Assembling, disassembling and reassembling ‘youth services’ in Austerity Britain

Abstract

This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on ‘youth’ and ‘youth services’. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of ‘austerity’, we take up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or components that come together to produce a ‘youth service assemblage’ and its disassembly and reassembly. As we do this we demonstrate the usefulness of assemblage as way of encountering the productivity of relations across components and avoiding an account that over-states the force or scope of ‘policy’. The paper concludes that by analysing in terms of assemblage, new challenges for thinking about politics emerge, in particular the limits of thinking in terms of a resistant political subject and the need to engage ambiguity.

Keywords:

• youth/adolescence
• poststructural/postmodern/critical theory
• neoconservatism/neoliberalism
• educational policy
• Deleuze

Notes

1. Following the financial crisis of 2007, and the election of the Coalition Government on a policy platform that emphasised fiscal conservatism and public spending controls, the term ‘austerity’ has become a nodal point in the articulation of UK policy discourses produced by institutions with a range of mainstream political affiliations (for examples drawn from journalism and policy think tanks, see BBC News, 2013; Butler, 2012; Harding & Politi, 2013; Massey, 2010; Wren-Lewis, 2011).

2. Epigenetics refers to the interaction between and mutual transformation of environment and genetics.

3. ‘…money flows with’ and ‘money flows to’; the difference in repetition here is indicative of the unsatisfactory nature of such spatial representations of productive movements of the assemblage. The productivity is in the relation of the two – money does not flow ‘to’ early intervention so much as this field and the Early Intervention Grant are mutually produced and producing in the interrelation of monetary flows and a series of contingent knowledges.

4. The reference to lines through a discontinuous series of characters is our attempt to undermine the sense of completeness and heirarchical (and thereby in some sense perhaps causal) relations to the lines, and the choice of their ordering. Such a closed, ordered series of super and sub ordinate relationsips would risk signifying youth service assemblage as arborecent.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Youdell

Deborah Youdell is Professor of Sociology of Education and Director of the Public Service Academy at the University of Birmingham.

Ian McGimpsey

Ian McGimpsey is Lecturer in Education at the School of Education, University of Birmingham.