Who knows? Youth work and the mise-en-scene: reframing pedagogies of youth participation

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the PARTISPACE research (www.partispace.eu) and particularly on findings from three of eight European cities included in the study, this article brings to the surface the dramatic and theatrical practices underlying the metaphor of performance in order to contribute to a better understanding of youth work and youth participation. It considers the spaces, temporalities, actors and audiences, and atmospheres of youth participation projects. Youth workers and young people in these space/times can be seen as actors in the drama of participation; cast in their roles and caught up in power play, both small scale and sometimes on a larger political stage. The micropolitics of group inclusions and exclusions which are pushed beyond the boundary in Youth Council spaces take centre stage in the drama of the Youth Club. Attention to ambivalence in the work of youth workers leads to a discussion of the needs of such pedagogues.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• youth work
• performance
• ambivalence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Walther et al. (2019) for detailed accounts on the study.

2. The term informal and non-formal learning are often used interchangeably, the first in UK and the second in the rest of Europe. In this article we use the term non-formal learning to distinguish the settings in which a pedagogue/youth worker is deliberately employed but which do not primarily exist to support education defined by the school curriculum.

3. There is not enough space in this article to discuss the methodology of the large comparative study from which the evidence here is drawn, but a selection of fieldnotes from each city were translated and analysed in cross-consortium meetings between 2015 and 2017 and it is these translations which are presented here. Extracts from fieldnotes are presented in italics with the city of origin noted in abbreviated form.

4. We concentrate on this aspect here while the appropriation processes by young people are treated in-depth elsewhere (Andersson et al. 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [649416].