Towards the Second Duality of Global Youth Work: The Environment and Disruptive Action

open access journalThere are five faces of globalisation that global youth work (GYW), as an offshoot of global education, should respond to (economic, political, environmental, cultural and technological), in order to be transformative, both in thought and deed. The vexed issue of climate change (environmental face) and its correlation to sustainable development, as an ameliorative mechanism, speaks to the imagination and contours of GYW, centred on the duality of provoking consciousness and taking action (Sallah, 2008a; 2014). In positioning the pedagogic approach of GYW, the author establishes his situatedness as a de-colonial scholar-activist, in presenting an analysis of the impact of climate change and its attendant negative consequences, on a Southern country like The Gambia. Using the conceptual framework of GYW, the author presents his work, spanning the last four years, with Global Hands and at De Montfort University, of disruptive attempts to challenge orthodoxy and configured ways of knowing and being, from a Southern perspective. Drawing on GYW projects he has implemented in a ‘live lab’ in The Gambia which has developed Africa’s first solar powered taxi service, the development of a Compressed Earth Brick machine to combat low-cost housing and climate change, and solar dryers to preserve food and encourage food self-sufficiency, all of which have huge carbon footprint savings as well as significant economic advantages. This article presents a reflective analysis of a scholar-activist’s practice of how GYW can be used to combat climate change and enhance sustainable development in a symbiotic approach. It will illustrate the powerful pedagogic prowess of this development approach as well as highlight the challenges and tensions inherent

Working with young people in the UK: Considerations of race, religion and globalisation

This thesis overall is concerned with three cardinal considerations in relation to working with young people in a modern and fundamentally demographically changed Britain. These themes include considerations of how young people’s racial/ethnic origins and religious identity continue to shape how mainstream services interact with them as well as understanding how an increasingly globalised world changes how young people from Britain see or are seen in a new way at the personal, local, national and global levels. This thesis argues that the majority of these considerations are not currently well understood; hence the need for practitioners in youth and community development to gain cultural competency and global literacy. It has been evidenced that Black young people continue to be disadvantaged in education, employment, criminal justice and a host of other socialisation spaces in comparison to the rest of society. In addition, the furore raised constantly and continuously in relation to the vulnerability of young Muslims to violent extremism deserves more critical attention. Furthermore, globalisation means that the world is much closer economically, politically, environmentally, technologically and culturally and there is increasing consciousness about the repercussions of these connections at the personal, local, national and global levels. However, questions remain as to whether practitioners who work with young people have the required competency to work across these racial, religious and global considerations. This thesis, consisting of the author’s published works and this overview explores these three cardinal considerations of race, religion and globalisation when working with young people in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-faith modern Britain. The thesis comprises an exploration of working with Black young people within a historical and social policy context, as well as presenting research that explores the views of young Black children and parents. The author’s key contributions consist of explaining how cultural relativism and dogmatism, as extreme positions, are constructed, with potentially fatal consequences. The second dimension of working with young people in Britain explored in this thesis is that arena of Global Youth Work within both a theoretical and practice setting, especially in relation to the training of practitioners. This section also reports on research in relation to how Global Youth Work is conceptualised and operationalised in British Higher Education Institutions delivering youth work training. The last section of the thesis focuses on the contemporary issue of working with young Muslims. Against a backdrop of the government’s policy context of the “Prevent" agenda, perceptions of barriers young Muslims face in accessing mainstream services are explored, as well as the wider implications of fostering a culturally and religiously competent way of working with young Muslims

Preliminary Findings From a Pilot Study of Electric Vehicle Recharging From a Stand-Alone Solar Minigrid

open access articleThe symbiosis between smart minigrids and electric mobility has the potential to improve the cost and reliability of energy access for off-grid communities while providing low-carbon transport services. This study explores the commercial viability of using electric vehicles (EVs), recharged by solar minigrids, to provide transport services in off-grid communities. Preliminary findings are presented from a field trial in The Gambia that aims to assess the techno-economic feasibility of integrating sustainable energy and transport infrastructures in sun-rich regions of the Global South. As a dispatchable anchor load, an EV can improve the technical and economic performance of a minigrid by providing demand-side response services. In the developing world, rural communities are often among the poorest, and inadequate transport services remain a major barrier to wealth-creation. Some solutions to this situation may be transferrable to island communities, which share similar challenges in terms of access to energy and fuel. The first of its kind in Africa, this field trial uses an electric minivan, operating from an off-grid village where it has access to a minigrid whose 4.5 kWp of photovoltaic modules form the roof of a parking shelter for the vehicle. While there, the taxi can recharge, ideally during sunny periods when the photovoltaic array produces surplus power, thus allowing the EV’s battery to recharge while bypassing the minigrid’s own accumulator. This improves system reliability and cost effectiveness, while providing pollution-free energy for the taxi. Ultimately, the intention is to test different vehicles in a variety of circumstances, but this paper outlines only the preliminary findings of the first of these trials. Early results provide convincing new evidence that commercial viability of such a concept is possible in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some promising scenarios for commercial viability are identified, which warrant further investigation, since they suggest that a taxi driver’s earnings could be increased between 250 and 1,300% in local operations, and even 20-fold in tourist markets, depending on vehicle type, minigrid configuration and target market. It is hoped that these may encourage the rollout of solar-recharged EVs where the nexus of sustainable energy and transport systems are likely to make the greatest contribution to addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, by helping to solve the trilemma of providing energy security, social benefit and environmental sustainability in low-income countries

A Local-Global Approach to Critical Peace Consciousness and Mobilisation as Disruptive Counter-Narratives

This paper examines opportunities for peace, as a dichotomy between the actual and re-imagined state of the world, using a Critical Peace Education (CPE) framework, and a Global Youth Work (GYW) pedagogic approach. Drawing from similar and shared constructs presented by CPE and GYW, such as developing local human rights and participatory citizenship, teaching consciousness-raising in and out of schools, and scrutinising how the theory and application of CPE and GYW can influence structural and cultural violence, this paper asserts the need to re-engage with the more radical roots of CPE and GYW as having potential for new stories in peace studies and education that resist the status quo using knowledge and action. The authors are keen to disrupt simplified representations of peace, and uniformity of what is meant by peace, in CPE and GYW theory and practice, and the implications this has both for the social reproduction of inequality, and for youth workers and young people. Secondly, the paper will redress how peace can be understood and acted upon as critical dialogue with young people to unpick and transform experiences for agency. This paper will contribute to a greater understanding of re-imagining peace in everyday life, and the relationship between peace and practice, as part of a decolonised post-critical approach, supported by examples for how youth workers and young people have actively worked towards opportunities for peace in the duality of praxis and consciousness in their everyday life

Global Youth Work: Provoking Consciousness and Taking Action

In a world of grotesque inequality and disproportionate distribution of the world's resources, the emerging discipline of Global Youth Work has suffered from a lack of theoretical location, and has been progressively ignored in practice. This book: develops a conceptual framework, drawing on theories of globalisation, anti-oppressive practice, development theory, education, and youth work provides spaces and resources for youth workers, social workers, development workers, and associated trainees and academics within these fields, to critically engage with this discipline advances theory and practice. In a world where 80% of resources are consumed by 20% of its inhabitants, and where 229 out of every 1000 children born in Mali in 1998-1999 would die before they reached their fifth birthday, compared to 3 per 1000 born in Sweden in 2002, Global Youth Work should challenge this toxic orthodoxy and be rooted in the pursuit of social justice. This book aims to: provoke consciousness, helping individuals and groups of young people to explore ways of conceptualising and interacting with the world that differ from their existing constructions of reality, and gain a new critical consciousness encourage young people to take action, commensurate with their abilities, to move from a state of paralysis, to change the way things are. Of value in learning and practice throughout the world, and supported by empirical research undertaken amongst youth workers across the UK, Global Youth Work explores: the concept and process of globalisation, highlighting its many definitions and configurations, and how the process affects our existence economically, politically, environmentally, culturally and technologically the construction of social reality, and how where we live and our life experiences influence our reality the scale and nature of global inequalities, including health, education and quality of life, both between countries and within them sustainable development, including political, social and environmental aspects the definitions, terminology and underpinning conceptualisations of Global Youth Work the empiric evidence establishing the efficacy of Global Youth Work as a pedagogical tool that effectively engages young people around local-global issues. It will help provoke young people to navigate the complex matrix of global interconnectedness and the inextricability of their lives with that of others, from the food they eat, the clothes they wear and the energy they consume, to the very political systems that facilitate their privilege or disadvantage, politically, economically, technologically, culturally and ecologically. Positioning development and social justice as antidotes to inequality, this book premises Global Youth Work on the need to redress inequality at the personal, local, national and international levels

A scholar-activist’s heretic attempts to “eradicate poverty” from a Southern perspective, through disruptive Global Youth Work

open access journalThis paper mainly addresses the reflections, observations and analysis of a scholar-activist, engrossed in challenging intractable international development issues, through the use of a Global Youth Work pedagogic approach. Using the main frameworks of Global Youth Work, scholar-activism, positionality/situatedness and decolonisation, this paper challenges the “missionary position” and “pornography of poverty” approach of some organisations both in the North and South, consciously or unconsciously working and collaborating towards the amelioration of the human condition. There are two main factors that influence my situatedness: given the structural violence that can be generated by knowledge production and configuration from a universally configured orthodoxy in the Development Education/Global Cooperation field that now requires the reimagination of “epistemologies of the South” as responses, which are “credible and visible” (de Sousa Santos, 2014). The second essential stance is my emersion in practice as a scholar-activist who is not only captivated by the process of theoretical knowledge production, but also in heretic and counter-orthodoxy approaches to challenging and changing the world, in practice. The focus of the Agenda 2030 on “eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions” and the reason d’etre of Global Youth Work (Sallah, 2014) of provoking consciousness and taking action, therefore underpins this paper; especially in the promotion of sustainable development. The main focus and lenses through which I do this is the Global Hands project, set up as a charity in The Gambia and a social enterprise in the UK, by former students of De Montfort University in the UK, whose mission is to build capacity and operationalise the dual mandate of Global Youth Work: to provoke consciousness; and to support those affected to take action (Sallah, 2014). Utilising a range of Global Youth Work interventions and case studies such as developing Africa’s first solar-powered taxi service; developing a self-sustaining intervention in its capacity building hub in The Gambia by Global Education actors from the UK with collaborators in The Gambia; running a number of public campaigns, for example, on the “backway” (“illegal” youth migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe via the Sahara desert). In this paper, I will explore collaborations, spaces generated, principles and tensions beyond theoretical considerations and their operationalisation in practice. This paper will uniquely contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between theory and practice, as well as disrupt the colonial lenses and dependency approaches of some organisations that sometimes disempower, instead of rebalancing power and addressing injustice and structural inequality

Generating disruptive pedagogy in informal spaces: learning with both the head and the heart.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.The author's positionality and situatedness is that of a scholar-activist, interested both in the generation/production of knowledge, and the application of knowledge, especially towards social justice and equality. The author also writes from a de-colonial perspective in challenging ways of knowing and ways of being; to generate what has been called “epistemologies of the South” (Sousa Santos, 2014). In using Global Youth Work (GYW) as a pedagogic approach and conceptual framework, the author will illustrate how participatory spaces for the deconstruction and reconstruction of ways of knowing and being, can be generated; how the classroom can be taken into the real world and how the real world can be brought into the classroom. Using a range of places and spaces, spanning the classroom, real-life situations, within communities, and across the streets and museums, the author will share how participatory learning methodologies are constantly employed to generate curiosity, maintain curriculum currency and make learning transformative. Drawing on his writing, teaching, practice and research over the last twenty years, across a number of countries and continents, the author will position participatory approaches and methodologies of learning as disruptive and a panacea to aspire to, as learning and teaching then becomes deeper, rather than surface; and transformative (Freire, 1972) instead of “banking”

#Backwaysolutions #Candleofhope: Global Youth Works approaches to challenging irregular migration in Sub-Saharan Africa

Hundreds of thousands of people, young people mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, attempt to escape the “horrendous situations” they live in, in search of greener pastures. There are significant push and pull factors that catalyse into fatalities that occur from the dangerous routes taken to get into Europe, some evidenced by the news, showing videos of migrant boats capsizing in the Mediterranean or Atlantic Ocean, on a regular basis. This method of travel is known as the “Backway”. During the journey from Sub-Saharan Africa to Mainland Europe, via Libya, not only do many young people lose their lives, but there are many increasing heart-breaking stories of these young people being sold as slaves in open markets in Libya for a price of 200 – 500 dollars; subjected to sexual abuse, kidnapping, and even reports of being used for organ transplants. This chapter is an opportunity to contribute to the dearth of African literature in this field. It responds to an invitation to contribute knowledge, especially in linking Global Youth Work Theory and social action. In presenting this case study of how Global Hands has worked with its partners to utilise the pedagogic tool of Global Youth Work (GYW) in order to provoke consciousness about this sorry state of affairs; and support disruptive action that challenges and finds solutions for the destructive trend of irregular “backway” migration to Sub-Saharan Africa. In doing this, we hope to highlight the agentic forces of some African youths and present a counter-narrative to dominant configurations of ways of knowing and being

Participatory Action Research with ‘Minority Communities’ and the Complexities of Emancipatory Tensions: Intersectionality and cultural affinity

Conducting research with communities constructed as the ‘other’ from a purely positivist paradigm can often be replete with colossal flaws with enormous potential to oppress the researched – especially minority communities in this case. This article presents an analysis of the cultural and experiential affinity experiences of the author towards a constructivist approach where the research process is emancipatory and the ultimate goal of engagement is for both the researcher and the researched to become co-producers of knowledge. The multidimensional identities of some ‘minority communities’ and their intersectionality are also discussed. This includes an exploration of this author's identity as a visible member of minority groups and the resulting cultural affinity that imbues his research as well as the participatory nature of his approach that seeks to liberate. The article will also highlight methodological implications of this author's empiric work, complemented by lessons drawn from recent research projects conducted with ‘minorities’ in different parts of the UK to illuminate methodological complexities and illustrate anti-oppressive practice with ‘minority communities’. This article is framed around the four theoretical constructs of Intersectionality; Participatory Action Research; Cultural Affinity/Experiential Affinity; and Freire's transformative education pedagogy