Youth Work in a Warm Climate: Navigating Good Practice in Australia Under Neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

We write as Australian youth work educators. We consider some of the ethical challenges involved in teaching youth work ‘in a warm climate’, situated in the diaspora of English youth work but where youth work also has a uniquely Australian character, placing us in an ethically liminal space in our teaching between an understanding of youth work that is robustly defended as being both ‘good’ and ‘true’, and what we do, which is different from this, and has its own character and strengths. We situate this in the policy history of youth work in Australia, particularly in the ‘neoliberal turn’ that this has taken in the last four decades which has created ethical challenges for us, just as it has for those elsewhere. Two guiding questions shape this paper. The first is, given our differences, what challenges do we face in maintaining connections with ‘good’ youth work and its value base as traditionally defined and defended in England, and relatedly, given that policy and funding regimes in the UK seem to be aligning more with an Australian model, is there anything that the youth work community in the UK can learn from the Australian experience?

KEYWORDS:

• Youth work
• ethics
• policy
• neoliberalism
• Australia

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathy Edwards

Kathy Edwards is a senior lecturer in the School of Global and Urban Studies at the RMIT. She is the Program Manager programme for the youth work degree and she has taught in this degree for 15 years. Her research critically considers social policy under the dominance of neoliberalism.

Patrick O’Keeffe

Patrick O’Keeffe is a senior lecturer in the Social Work and Human Services Cluster at RMIT University. Patrick's research examines how processes of marketisation, privatisation and financialisation affect young people, and how young people respond by creating subversive spaces and practices.