Intersectionality and Resistance in Youth Work: Young People, Peace and Global Development in a Racialized World

Abstract

This chapter is framed by the concepts of Critical Race Theory, Critical Peace Education, and Global Youth Work. It departs from a premise that Youth Work can be an effective tool to provoke consciousness (Sallah, 2014) and redress power imbalances as an instrument of resistance (Scott, 1990) in a grotesquely unequal and increasingly globalized world. In this context, we argue that globalized hegemony exists in personal, local, national and global acts of, and reactions to, violence, and that this necessitates a shift from a singular binary of oppression to an intersectorial approach recognizing multiple interconnections such as age, race, structural violence, ‘development’ and global situatedness. In making this argument, we focus on the way that hierarchies of oppression, enacted within society, are linked to micro aggressions and the framing of majoritarian stories within the conscious- ness of the oppressor and the oppressed that negate human potential as direct and structural violence (Galtung, 1969). Crucially, we argue that resistance to oppression should also shift from a mere critical understanding of this intersectionality, to generating pedagogies of disruption, and in turn pedagogies of hope. Starting from the experience of Youth Work in England, this chapter will decon- struct the lure of ‘whiteness’ as a cultural marker (Fanon, 1986; Giroux, 1997), and explore the causal and emergent properties (Archer, 1995; Carter, 2000) of racial hierarchy to understand the generative mechanisms that influence the structure and agency of the individual. It is cardinal to understand at this juncture that ethnicity/whiteness is only one of many variables that intersect to generate discrimination and oppression at the personal, local, national and global levels. Due to imposed word limits, we will explore only ethnicity/whiteness in detail, out of all the other variables, to illustrate our core points. This will permit us the opportunity to position Critical Peace Education and Global Youth Work as experiential, informal and critical spaces to disrupt the configuration of ways of knowing, in order to generate new ways of being. Key questions that frame the chapter include, ‘how do we initiate a critical dialogue between the hidden transcript of subordinate groups into the public transcript (Scott, 1990) of Youth Work?’ and ‘how do we make them one, anti-oppressive and mutually liberatory script?’