Case Study 6 – Researching Geographies of Youth Work

Football games, youth-led creative projects, spaces to ‘drop in’ and ‘hang out’, mentoring, fun trips are some things that youth work and community organisations do with young people. The informality, flexibility and responsiveness of youth work make it an accessible and important space for young people who are disenfranchised from schooling and even from informal educational services. Furthermore, geography is a constitutive element of youth work, which engages with young people in their everyday neighbourhood spaces, movements and communities, as well as facilitating their mobility beyond the neighbourhood. In this chapter, we reflect on our experiences in the United Kingdom and Slovakia to explore some of the methodologies, challenges and richness of researching the geographies of youth work. Decentring narrative methods in favour of ethnography was essential to capturing the primacy of relationships, the significance of the embodied and emotional and the place-based nature of youth work. However, more than this, ethnographic approaches needed to be aligned with youth work principles, collective dynamics and localised politics. At times, methodological strategies and research agendas – the desire to learn about research participants and their learning, lives, and places – had to be laid aside in favour of a mutual learning to be together. We came to understand both research and the learning that goes on in youth work settings as processes that are simultaneously individual and collective, private and public, cognitive and emotional, spatial and political.