Exploring young people's and youth workers' experiences of spaces for ‘youth development’: creating cultures of participation

The paper focuses on the emergence of ‘positive youth development’ and its impact on older, more established practices of working with young people, such as youth work. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in England between 2004 and 2006, in particular young people's and youth workers' accounts of participating in youth work, the analysis engages with the social spaces in which youth work takes place and asks key questions about why young people might participate in youth spaces, what they get out of participating and how such spaces can promote cultures of participation. The analysis shows that such spaces provide young people and their communities with biographical continuity and time becomes a key component for sustaining such spaces. The argument is made for a more nuanced understanding of what young people get out of their participation in youth spaces, and for an epistemological approach to youth praxis that embraces the messiness and inequalities of lived experience

[Review] Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman (2008) Towards psychologies of liberation

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[Review] M. S. Pancer (2015) The psychology of citizenship and civic engagement

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Children's participation, childhood publics and social change: a review

Progress in the implementation of children's participation rights in England is reviewed and situated within a broader agenda of social change. The article argues that much of the energy for ‘change for children’ has resided within a governance pathway across policy, practice and research. An alternative perspective is offered by re-connecting children's rights debates to those of social movements and asking whether childhood publics are possible, what they might look like and where they might be found. It is concluded that a cross-national and longitudinal perspective grounded in everyday life is likely to provide a more nuanced understanding of the change for children