Ambiguous spaces for troubled youth: home, therapeutic institution or school?

Abstract

In Sweden and elsewhere, students permanently excluded from school are removed from their local environment, and sometimes their parental home, and moved to a rural residential care home. Thus ‘home’ and ‘school’ are clearly considered places where problems exist, but it is the young people themselves who are scrutinised and subjected to change. This study examined how the change of place and the performance of the alternative ‘home’ and alternative ‘school’ affected student adjustment. It also explored the significance of place in these measures and questioned how possibilities for agency and subjectivities are produced. The work comprised an ethnographic study of two residential care homes for troubled youth (aged 12–15). The results show how complex assemblages produce opportunities and limitations for care and education and how location and buildings partake in the constitution of possible subjectivities and agency. The analysis, inspired by actor-network theory, captured mobility and flow, an important aspect when studying complexity. The analytical approach used enabled the complex arrangements for disadvantaged teenagers to be studied in terms of social interactions, but also of materiality.

Keywords:

• troubled youth
• residential care
• ANT
• assemblage
• network
• educational practices
• space

Notes

1. This category of students is equivalent to those identified in the UK as having ‘Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties’ (SEBD); the term more often used in the US system is ‘Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties’ (EBD). Similar designations can be found in most countries.