Discipline & Caring: The Cultural Politics of Youth Work

This dissertation examines the cultural politics and social conflicts that have and continue to shape the relations and practices of youth work. Based on ethnographic participant-observation and interviews in a non-profit alternative school and a for-profit day treatment program, I describe how youth workers in Alston, North Carolina, negotiate relationships with young people, their co-workers, and the uneven social contexts of their work through contested and culturally informed understandings of what should be done about troubled or at-risk youth. Using discourse analyses of public hearing transcripts, policy statements, media accounts, and youth work literature, and an examination of the cultural history of social-work, this research situates the local contentious practice of youth workers in Alston within ongoing social struggles in the United States and capitalism at-large. These struggles and conflicts involve the role of the state in relation to the market economy, the social distribution of resources, and the conduct of social welfare and control. I examine these struggles as they emerged through and shaped the character of youth work in both the 19th century child saving movement and in the neoliberal privatization and withdrawal of the state at the close of the 20th century. Historical and ethnographic analyses illustrate how these conflicts not only concern the substance of youth work, but also social divisions and inequalities including the gendered implications of social labor, the moral valuation of poverty, crime, and violence, and the relationship of these to racial, ethnic, and class difference. Drawing on social practice theory and the idea that the language and practices workers express are shaped by their history-in-person, this dissertation describes how youth workers employed varying rhetorical narratives of professionalism and what I call organic expertise to define youth and the moral conduct of youth work. Finally, I consider how the cultural resources workers bring to practice converge with the conditions of their labor to shape what they actually do with young people

Revising Reform: a Cultural History of Juvenile Justice Reform in the United States

The “child saving” movement of the late 19th century has been largely credited with the political and moral impetus for the first distinctly “juvenile” courts in Chicago, which were established in 1899 and became the model by which juvenile justice systems across the United States were based. Through the work of Jane Addams and her Settlement House colleagues, the birth of these new structures for governing juvenile delinquency, such as the Juvenile Protective Association, were also indelibly..

Violences juvéniles sous expertise(s) / Expertise and Juvenile Violence

Dans la construction historique du problème social que constitue la violence juvénile, le rôle de l'expertise est primordial. L'expert, agissant au coeur ou à la lisière du système institutionnel de protection de la jeunesse, peut être celui qui recueille et met en forme l'expression de cette violence. De ce fait, il contribue à l'extension de sa définition: violence physique, mais aussi psychique, voire symbolique. Les experts dépassent alors la posture du simple diagnostic pour s'inscrire dans une démarche de soin et de réhabilitation sociale. Depuis le XIXe siècle, médecins, psychiatres, puis psychologues, pédagogues, sociologues et anthropologues, ont investi la question de la jeunesse irrégulière, contribuant ainsi à la définition d'une population-cible pour les politiques publiques.Expertise has played an essential role in the historical construction of juvenile violence as a social problem. The expert who is situated at the centre and periphery of the child protection system, gathers the expression of violence and gives it form. In so doing, he/she contributes to a more complex definition of violence: from physical to psychic violence, and even to symbolic violence. Since the 19th century experts have moved beyond making simple diagnoses and entered the field of treatment of violence, joining others in the practice of care and rehabilitation. Physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, pedagogues, sociologists and anthropologists have addressed the question of youth at risk, helping to define a target population for public policies

Violences juvéniles sous expertise(s) / Expertise and Juvenile Violence

Dans la construction historique du problème social que constitue la violence juvénile, le rôle de l'expertise est primordial. L'expert, agissant au coeur ou à la lisière du système institutionnel de protection de la jeunesse, peut être celui qui recueille et met en forme l'expression de cette violence. De ce fait, il contribue à l'extension de sa définition: violence physique, mais aussi psychique, voire symbolique. Les experts dépassent alors la posture du simple diagnostic pour s'inscrire dans une démarche de soin et de réhabilitation sociale. Depuis le XIXe siècle, médecins, psychiatres, puis psychologues, pédagogues, sociologues et anthropologues, ont investi la question de la jeunesse irrégulière, contribuant ainsi à la définition d'une population-cible pour les politiques publiques.Expertise has played an essential role in the historical construction of juvenile violence as a social problem. The expert who is situated at the centre and periphery of the child protection system, gathers the expression of violence and gives it form. In so doing, he/she contributes to a more complex definition of violence: from physical to psychic violence, and even to symbolic violence. Since the 19th century experts have moved beyond making simple diagnoses and entered the field of treatment of violence, joining others in the practice of care and rehabilitation. Physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, pedagogues, sociologists and anthropologists have addressed the question of youth at risk, helping to define a target population for public policies