With Children and Youth provides a snapshot of emerging theories and perspectives in the field of child and youth care across North America. Well-known scholars and researchers present new and innovative critical perspectives, written in a provocative manner and reflecting outside-the-box thinking.
The book examines from scholarly and practical viewpoints the purpose of child and youth care practice, relational practice, post-modern approaches to thinking about theory and practice, and new and innovative thinking about the professionalization and accreditation of the discipline itself. Some chapters merge thinking about child and youth care with esoteric and literary prose; others use humour and satire as a way to represent both foundational and entirely new directions in the field.
With Children and Youth provides no set conclusions or findings about the field; instead, it guides the reader to spaces of controversy, contention, and opportunities for innovation and change. Child and youth care practice and theory, it is argued, is based fundamentally on engagement across generations, cultures, and social positions, and this book exemplifies precisely that.
Kiaras Gharabaghi is an associate professor in the School of Child and Youth Care at Ryerson University and co-editor of the journal Child & Youth services. A practitioner for more than twenty years, he researches in the areas of residential care, children’s mental health, education and social pedagogy, policy and regulatory frameworks for youth services, and system collaboration and organizational change.|Hans A. Skott-Myhre is an associate professor in the Child and Youth Studies Department at Brock University. He spent twenty-five years as a youth worker and family therapist working primarily with runaway and homeless youth before entering academia. Research interests include radical and political approaches to youth–adult relations, subcultures, critical disability studies and anti-psychiatry, post-capitalist subjectivity, post-Marxist politics, undoing whiteness, and political readings of popular culture.|Mark Krueger was professor and founder of the Youth Work Learning Center, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he taught and studied youth work. He wrote several articles and twelve books about the field, and consulted and spoke at numerous conferences and agencies in the United States, Canada, and Europe.