Youth Work, Early Education, and Psychology / Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood (PDF)

Hans Skott-Myhre is Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University, Canada.

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is Professor of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Kathleen Skott-Myhre is Assistant Professor at the University of West Georgia, USA.

"This book is a deeply satisfying journey through the liminal spaces of youth work/child and youth care, education, and psychology. In order to rethink how we approach young people particularly under the suffocating influence of global capitalism the authors in this powerful collection interrogate conventional approaches and institutions, finding them to be utterly unworkable. Instead, they draw upon the possibilities offered through a liminal and immanent theoretical framework in order to shatter our preconceived notions of the 'helping adult'. This is not a book that tells you how to fix young people; this is a book that demonstrates how to think with young people as a form of resistance, rebellion, and refusal to developmental and humanist perspectives. In these richly written pages, you will find a unique approach to youth work/child and youth care that explodes dualisms, escapes limiting enclosures, and imagines a re-signification of adult-child relations. Indeed, this book is a vital conceptualization of youth work/child and youth care for the twenty-first century and without a moment to lose." - Shauna Pomerantz , Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, USA; author of Girls, Style, and School Identities: Dressing the Part (2008)

"Visualize this a young person, being led in handcuffs by uniformed adult security guards out of Wal-Mart, resisting slightly but unable to overcome the force of the underwhelmingly seized guards. Before you read this book, you may describe this visual image as a scene capturing a shoplifting incident. After you have read this book, you will recognize the immense irony, and perhaps farce, of the dialectical and paradoxical impact of late capitalism on the social relations constructed as rationale hierarchies and absurd binaries of right and wrong, of truth and consequence. In this book, this image reflects the moment in which the species digests its waste. Who really is the thief? And who really