Abstract
There is general agreement overall about the desirability and importance of youth support systems as being crucial for young people ‘at risk’ to help them cultivate their subjectivities about employability. In this article, we take a closer look at these support systems and especially at outreach youth work in Finland. We focus on the construction of knowledge and subjectivities of young people related to it. We argue that among the good intentions in cultivating young people’s subjectivities, outreach youth work tends to operate as a practice for enhancing the construction of psycho-emotional vulnerabilities and employability of young people while translating wider societal questions of austerity, poverty and inequality into questions of individualised deficiencies.
Highlights
In Finland, young people ‘at risk’ are at the centre of youth policies and their implementation
We suggest that outreach youth work (OYW) is a governing practice taking place through discursive practices (Bacchi and Bonham, 2014; Brunila et al, 2016) that enable particular types of knowledge and subjectivities to be developed for and by young people
We have shown how OYW is filled with good intentions, strives for positivity and aims to empower and enhance the knowledge of young people, cultivating their employability
Summary
In Finland, young people ‘at risk’ are at the centre of youth policies and their implementation. Often represented as statistical categorisations, such as referring to young people ‘at risk’ as Not in Employment, Education or Training, ‘at risk’ forms a tool for youth support systems such as outreach youth work (OYW) to find and detect young people seen as in need of intervention (Mertanen, 2020; Brunila et al, 2020; Brown, 2014).
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