Radical histories and alternative education: recovering the spaces of youth work.

A multi-disciplinary BERA Youth Studies and Informal Education SIG day conference

Friday April 1 2011. 9-4pm

Manchester Metropolitan University, Didsbury Campus

This conference looks at histories of radical experiments that have involved youth work in the broadest sense. It brings under scrutiny experimental work with groups that may have been marginalised by class, ‘race’ or gender, for instance, over the last hundred years. Our suggestion is that there has been a loss of collective memory about these ‘seeds beneath the snow.’

This multi-disciplinary day will build on discussions that have been raised by the recent In Defence of Youth Work conferences, the revisiting of Bernard Davies’ seminal text Threatening Youth (OUP1986) and the current political threat to statutory youth work.

Call for paper, panels or posters: there are a number of themes that might be pursued, for example,

Anarchist and libertarian educational experiments

Alternative work with young women

‘Beyond steel bands’

Spaces for the ‘unattached’

Community activism

The challenge of creating alternative spaces in schools

Children’s rights

Work with young people/communities in urban and rural spaces.

Please send suggestions for panels, outline of papers/posters and a brief biography to a.ronan@mmu.ac.uk by Feb 14 2011