Cultural humility in youth work: a duoethnography on anti-racist, anti-ableist practice

Abstract

Cultural humility is a framework for engaging in self-reflection, self-critique, and reflective practice to cultivate respectful relationships and understand power and privilege. Using duoethnography, we applied cultural humility to our youth work at summer camp and in a social skills group for Autistic youth. Our integrative analysis shows how cultural humility allowed us to enact a transformative social justice agenda, understand inherent power imbalances in youth-practitioner partnerships, and better engage around race and disability in our daily practice. Given the power imbalances inherent to working with youth, we posit cultural humility as an important framework for creating anti-oppressive youth development spaces and relationships.