Global Youth Work: Provoking Consciousness and Taking Action

Abstract

In a world of grotesque inequality and disproportionate distribution of the world's resources, the emerging discipline of Global Youth Work has suffered from a lack of theoretical location, and has been progressively ignored in practice. This book: develops a conceptual framework, drawing on theories of globalisation, anti-oppressive practice, development theory, education, and youth work provides spaces and resources for youth workers, social workers, development workers, and associated trainees and academics within these fields, to critically engage with this discipline advances theory and practice.

In a world where 80% of resources are consumed by 20% of its inhabitants, and where 229 out of every 1000 children born in Mali in 1998-1999 would die before they reached their fifth birthday, compared to 3 per 1000 born in Sweden in 2002, Global Youth Work should challenge this toxic orthodoxy and be rooted in the pursuit of social justice. This book aims to: provoke consciousness, helping individuals and groups of young people to explore ways of conceptualising and interacting with the world that differ from their existing constructions of reality, and gain a new critical consciousness encourage young people to take action, commensurate with their abilities, to move from a state of paralysis, to change the way things are.

Of value in learning and practice throughout the world, and supported by empirical research undertaken amongst youth workers across the UK, Global Youth Work explores: the concept and process of globalisation, highlighting its many definitions and configurations, and how the process affects our existence economically, politically, environmentally, culturally and technologically the construction of social reality, and how where we live and our life experiences influence our reality the scale and nature of global inequalities, including health, education and quality of life, both between countries and within them sustainable development, including political, social and environmental aspects the definitions, terminology and underpinning conceptualisations of Global Youth Work the empiric evidence establishing the efficacy of Global Youth Work as a pedagogical tool that effectively engages young people around local-global issues.

It will help provoke young people to navigate the complex matrix of global interconnectedness and the inextricability of their lives with that of others, from the food they eat, the clothes they wear and the energy they consume, to the very political systems that facilitate their privilege or disadvantage, politically, economically, technologically, culturally and ecologically. Positioning development and social justice as antidotes to inequality, this book premises Global Youth Work on the need to redress inequality at the personal, local, national and international levels.