YOST4317: Youth Work in Contested Spaces

How does youth work change in contested spaces? Do youth workers require different competencies to work in a “world that has been made strange through the desolating experience of violence and loss?” This course continually revisits these questions as we read about, research within, and talk to others who have worked in contested spaces. The course ends by describing and developing an understanding of youth work in current and post-violently divided societies internationally, such as Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, and India. Veena Das’ work in India around social suffering will be used to frame the work and understand the overall aims and goals of community-based youth work in such places. Indeed, youth work in contested spaces began in these worlds marked by suffering, loss, and a legacy of violence. One purpose of the course is to explore youth work practice in contexts marked by suffering, loss, and violence.During the first two thirds of the course, we begin to understand how contested spaces exist all around us, some that we are well aware of because we also experience and are shaped by them, and others that exist only slightly further away from our own personal experience. To gain a deeper understanding of what it is like to work in contested space, students and faculty will talk with and visit different organizations and people working in different “contested spaces.” Over two weeks we will talk with community members and young people to gain insight into how contested spaces provides background and context for growing up, what major issues young people face living and growing up in this space, and what work is currently going on to address the contested nature of the community.The course also supports an autobiographical turn, asking students to begin to reflect on, and understand the contested spaces that they too were a part of, either as victim or instigator. We end the course by analyzing the data we have collected on the neighborhood, our own personal experience of contested spaces, and searching for themes and touchstones to guide youth work in such spaces.

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