Category: Youth Work

James Ballantyne questions the policing of emotions

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Politics, Youth Work1 Comment

During a month shadowed by family bereavement I’ve been labouring to put together my opening contribution to last Friday’s annual In Defence of Youth Work conference, ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands – youth work and well-being?’ Hopefully, in the next fortnight I’ll type up my notes [always a tortuous, one-fingered process] and post them on this blog – quite a few folk encouraged me to do so.

Meanwhile, I’ve amassed a number of links to stuff I think deserves our attention. Rather than just compress these into an all-consuming list I’m choosing to give each of them a separate billing over the next week or so.

First off a warm welcome to a piece, inspired by the conference debate, from one of youth work’s favourite bloggers, James Ballantyne. In his inimitable way he rattled this off on the train back to Middlesborough from the Birmingham event, claiming, which I believe, it was done and dusted before Sheffield. Given my leaden progress when writing I am awestruck in the face of such alacrity!

Should Youthworkers be ‘policing’ young peoples emotions?

James begins:

Getting young people off the streets, that was and still is one of the old mandates for youth workers, getting young people into other institutions was another.

Youthworkers effectively were tasked with policing the streets – or policing the third space in between organisations, so that young people wouldn’t fall through the gaps. There is a new place for youthworkers, to effectively police ‘in town’. And, though it is not new, it is back with a vengeance.

Youthworkers now tasked with policing young peoples emotions? Young people are to be happy, and to be well.

The area of value is not the social space of the park, but the heart space, the attitude, the feelings of the young person.

Policing young peoples emotions so that ‘they are not unhappy’ with their lot – I wonder.

He closes:

If we meet young people in their space, or try and create safe spaces for conversation, what kind of space is a young person going to engage with if it’s not derived by their agenda, their interests and passions and gifts – rather than be a space where their emotions are under scrutiny.

Youthworkers, who curated during the day, are some of the most imaginative around for trying to do practice that ‘looks like youthwork’ even in a space dictated by the latest agenda ( and knife crime is also another one) – and significant credit where credit is due, as any work with young people is valid and important. But policing the streets was an impossibility and best left for police – the intensity of young peoples emotions might be best left with the kind of well trained counsellors who can do this.

But whatever happened to just trying to to create spaces of relationships, of creativity, or groups, of activity, of participation and even entrepreneurship all of which will allow young people to have connectivity, autonomy and become competent. Then, and this done in community, with families, with the institutions, and others, might be the best way of making more than just young people happy. It might make the community happy too.

We would never say that we would want young people to feel worse after meeting us, but happiness might not be likely if we have exposed and helped them become more self aware of the issues that affect them and how they react. They might know more but be less content as a result, needing a personal struggle to assimilate new information into their previously normative world view and identity.

We’ve got a long way to go. But the journey doesn’t start with fixing young people and helping them feel something, despite their circumstances. Policing young peoples emotions… really? Is that what youth work has come to?

Read in full at Should Youthworkers be ‘policing’ young peoples emotions?

International Women’s Day: Jo Freeman [1972] ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’

On By Tony TaylorIn Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

On International Women’s Day you’ll find below the link to and the closing lines of the hugely influential and still relevant article, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, written by Jo Freeman, getting on for half a century ago. Certainly, it impacted significantly on the in-service training programme for youth workers in Wigan, where I worked, complementing the emergence of feminist practice in the Authority’s Youth Service.

THE TYRANNY OF STRUCTURELESSNESS

PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING

Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of “structurelessness,” it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all. Some of the traditional techniques will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself — only its excess use.

While engaging in this trial-and-error process, there are some principles we can keep in mind that are essential to democratic structuring and are also politically effective:

1) Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.


2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.


3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.


4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person’s “property” and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.


5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of “apprenticeship” program rather than the “sink or swim” method. Having a responsibility one can’t handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one’s skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.


6) Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one’s power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion — without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.


7) Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members’ skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.

When these principles are applied, they insure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large. The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it.

Jo Freeman – biography

We’re being Googled: The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, neoliberalism, Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

Quite a lot of us are uncomfortable and ambiguous about our relationship with such social media as Facebook, yet its hold is strong. Within youth work practice itself there is concern about young people’s digital literacy. [1] Personally, I’ve felt in danger of being smugly ignorant, content, despite the occasional doubt, to google to my heart’s content. My complacency has been shattered by Shoshana Zuboff’s compelling thesis that we are living through the latest phase in capitalism’s evolution, the emergence of ‘surveillance capitalism’. An excellent introduction to her argument is to be found in a Guardian interview, ‘The goal is to automate us.‘ I would urge you to engage with her thoughts.

‘It [surveillance capitalim] works by providing free services that billions of people cheerfully use, enabling the providers of those services to monitor the behaviour of those users in astonishing detail – often without their explicit consent.’

Some quotes from Shoshana Zuboff to whet your appetite

Surveillance capitalism is a human creation. It lives in history, not in technological inevitability. It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google in much the same way that the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of mass production or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial capitalism.

Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.

Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.

Democracy has slept while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. We enter the 21st century marked by this stark inequality in the division of learning: they know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them. These new forms of social inequality are inherently anti-democratic.

It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Paradoxically, this coup is celebrated as “personalisation”, although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.

So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented, the first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all among the young.

I’ve ordered the book with some trepidation. It’s over 700 pages long. Even when I claimed to be a Marxist, I was of the cultural rather than the economic sort. And I failed Maths ‘O’ level three times. Wish me luck and I’ll report back.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power
Shoshana Zuboff published by Profile

  1. See Nuala Connolly’s chapter 25, ‘Young People, Youth Work and the Digital World’ in Thinking Seriously about Youth Work – available online as a pdf.