Team Managers of Foster Carers, or Directors of foster care services.     

Use of Self in the Context of Youth Work

Used in the education of counselors, nurses, occupational therapists and social workers, “use of self” is a way of understanding how practitioners bring about human change. In this article, the author discusses how use of self can be applied to youth work and is related to “developmentally responsive practice” thereby providing a deep theoretical construct for understanding youth work as relational. The author concludes by presenting the barriers to the use of self paradigm in the current climate of assessment and accountability, designed to measure static inputs and outputs rather than dynamic systems or ecologies and presents a challenge to the field for designing methodologies that are equally dynamic, responsive and relational.     

Not-Knowing or Knowing Naught: Revisiting the Concept of Collaboration and Expertise in Child and Youth Care Practice

This article discusses the complexities associated with adopting a not-knowing stance in Child and Youth Care practice. By highlighting some of the challenges, it also clarifies the distinctions between practitioner lack of knowing how to proceed and an intentional, uncertain attitude when working with children, youth and families. Recommendations or caveats are provided if a practitioner chooses to adopt this kind of orientation to practice.     

Like a Deer in the Headlights: The Paralysis of Stuckness

When describing how they experience moments of not-knowing, youth workers often talk about a sense of paralysis, as though their uncertainty becomes physically constraining. This chapter describes the first of five themes associated with youth workers' experiences of not knowing what to do: the paralysis of stuckness. In addition to describing and investigating the dominant theme of paralysis, this chapter discusses its three variations, as described by youth worker participants: (a) It's just me, and that's not enough, (b) It's like a mental freefall, and (c) That crushing becomes your world.     

Escalon:

No abstract available for this article.     

Creating an Extrafamilial Living Environment

Abstract

As human actors, the staff members and children who inhabit a residential center do not just react to their physical and social environment. In many ways they can be said to enact or create it.     

Guidelines in Child and Youth Care Family Work

SUMMARY

There are many paths that can be taken with the families we encounter in our work. It is this richness in options that can make the child and youth care approach so powerful. However, amongst each potential path there are a number of common guideposts that serve as markers for our interactions with families. These guiding principles are described through the use of examples from a family in a program for teens who are parenting.     

Youth Work in Croatia: Collecting Pieces for a Mosaic

This article explores the historical development of youth work in Croatia. By drawing from available data and personal experience, we describe three key phases of youth work development in a post-conflict country: (a) the period of the early 1990s as a “direct peace building" youth work; (b) the rise of nonformal education during the mid and late 1990s; and (c) the growth of a networked youth sector and its focus on youth policy advocacy starting in 2000. In addition, we refer to today's context, particularly because of its project-management orientation. Such categorization highlights various practices that we consider to represent youth work in a specific and contested national framework. Work with young people with fewer opportunities is being presented as a case, building on our observation that contemporary youth work continues to be embedded in civil society development and nonformal education, facing challenges of funding-driven discourse and unsystematic support.     

Can the global South take over the baton? What cosmopolitanism in ‘unlikely’ places means for future world order

As the West’s centrality fades, the global South may have a decisive influence in shaping future world order. Will that future see a retreat from globalisation to hard-edged particularisms? Or will the emerging post-Westphalian global society let the global South take over the baton of cosmopolitan institution building in its own way? This article draws on a multi-country survey of educated youth to find promising signs of imagined common ground with other countries. It suggests the flavours of cosmopolitan integration that the global South is likely to support in coming decades.     

Carnal teachings: raunch aesthetics as queer feminist pedagogies in Yo! Majesty's hip hop practice

This essay puts forward a notion of “raunch aesthetics,” theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.