Imagining ‘radical’ youth work possibilities – challenging the ‘symbolic violence’ within the mainstream tradition in contemporary state-led youth work practice in England

Abstract

This paper critically assesses the contemporary mainstream state-led youth work tradition in England. Its particular focus is possibilities within this tradition for engaging disadvantaged young people in activities that facilitate resistance to oppression. The basic thesis presented is that the current framework for youth work policy and practice is closing off opportunities for progressive ways of working with young people and, as a corollary, is stifling their capacity to overcome the constraints limiting their life chances. The data were gathered in 2010 while the author worked at an open-access youth club in a deprived inner-city district of an English city. While the majority of the young people using the club suffered severe social disadvantage, both the macro and micro political frameworks for state-led youth work worked against imagining strategies of resistance and social change. The paper draws on Bourdieu's notion of ‘symbolic violence’ to shed light on the way the operations of social institutions often conceal the power relations behind the violence of oppression and thereby add their own symbolic force to those relations. In the case of contemporary youth work practice, the force of this symbolic violence is having profound material consequences in the form of denied dreams and aspirations.