Title: Digitalizing Risk and Marginality: Social Work Knowledge Production through a Youth Lens.
Presenters: (all from the Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto):
Rory Crath (PhD student)
Graham Watson (MSW student)
Adrienne Chambon (Professor)
Abstract:
Social work has always taken an interest in youth at the margins (as newcomer, as ‘deviant’). At present, the notion of ‘youth at risk’ encompasses diversely located youth (Swift & Callahan, 2009) who are deemed vulnerable but also disfranchised from civic participation. Of concern is whether social work interventions that focus on the troublesome characterization of youth may result in their further marginalization and stigmatization (Sharland, 2005; Kelly, 2001)? Do social work practitioners and scholars account for and build upon youth capacities, youth insights about their subjectivities (de Finney, 2007), and their investments in redefining the markers of a just society?
We propose that videos produced by youth within the context of social service programming designed to “give voice” to youth-at-risk are a rich source for practitioners to draw upon to inform practice strategies. We analyze a select sample of videos drawn from several arts-based social service initiatives in Toronto (one with queer identified youth, the other with youth living in one of the racialised and economically marginalised “priority neighborhoods”). The speed and combinatory possibilities of video technology, popularly employed in youth culture, permit youth a unique range of possibilities with which to engage with dominant representations of themselves. These videos reveal how youth mediate, buy-into, or subvert social and agency based discourses about risk and marginalization.
Our presentation addresses how images created by youth provide insight into the operations and negotiations of power within the communities in which youth live and expands our understandings of youth’s sense of belonging and desires to shape civic/public space. Funded by SSHRC, our project “Knowledge for Solidarity: A Critical Cultural Perspective for Social Work” focuses on how social work can benefit from approaches in cultural studies that operationalise use of contemporary technology and visual communication to facilitate subaltern worldviews.
Presenters: (all from the Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto):
Rory Crath (PhD student)
Graham Watson (MSW student)
Adrienne Chambon (Professor)
Abstract:
Social work has always taken an interest in youth at the margins (as newcomer, as ‘deviant’). At present, the notion of ‘youth at risk’ encompasses diversely located youth (Swift & Callahan, 2009) who are deemed vulnerable but also disfranchised from civic participation. Of concern is whether social work interventions that focus on the troublesome characterization of youth may result in their further marginalization and stigmatization (Sharland, 2005; Kelly, 2001)? Do social work practitioners and scholars account for and build upon youth capacities, youth insights about their subjectivities (de Finney, 2007), and their investments in redefining the markers of a just society?
We propose that videos produced by youth within the context of social service programming designed to “give voice” to youth-at-risk are a rich source for practitioners to draw upon to inform practice strategies. We analyze a select sample of videos drawn from several arts-based social service initiatives in Toronto (one with queer identified youth, the other with youth living in one of the racialised and economically marginalised “priority neighborhoods”). The speed and combinatory possibilities of video technology, popularly employed in youth culture, permit youth a unique range of possibilities with which to engage with dominant representations of themselves. These videos reveal how youth mediate, buy-into, or subvert social and agency based discourses about risk and marginalization.
Our presentation addresses how images created by youth provide insight into the operations and negotiations of power within the communities in which youth live and expands our understandings of youth’s sense of belonging and desires to shape civic/public space. Funded by SSHRC, our project “Knowledge for Solidarity: A Critical Cultural Perspective for Social Work” focuses on how social work can benefit from approaches in cultural studies that operationalise use of contemporary technology and visual communication to facilitate subaltern worldviews.
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