A New Ontology and Youth Work Ethics in a Time of Planetary Crisis

ABSTRACT

Evidence of the far-reaching impact of the Anthropocene on young people presents youth work with opportunities to reflect on some long-standing issues. This pioneering exercise considers the implications for youth work practice and its ethical frameworks should it embrace the tenets of the ‘new materialism’. We ask how youth work practice is currently understood, especially in ‘British-influenced youth work’ and whether there are problems with its conceptual, ethical and practice frameworks. We offer an account of ‘new materialism’ then consider the implications for the ethics of youth work practice if practitioners were to adopt this ontological perspective. Conceptually youth work would have a more relational orientation and rely less on essentialist universalised categories like ‘child’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘adult’. It would jettison developmentalist narratives and the structure-agency impasse by elaborating new accounts of assemblages-contingency. Adopting this approach also entails an ethic of cultivation grounded in care for the world. Such an ethic would entail situational judgements about how to enact care in a world in which unexpected changes periodically emerge. This bears a close relationship to ‘phronetic practice’.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• ontology
• youth work
• new materialism
• anthropocene

Increasingly it is being recognised that we live in the Anthropocene, a new geological era understood as a period of planetary crisis caused by human activity. The Anthropocene is characterised by interlinked environmental crises that include global warming, degraded eco-systems, chemical contamination (pollution) and a loss of biodiversity. We have crossed a number of planetary boundaries which humanity and all life on earth needs to develop and thrive (Persson et al. 2022). For some scholars the Anthropocene is not just a new geological ‘era’ that began in the 1950s, but a wake-up call to reconsider the ways ‘we’ have understood ourselves and the world over the last five hundred years. Those now living in ‘modernity’ are the ‘heirs’ of the seventeenth-century ‘scientific revolution’ and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. These intellectual movements espoused a commitment to rationality and faith in the ceaseless socio-economic project of economic growth and development delivering ‘progress’ associated with the capitalist carbon revolution already gathering momentum. Critics of modernity like Melinda Benson say the Anthropocene offers an ‘opportunity to embrace a new ontology’, i.e. our stories about reality, thereby enabling us to ‘reconfigure our orientation to the material world’ in ways that differ to the prevailing modern approaches to describing and explaining the world (Benson 2019, 252). As Benson points out, that long-dominant ontology:

… reinforces a familiar binary -one in which humans are separate from and doing things to nature. Humans are ruining the planet, causing it to fundamentally change in ways that are not ‘natural’ precisely because humans are the agent of change. (Benson 2019, 252)

One alternative to the modern ontology is to be found in a body of theoretical and philosophical work emerging since the 1980s (Braidotti 2002; De Landa 2016; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Fox and Aldred 2017; Latour 1993). For ease of reference we call this the ‘new materialisms’ (Lemke 2021). This interdisciplinary project involves scholars in fields like feminism, sociology, quantum physics, science studies and democratic theory, who began decentring the human and rediscovering ‘matter’ as the basis of metaphysics and ethics (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012). According to the ‘new materialists’, humans have ‘always coevolved, coexisted or collaborated with the nonhuman … the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman’ (Grusin 2015, ix–x). They also reject the modernist ‘dualist’ ontology which splits ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ and sees humans as separate from, and superior to, ‘nature’. This approach also bypasses the modern distinction drawn between ontology (theories of being or reality), epistemology (theories of how we know the world) and ethics (theories about how we should live) by talking about ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ (Barad 2007, 90).

What you may ask, does any of this have to do with youth work? While we address this question in detail later in this article, the short answer is everything.

To begin, while global warming and dramatic environmental degradation threatens all planetary life, we are already seeing disproportionate harm caused to the health and well-being of children and young people across the globe, (Sjögren 2020; Williams et al. 2023). Young people who make up the primary focus of youth work, are, compared with older people, disproportionately affected by the climate crisis whether it be in the form of exposure to pollution, floods, droughts, fires or food insecurity. Young people are still developing their immune systems, their bodies are smaller and constantly changing. They eat, drink and breathe more compared to older people. This means that young people are ‘more biologically and psychologically vulnerable than adults to the many adverse effects of toxic air pollutants and physical trauma, psychological stress, nutritional deprivation, infectious agents and heat waves associated with climate change … ’ (Perera 2017, 141). These harmful effects are exacerbated by factors including economic inequality, geographic location and gendered inequity which mean that some young people experience greater exposure to illness, injury, death and other adverse conditions associated with climate change than other young people.

The planetary crisis also highlights the need for professional practices like youth work (teaching-education, psychology, community development) and related fields of inquiry (like youth studies, sociology, indeed all the social science and humanities as well as the medical and physical sciences) to reflect on their relation to and dependence on modern habits of thought and practice. For some scholars the climate crisis emphasises the need to ‘develop and deploy innovative critical and disruptive theoretical and methodological tools for doing childhood and youth studies’ (Kelly 2022, vii). We argue here that the new materialisms offers the kind of ‘innovative critical and disruptive’ theories and approaches to research that can contribute in these ways.

A new materialist approach challenges some modern ways of knowing ‘youth’, and how young people are represented (Griffith 1993). It encourages recognition of the long-standing tradition of developmentalist theory and research that youth studies and many youth workers have relied on and its influence on relations, practices, relations and the experience of being young. It is a tradition that represents ‘the child’ and ‘young person’ as a ‘becoming’ and embarking on an inherently risky, perilous, ‘developmental pathway’ or ‘transitions’ to ‘adulthood’. Apart from portraying children and young people as cognitively, emotionally and morally deficient, much of this theory and research is also fractured by disputes about when ‘the child’ becomes a ‘youth’, or an ‘adult’, whether youth are ‘victims’ or ‘threats’, and what ‘criteria’ inform these classifications. To this, we also note the interminable disputes about the role of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, or how much ‘agency’ young people have, given the role played by ‘structures’ such as ‘class’, ‘gender’ or ‘ethnicity’. Norman Gabriel is not alone in pointing to the value of rethinking this developmentalist model so as to reconsider ‘the unresolved tensions in the relationship between natural, or biological processes and the social’. (Gabriel 2021, 59). This will mean by-passing dualisms like ‘natural’ and ‘social’ and adopting ‘a relational, embodied and processual approach’ that can address and overcome some of the persistent concerns about ‘age’ and ‘stage’ (Gabriel 2021, 59 our stress).

The case that youth workers need to reflect on how they understand and work with young people in the light of the Anthropocene is enhanced when we consider how many young people are now acting politically in response to the planetary crisis. If we recognise the political, moral and organisational capacities of children and young people evident in global movements such as SchoolStrike4Climate we must surely revise the ‘usual’ well-established common-sense ways of seeing and ‘knowing’, ‘children’ and ‘young people’ (de Moor et al. 2020).

At the least, this provides a reason for reflecting on models of youth work that rely on the ‘modern’ account of ‘youth’ as ‘defective adults’. Such reflective practice can produce valuable changes to one’s ‘everyday normal’ youth work practice. This in turn has implications for the legitimacy of traditional and institutionalised hierarchical relations between young people and their elders. This is disruptive as it is also likely to involve critical reflection on state policy, on practices within the organisations in which youth workers work. It presents an opportunity for inquiry about intergenerational relations and ethical accountability. This can encourage youth work practitioners to consider their own ethical obligations in respect to working with young people.

The changes that are needed, and that are already taking place are many. They call ‘us’ away from ‘our everyday lives and to enter a world many have not experienced: what Latour called the “middle earth” of climate change’ (Latour 2018). In short, in the context of a planetary crisis ethical practice (as always) requires good judgment which in turn relies on making the effort to be properly informed about what is taking place. This is needed if youth workers are to think well (to know about and make sense of the various scientific and other accounts) and based on that determine what ideas and practices are good, what are bad, and how they should act ethically. This is disruptive as it is also likely to involve critical reflection on state policy, on practices within the organisations in which youth workers work. It presents an opportunity for inquiry about intergenerational relations and ethical accountability.

Such ethical practice is also likely to be disruptive as it raises questions about established modern ways of knowing ‘youth’, how young people are variously represented. This relates to the tradition of developmentalist theory and research that youth workers and others have long relied on. It is a tradition that represents ‘the child’ and ‘young person’ as a ‘becoming’ and embarking on an inherently risky, perilous, ‘developmental pathway’ or ‘transitions’ to ‘adulthood’. Apart from portraying children and young people as cognitively, emotionally and morally deficient, much of this theory and research is also fractured by disputes about when ‘the child’ becomes a ‘youth’, or an ‘adult’, whether youth are ‘victims’ or ‘threats’, or what ‘criteria’ inform these classifications.

To this, we can add disputes about the role of ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’, and how much ‘agency’ young people have or ought to exercise given the role played by ‘structures’ such as ‘class’ ‘gender’ or ‘ethnicity’. Norman Gabriel is not alone in making the case for rethinking this developmentalist model so as to reconsider ‘the unresolved tensions in the relationship between natural, or biological processes and the social’ (Gabriel 2021, 59). This will mean by-passing dualisms like ‘natural’ and ‘social’ and adopting ‘a relational, embodied and processual approach’ that can address and overcome some of the persistent concerns about ‘age’ and ‘stage’ (Gabriel 2021, 59 our stress).

This will affect relations between older people (youth workers) and young people; it can change how ‘we educate and work with young people’. This obviously has implications for the experience of being young.

The task of critical reflection and establishing what is taking place includes paying attention to how many young people are now acting politically, and how they feel and think in respect to the planetary crisis. Amongst other things, this gives cause for revising the ‘usual’ established and dominant common-sense ways of seeing and ‘knowing’ the ‘child’ or ‘youth’, and be more cognisant of what is taking place collectively and in the lives of young people. It can lead to reflection on one’s own worldview that relies on modern representations of youth. Such reflective practice can result in changes to one’s ‘everyday normal’ youth work practice.

This can encourage youth work practitioners to consider their own ethical obligations in respect to working with young people and supporting them in what they are doing. It will entail reflection on how practitioners talk and work with young people about the question of climate change and related issues in ways that are productive and sensitive to the particular needs of young people.

The ‘disruptive’ implications of the planetary crisis for professional practices like youth work, for educators (teachers), lie in the ways it presents opportunities for reflective practice for thinking about intergenerational relations and ethical accountability. Specifically, do youth workers have a responsibility to respond to what is happening generally to others in ways that are not limited to humans, and specifically what is their responsibility to act in response to ‘the call’ of young people (Levinas 1996)? That said, it is impossible to speak of a professional group like youth workers as if they are an homogeneous entity. It is very likely many have already responded and are already working in solidarity with young people to effect the changes needed to mitigate and address the climate crisis.

All this work also entails observing and recognising what many young people already know, what they think and feel and do, how many are assuming responsibility, and calling on world leaders to ‘stop acting like children’ as they themselves enter the field of politics. This reflective practice has implications for traditional hierarchical relations between young people and their elders. Amongst other things, it is also likely to raise questions about the popular assumption that young people are passive recipients of ‘knowledge’.

It entails recognising how many have much to offer in respect to helping to teach their leaders, in informing the school curricula and indeed the curricula of policy-makers, politicians and human service practitioners (Bessant, Farthing, and Watts 2015, 1–19). This is not to argue for a ‘hands-off’ approach or say that young people will and ought to save the world. On the contrary, the prevailing planetary crisis works also to turn the focus on ‘the adults in the room’, who are ethically obliged to give service by ensuring young people today and those not yet born inherit an earth in which they can live well.

In what follows we ask what the new materialisms ontology can offer youth work practice and ethics and argue that there is value in youth workers engaging with this emergent paradigm. We offer a pioneering exercise that moves from the often abstracted mode of inquiry characteristic of the ‘new materialisms’ and ask, as Fox and Aldred (2017) have done in respect to sociology, how might the new materialist framework help to rethink the practice of youth work.¹ We ask how does youth work practice currently understand itself, especially in the Anglosphere or what Cooper (2012) calls ‘British-influenced youth work’.² We ask whether there are any problems with the way youth work understands or represents itself and its ethical frameworks? We then present a brief account of the new materialisms before considering some of the implications for youth work of adopting this new ontological perspective and how we might rethink the ethics of youth work practice.

Youth work and its discontents

Reading academic reflections on youth work might convince us that apart from concerns about how to ‘define’ youth work (Cooper 2018) or whether it is a ‘real profession’ (Jones 2018), youth work has generally represented itself as a ‘practical’ profession (Batsleer and Davies 2010; Bessant 2004, 17–25; Bowie 2004; Jeffs and Smith 2005; Cooper et al. 2014; Martin 2002). As a practical profession, youth workers simply want to ‘help young people’ by establishing a ‘caring relation’ between the practitioner and young person (Spence, Devanney, and with Noonan 2007; Spier and Giles 2018; Young 1999). Representing youth work as ‘practical’, also seems to justify the idea that youth workers do not need ‘theory’. We don’t agree.

Firstly, scholars have identified some important political-moral theoretical traditions, or ‘perspectives’ informing youth work (Cooper and White 1994; Cooper 2012). Cooper identifies six ‘political ideologies, worldviews and values which sustain different forms of youth work, … [which] continue to develop and co-exist’ (Cooper 2012, 99). They include youth work practice oriented to treatment, reform, non-radical advocacy, radical advocacy, non-radical empowerment and radical empowerment (Cooper 2012).

Secondly, other commentators highlight the problematic albeit symptomatic ‘tension between “theory” and “practice”, a tension some say is reflective of a disinclination to engage in theoretically-informed discussions of those universally distinctive features which delineate [youth work] from other welfare and educational professions’ (Spence 2008, 4). This is why some call for more ‘research-based, theoretically developed and practice informed texts’ (Spence 2008, 4).

Thirdly, in respect to the idea that youth work is just a ‘practical’ enterprise, this claim misrepresents the actual history of the idea of ‘practice’ and what ‘being practical’ has meant in Western philosophy. Proponents of this tradition understood practice as derived from the Greek word praxis and defined by Aristotle (1976) as ‘thoughtful, practical doing’ (praxis). In this respect practical reasoning e.g. involves deliberation which is:

… practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequences or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. (Wallace 2014, 1)

As Sarah Banks makes clear, the question of what kind of ethical framework youth work actually relies on, or needs -which is another matter altogether- cannot be ignored or left for another time (Banks 2011; 2012). Banks and others do not accept that just because youth workers claim to be committed to ‘helping young people’ there is no point in asking about ethics (Banks 2012). This is important given the role played by liberal-individualism embraced by many practitioners in anglophone youth work who like to believe they only engage with young people:

… based on certain core values and principles requiring the establishment of voluntary relationships with young people. This in turn presupposes a regard for young people as individuals by recognising young people’s rights to be treated with dignity as individuals. (Sapin 2012:our stress)

This seems to imply that all that youth workers need is a ‘code of ethics’ (e.g. Sercombe 2018).

Yet critics point out that youth workers face a variety of complex ethical dilemmas, problems and issues which require reflexivity (Banks 2012). It is a practice that needs more than the technical fix implied by turning to a code of ethics (Bessant 2009, 423–438). This is because the dilemmas and problems that youth workers face daily reflect the tensions and contradictions operating when youth workers claim they are ‘empowering’ or ‘helping individual young people flourish’, when many youth workers are employed in child-protection and juvenile justice systems ‘dealing with’ children and young people who have no choice about being in ‘governmental’ projects (Foucault 1975).

Modern youth work has its origins in the nineteenth-century ‘child-saving’ itself part of a more complex history of ‘childhood’ (Aries 1973) and ‘adolescence’ (Griffith 1993; Kett 1977). The primary interest of ‘child savers’ was to ensure that children had a ‘childhood’, and that young people survived the perils of ‘adolescence’ to ‘transition’ into responsible ‘adulthood’. ‘Childhood’ and ‘adolescence’ (or ‘youth’) were defined against what were said to be the defining characteristics of ‘adulthood’ including autonomy, rationality, good judgment and being responsible for others. Over two centuries ‘child savers’ and ‘youth workers’ worked to constrain the historical independence and competence of young people by infantilising and rendering them dependent. This involved removing them from adult spaces, activities and relations, and sequestering them in spaces reserved for young people (Bessant 2021). The subordination, dependency, vulnerability and inherent risks of being a child or young person were normalised and thereby made real. Part of this process involved a professionalisation of ‘human services’ including youth work, social work, psychology, community development and counselling (Bledstein 1976; Perkins 1989).

An idea central to this history was that professions should emulate the relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ said to be found in medicine, architecture and engineering. Construed as the ‘theory’/‘practice’ binary, ‘scientific theory’ is ‘scientific’ ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ and produced by academic researchers, while ‘practice’ models are elaborated by educators and practitioners (Buchroth and Parkin 2010; Green 2009; Ord 2007). Although not an entirely hegemonic view in youth work, there has also been a tendency to understand ‘practice’ as ‘instrumental rational’ action committed to measuring the ‘quality’ or benefits of practice, making youth work practice a relatively simple yet ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ exercise. Here are clues to the ways youth work is implicated in some problematic assumptions that define modernity itself.

This ‘theory’-‘practice’ binary continues to provide a sense-making framework in spite of powerful criticism from Schon (1983). Bourdieu argued for example that the popular view of objective and technical professional practice informed by a ‘scientific’ theory was never going to be possible or desirable (2004). Bourdieu shows how ‘fields of practice’ always involve ‘endless contest’ relationally entangled with the ‘logic of reproduction’. This point is relevant to youth work given how much of its practice takes place within and across a spectrum of sites including statutory fields (child protection and the criminal justice system) and voluntary sites like leisure services and community work. This is to say nothing of the fact that currently youth workers find themselves operating in circumstances shaped by neo-liberal policies that are antithetical to human flourishing, social justice, human rights or fairness. As numerous official inquiries have revealed there are many sites of practice such as youth justice systems that encourage and sustain abuse of human rights, unprofessional, unethical and even criminal conduct (e.g. Bessant and Watts 2019, 483–500).

The youth work field not only regards the theory-practice split as common-sense, but accepts many other dualisms like ‘individual’-‘society’, ‘nature’-‘nurture’ and ‘agency’-‘structure’. This indicates why youth work has long been caught between an over optimistic account of the self-actualising capacities of young people’s agency, and more pessimistic stories about the ‘determining’ effects of social ‘structures’. These symptomatic and apparently irresolvable binaries and impasses highlight how youth work like other ‘helping professions’ emerged in the anglosphere as the legatees of Western modernity.

Finally, critical reflection on the common-sense of youth work highlights its reliance on the epistemological, ontological and ethical foundations of Western modernity (Connell 2008, Swartz et al. 2022). Subaltern studies and work done in the Global South shows how the evolution of youth work practice theories, models and research-based knowledge which was developed in the anglosphere was often imposed, often uncritically, on the rest of the world, as the ‘right’ approach to practice (Alldred and Fox 2018; Chakrabarty 2018; Swartz et al. 2022; Tascón 2018; Tusasiirwe 2020). This heritage, while enabling youth work to establish credibility in a world of neo-liberal globalisation, colonialism and Western cultural hegemony, will not serve youth work well as the Anthropocene unravels. And this is why a new ontology matters.³

A new paradigm

The ‘new materialisms’ is one way of referring to a variety of intellectual movements offering a range of novel relational, affective and more-than-human perspectives in the social sciences and humanities (e.g. Fullagar 2017; Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt 2020). This development involves rejecting the social constructionism and discourse theory that were part of the ‘linguistic’ or ‘cultural turn’ that has dominated social science research and social theory from the late 1960s on (Coole and Frost 2010, 7).

Three key themes characterise the new materialisms and offer opportunities for positive change for youth work practice and ethics. The ontology of the new materialisms:

1. is relational instead of essentialist and rejects a substance theory understood as the world being made of mind or matter

2. is post-anthropocentric rather than humanist or anthropocentric,

3. bypasses dualisms (e.g. mind-matter, agency-structure, reason-emotion micro–macro and nature-nurture) preferring a ‘flat’ ontology (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012)

The new materialisms are ontologically relational. This involves claims the world is material but is not comprised of stable entities or well bounded ‘things’ with fixed, inherent or ‘essentialist’ traits or attributes. Rather reality is relational as humans and non-human materialities ceaselessly interact producing unpredictable actions and events (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012). The focus is no longer on individual bodies or on non-human objects like technologies, physical locations, or natural phenomena like climate but on the ‘assemblages’ of disparate bodies and other forms of materiality that become ‘events’ or ‘assemblages’. These assemblages are not static or stable, but are fluid, changeable and continually in flux, as relations between bodies, things, social practices and constructs come and go (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 128). The focus is not on what bodies or any other material relations are, but on what they can do in a specific context (Braidotti 2011). This way of seeing de-stabilises supposedly unitary phenomena and categories- such as ‘human’, ‘woman’ ‘government’ and ‘power’ (Braidotti 2011, 130).

Secondly, the new materialisms are post-humanist and its advocates reject a human-centred or anthropocentric way of seeing, implied for example by the practice of separating ‘humans’ from ‘nature’ while privileging ‘humans’ over ‘nature’. Acknowledging what Bennett calls ‘thing-power’ means recognising the liveliness of all matter (Bennett 2010, 2). This raises the possibility of exploring the capacity of matter to affect other materialities in its own right without the intervention or mediation of ‘human agency’. As Latour argues when a tree falls on someone, or a virus moves through a community wreaking death and disease, then we see how the tree or virus is an ‘actant’ acting on or affecting humans and other entities as humans do when they exercise ‘agency’ (Latour 1996, 79).

New materialism invites us to understand how non-human entities like a tool, bacterium or rocks can make things happen, how humans and non-human entities and processes interact to affect and are affected (De Landa 2016, 4). This is a shift away from privileging the agentic ‘human actor’, and towards acknowledging ‘flows of affect’ operating in all the relations that make up an assemblage.

Thirdly the new materialists are sceptical about the traditional vocabulary of ‘structures’, ‘systems’ ‘ideologies’ ‘forces’ and ‘mechanisms’ that conventional social scientists have used to describe phenomena such as inequality, violence, power and change in the social world. Proponents of the new materialisms are not interested in arguing that ‘social structures’ such as ‘capitalism’, ‘colonialism’ or ‘patriarchy’ have ‘causal’ or ‘explanatory’ value. Rather they identify the play of forces in what can be called an ‘affect economy’ that assembles around the actions and events that produce and reproduce the world and human history (Clough 2008, 15).

Again this relates to the new materialists’ claim that reality is not made up of things or well-bounded objects with unchanging essences, but is all about the intra-actions of relational phenomena in a variety of assemblages, dynamic processes and events. Drawing on her work as a quantum physicist, Barad says we are well advised to pay attention to diffraction patterns which are ‘patterns of difference that make a difference’ because these differences are ‘the fundamental constituents that make up the world’ (Barad 2007, 72). One way of understanding this is to say that we should attend to the intra actions and relations in events which are ‘normally’ represented variously involving identities such as ‘age’, ‘gender’, ‘class’, sexuality or ‘ethnicity’. Focusing on diffractive patterns means understanding these are not identities that are essentially or inherently separate from anything else, but rather are separations or boundaries that are enacted -or not-within the relations of an assemblage or an event.

This approach has major implications for how young people are ‘known’ or represented, how they variously experience their lives, and the knowledge base on which youth work relies when framing the problems which practitioners address.

Revisioning youth work practice

If youth workers were to consider some of the ideas just outlined, we can expect changes in how they see young people, in their practice and in their ethical coordinates.

Rosi Braidotti speaks of the ‘missing peoples’ of modern liberal humanism, the ‘real-life subjects whose knowledge never made it into any of the official cartographies’ (Braidotti 2018, 21). The liberating ethical task we face, she urges, is to help turn painful experiences of missing peoples’ ‘inexistence into generative relational encounters and knowledge production’ (Braidotti 2018, 21). This speaks directly to the way conventional youth work has reinforced the subaltern status of young people by amplifying its concern to promote the welfare and well-being of young people while tacitly reinforcing the idea that they are defective beings.

Conceptually youth work would have a more relational orientation and rely less on essentialist universalised categories like ‘child’, ‘adolescent’, or ‘adult’. It would see the jettisoning of the developmentalist narrative along with a recognition of children and young people as fully human and free and equal as other persons. The new materialisms invite a reimagining of youth work which includes questioning and moving beyond age-based systems of classification. Youth work has long relied on developmentalist accounts of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’ represented as ‘stages’ or ‘transitions’ from ‘innocence’ to ‘maturity’. Accordingly, ‘youth’ were often misrecognised as ‘deficient adults’, whose ‘bodies’ and ‘minds’ were a risk and danger to themselves and others (Fox and Aldred 2017). The telos of progress from the ‘animal-savage child’ through to ‘hybrid youth’ to ‘human adult’ is historically and conceptually resonant with the modern trope of ‘European civilisation’, resonant with meta-narratives about the journey from cultural savagery and cultural ignorance to the civilisation of white-adult-males (Elias 2000).

We also expect that youth workers would move beyond the many conceptual impasses which adhere to binaries such as ‘nature’-’nurture’, ‘society’-’individual’ or ‘structure-agency’. Working within a new materialists framework is a greater respect for the permeable, fluid, contingent and potential features of young people’s lives which resist the habitualised application of categories to people.

This will require reflecting on the fact that both they and young people are entangled in various relations, events and intra actions in which ‘hierarchical identity markers’ like ‘age’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, ‘ability’ or ‘class’ matter - or not depending on the intra actions for which youth workers are responsible in part.

There are many implications that follow from recognising the intra-active, materiality of the relations young people find themselves in, to say nothing of the possibilities which youth workers working with young people might uncover. Youth workers do not need to be afraid of working with young people who are politically engaged in the critical issues of the day. Those employed in secondary schools might well work closely with students concerned about climate change to enhance the political effectiveness of movements like SchoolStrike4Climate.

School-based youth workers are also well placed to work with young people on changing the old school-to-employment model given the increasing labour market precarity and underemployment, student disengagement and rising student tuition debt. Youth workers working in child protection and juvenile justice systems could reimagine their practice in ways that do not reproduce ‘blaming the victim’ explanations which emphasise the young person’s deficits but work instead to help ‘wards of the state’ understand why they are being punished for what are too often actually failures of neoliberal state policy and corporate greed and social irresponsibility. Not least of all the new materialists’ framework provides an opportunity to think freshly about the ethics of youth work practice.

Revisioning youth work practice ethics

New materialists offer alternatives to the classical conceptions of ethics that have shaped the history of youth work in the anglosphere including various ‘command morality’ traditions in which for example ‘God’ or ‘society’ served as the source of authority.

Within anglophone spaces and traditions, we see the exercise of authority demanding conformity with normative rules backed by punishments. Conventional forms of youth work have embraced various kinds of ‘muscular Christianity’, (e.g. the YMCA, or the scouting and guides movements) or models of ‘pro-social’ practice especially when working with ‘working-class’ or ‘disadvantaged’ young people as part of a ‘civilising offensive’. Other youth workers practiced in a various ‘derived moral’ systems committed to ideas of empowerment, freedom, or acceptance of difference framed in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, ability, anti-racism, etc. and reliant on various essentialist and substantialist ontologies. The new materialists’ framework invites a break with the longstanding practice of moralising judgments that sustain youth work’s reliance on the developmental perspective. It also suggests a way of moving away from the impasse which contemporary youth work faces because too often it is caught between overly optimistic liberal accounts of the self-actualising capacities of individual agency and more pessimistic stories about the ‘determining’ effects of social ‘structure’.

Barad, a new materialist and advocate for agential ‘realism’, argues for a ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ to highlight how ethics, ontology and epistemology are inseparable (Barad 2007). Recognising that we cannot detach ethics from ontology or epistemology matters whether we are engaging in scientific knowledge production, or professional practice, or just living: each involves being in a world in which human and non-human beings intra-actively co-constitute the world (Barad 2007, 90). This involves an ethics of world making or ‘worlding’ that starts from a relational, situated and embodied model of (intra)subjectivity, because ethics, being and knowing can no longer be regarded as separated (Barad 2007, 392).

According to Barad it helps if we replace ‘things’ with ‘relations’ as relations are everything. Her point is that the world we live in is grounded in the co-emergence of entities-in-relations that come forth through their intra-action. In short, relationships are always prior to those individual entities, including humans, that appear in relations. The new materialist commitment to intra-activity emphasises entanglement, foregrounding the importance of relationality for ethics. Indeed Barad’s ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology offers a kind of ‘quantum entanglement’. That means that humans are part of a world in which phenomena are produced, and intra act. In this way, each particular person, nonhuman, or abiotic entity is not separate from all the other entities including those set apart by physical distance. Action at a distance is common: actants in the earth’s atmosphere like CO2, or a terrorist attack in the Middle East can produce global affects.

One implication of this relational view is an emphasis on the idea of ethical engagement with the world. The classical Western ethical traditions focused on what humans ought to do. The key questions were predictably human-centric: why do and how can humans act ethically? Barad’s new materialist ethics overlaps with the case Levinas and Derrida made for rethinking ethics in ways that bypass the conventional humanist and liberal idea that individuals need to maximise their own utility or else rely on formal rules and reasoning. For these thinkers ethics engages questions like what happens e.g. when a person’s life is damaged or negatively affected, or when we are standing ‘face to face’ with ‘the Other’, and are ethically obliged to respond to the Other’s call (Levinas 1985, 95–98).

Barad foregrounds the indebtedness we owe to the Other where entanglements are relations of obligation and hence ethical debts towards Others are interwoven into the very fabric of the world (Barad 2012). The ‘face of the Other’ cannot be limited to the face of human beings because our being-in-the-world is entangled with other beings’ existence (Barad 2007, 392). That responsibility to respond to others cannot be restricted to human-human relations when the boundaries and the constitution of the ‘human’ are continually reconfigured (Barad 2007, 392). Barad reworks the ethics of otherness – conventionally represented in terms of the self-Other binary in the Western philosophical tradition. For Barad ethics is the relational practice of ‘response-ability’ towards all beings (Barad 2012, 208, Harraway 2008: 88). Barad’s ‘ethics of entanglement’ entails identifying the ethical demands made in the presence of others whether they are human or nonhuman life or abiotic (Barad 2012). From this perspective the universe consists of interacting agencies that are not separable.

This idea of responding-to extends Levinas’ call for ethical accountability and for care, when confronting the face of ‘the Other’. However, this agential-realist version of ethics entails a response-ability that moves beyond responding to the human Other’s call. It relates to interactions of all beings (‘actants’) as we are all part of the world’s becoming. The ethical call is embodied in generative processes of world-making or what Barad calls ‘attunement’ and Rosa (2019) refers to as ‘resonance’.

Concepts such as ‘attunement’ or ‘resonance’ move beyond the human-centric project of classical ethics by highlighting the entanglement of humans and non-human entities. Attunement invokes an ethical, posthuman practice grounded in observing, understanding and connecting with human and non-human others in meaningful ways. Barad says it points to:

… the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. (2007, 62)

Rosa’s account of ‘resonance’ likewise highlights a new relational ethics. Resonance is defined as

… being addressed and affected … by someone or something ‘out there’ … but also being able to ‘move outwards’ … and touch and affect others, i.e., to experience self-efficacy. (Rosa 2017, 160)

All this raises the question: how might an ethics of attunement be translated into an ethics of youth work practice?

The implications of an ethico-onto-epistemology for youth work practice

A new materialist’s framework potentially requires a major reworking of youth work’s vocabulary and conceptual schema which we are not in a position to outline here. However, we can highlight three possibilities.

One involves a shift by youth workers to a form of democratic practice oriented towards what Nancy Fraser (2013) and Hartmut Rosa (2017) call ‘participatory parity’. The principle of participatory parity is based on the idea that all humans -and non-human entities- are recognised as equally morally deserving of participation (either directly or by proxy). Moreover, they should be supported to participate in those social institutions and shape the rules that regulate the world in which they live. Such a practice acknowledges and seeks to address the exclusion of children and young people from social and political life.

Embracing participatory parity would entail major changes to the ways youth workers currently work with young people and their communities. For example ‘participatory parity’ would require that youth workers help young people to exercise freedom to decide who it is they want to be and then to help them access the material and other resources they need to achieve that freedom.

Jacques Rancière explains why participatory parity matters. Rancière insists on a distinction between between ‘police’ and ‘politics’ (Rancière 2010). He calls conventional politics ‘police’ because it involves the distribution of resources amongst those who are deemed to ‘have a part’. Rancière highlights the role played by government in reproducing an unequal social order. Even in ‘democracies’ political elites use ‘democratic’ techniques to (re)produce an unequal social and economic hierarchy. He conceives of ‘politics’ as a fully democratic process that is disruptive because it is impelled by subordinate groups who ‘have no part, claiming a part’ (Rancière 2010, 33). Children and young people are one such excluded group, normally regarded as naturally deficient who are denied a part while their actual political agency is persistently misrecognised. While the past decades have seen explicit recognition of children’s rights (for example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) and much said by governments and other organisations about ‘the need’ to encourage’ youth participation, much of this rhetoric and accompanying exercises in youth roundtables is deeply deceptive (Sukarieh and Tannock 2014, 143)

Like Ranciere, Fraser highlights how participatory parity can happen when all people are fully included as a political subject in a shared lifeworld making it possible to make oneself ‘heard’, being able to ‘contribute in one’s own voice’ (Fraser 2008, 145–146). The provision of social and material resources is an essential condition of any anthropocentric account of participatory parity. For youth workers, this would mean working minimally with young people themselves in their immediate workplaces as well as in their relations with NGOS, government, professional bodies, social institutions (schools) to extend the principles of democratic representation. Understood more inclusively, participatory parity offers an account of planetary justice that is inclusive of the biotic world and the materiality of this planet, and would involve working out how to also include animate non-human life forms and material things of the world in the pursuit of planetary justice.

The second implication of the ethico-onto-epistemology for the ethics of youth work practice is that it involves developing an ethic of care. This requires practices that are attentive to the cultivation of what virtue ethicists call ‘character’ or virtues such as courage, prudence or honesty. If we are to act in ways that mean that we will flourish along with others we will need to practice making these virtues a habit. Such an ethic of care not only goes well beyond the neoliberal ethos of self-care but refuses the idea that ethical practice is either synonymous with the governance of young people, or with compliance with a formal Code of Ethics. Those practising an ethic of care appreciate why continuing injustice grounded in the exclusion of young people ‘who have no part’, is unacceptable (Hobart and Kneese 2021). It will involve youth workers modelling an ethic of care that actively encouraging the young people they work with to develop their own virtues as part of an ethic of care.

Such an ethic requires exercising and making persistent situational judgements about what care needs to look like in a world in which unexpected change is normal. This bears a strong relationship to ‘phronetic practice’ based on ‘practical wisdom’ which involves responding on a case-by-case basis, without recourse to rules, codes or regulations (Flyvbjerg 2001). Classical philosophers like Aristotle (1976) saw ‘phronetic practice’ as a practice committed to good judgment, requiring reflexivity and acting on the basis of virtues such as courage, resilience, endurance, generosity and humility (Bessant 2009, 423–438). Reset within a new materialists frame, ‘phronesis’ in youth work requires an ethnographer’s capacity to stand both inside and outside a given situation so as to better grasp the manifold relations at work in young people’s entanglement with other significant people, and with their material environment. This helps in the task of being context-sensitive, from stopping us from being too close and not seeing what is before our eyes and from being too remote and abstracted.

Finally, a new materialists’ framework has implications for youth work education and curriculum. Reimagining youth work education will entail developing a critical reflexive practice that rejects a reliance on rote learning, tests and prescribed texts that ostensibly provide access to various disciplinary canons of knowledge. It would require reimagining the relations between teachers and students in the light of the principle of ‘parity of participation’ and involve co-designing curricula. It would also involve youth workers (and teachers) modelling and encouraging phronetic practice. Crucially it involves building new relations between higher education and various old and new fields and sites of practice.

It also means no longer seeing youth work internships and field education as spaces where would-be youth workers figure out how to adapt to existing modes of mandated practices or interventions. In the spirit of innovation directed towards what Roberto Unger (2014) calls ‘deep freedom’, youth workers, teachers and students alike would engage in and practice innovation and experimentation. As Unger says such ‘deep freedom’, ‘calls on many minds and many wills’ because it involves ‘the dialectic between (Unger 2014, 30). The conception of a free society and the cumulative institutional innovations can make that conception real’ (Unger 2013, 97).

It will take time for youth work teachers and others working in a tradition-oriented institution like the university to determine how to recreate schools, universities or recreation centres, etc. as sites of innovation. It will take a long time to determine how best to establish the conditions for human flourishing given the re-orientation to a post-anthropcentric conception of planetary justice.

Conclusion

Understanding the significance of the anthropocene means recognising how young people already bear a disproportionate burden of harmful consequences of global warming compared to many older people (Hickman et al. 2021, 863–873). The Anthropocene highlights the need to rethink certain taken-for-granted ontological coordinates of youth work practice. We addressed two questions here. What might a new ontological perspective like the ‘new materialism’ look like? What are its implications for ethical practice for those working with young people? We also recognise that it is not possible to speak of a professional field of practice like youth work as if it is an homogeneous entity. As mentioned, it is very likely that many are already working in solidarity with young people to effect the changes needed to mitigate and address the climate crisis.

At the least, we might expect youth workers to realise the value of thinking in more relational ways and in doing so relying less on essentialist categories like ‘child’, ‘youth’ and ‘the adolescent’. It will also involve jettisoning the developmentalist narrative and acknowledging young people as fully human. Any change of this kind is likely to take some time given the resilience of our personal and collective habitus, but it will shift as it becomes apparent how the prevailing taken-for-granted Western ontology fails to provide an adequate guide for thinking and action in the context of the climate and other crises we face. It entails recognising how many young people have to offer in respect to helping to teach their leaders, in informing the school curricular and indeed the curricula of policy makers, politicians and professional human service practitioners (Bessant, Farthing, and Watts 2015, 1–19). This is not to argue for a ‘hands-off’ approach or say that young people will and ought to save the world. On the contrary, the prevailing planetary crisis turns the focus on ‘the adults in the room’, who are ethically obliged to give service by ensuring young people today and those not yet born inherit an earth in which they can live well.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Bessant

Judith Bessant is a Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia https://www.rmit.edu.au/contact/staff-contacts/academic-staff/b/bessant-professor-judith She was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2017 for ‘Significant service to education as a social scientist, advocate and academic specialising in youth studies research’. She writes in the fields of sociology, politics, youth studies, policy, technology-media studies and history. She also provides advise to government and non-government organisations.

Rob Watts

Rob Watts, FASSA, is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University. He has published many books including Criminalizing Dissent: The liberal State and the problem of legitimacy (2020), and many journal articles. He is finishing another book on youth participation and democracy. He teaches politics, social theory and human rights.

Notes

1 We have not been able to find an equivalent exercise for youth work although we did find papers on new materialism and social work (Ross, Bennett, and Menyweather 2020) and nursing (Neff 2020).

2 The Anglosphere refers to an ‘imagined’ racialised, transnational community of countries that share colonial links with Britain including former British colonies like the United States or dominions like Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

3 Many issues that include the claimed novelty of the ‘new materialisms’ cannot be addressed here. As anti-colonial and Black-feminist early childhood scholar, Fikile Nxumalo (2020, 543), points out, ‘Indigenous conceptions of relationality have never bifurcated humans from the more-than-human world and have always taken seriously the agency and sociality of the more-than-human world’. There is a discussion to be had about the extent to which the ‘new materialisms’ emulate, recapitulate or develop the ontologies found in indigenous cultures.