Thinking Seriously about Work with Girls and Young Women

Thinking Seriously

About Youth Work and Work With Girls and Young Women

Conference
22nd 23rd March 2010

Hinsley Hall, Leeds

The second of the biannual ‘Thinking Seriously’ conferences organized by ‘Youth and Policy’ is to focus on the subject of Work With Girls and Young Women.


The intention of the ‘Thinking Seriously’ conferences is to offer participants an opportunity to discuss youth work and other approaches to work with young people in a serious, reflective and analytical way, benefiting from analysis and research as well as practice experience across a range of settings and localities. The events are deliberately structured to be small scale to encourage sustained and open critical discussion and developmental conversation amongst participants.


The 2010 conference will approach the question of work with girls and young women from the broad perspective of gender inequality and difference and will seek to develop a critical understanding of current policy agendas and the particular professional specialisms associated with work with girls and young women.


In keeping with the intention to create an atmosphere and setting favourable to debate and conversation, we shall restrict attendance to a maximum of 60 and ask all participants to make a commitment to attend for the whole two day event so book early to guarantee a place!
Youth and Policy Girls Work Conference 2010
Girls Work Conference Booking Form 2010
The event is women-only, which has sparked an interesting debate on the Google group, In Defence of Youth Work, to which you might want to subscribe –

http://groups.google.com/group/in-defence-of-youth-work

Published in: on September 21, 2009 at 11:06 am  Leave a Comment  

Chatting Critically to Young People about …..Drugs

An Entitelment for All- Drugs

For many a year Drugs Education has been a lucrative source of finance within Youth Work. And, of course, it has seemed  utterly the right thing to be doing. None of us want to see young lives wrecked by drugs. And yet, of course, many of us take drugs – between 2 and 5 million cannabis users in the UK – and stay on the rails. I’m not saying anything special here, except to ponder whether the overall thrust of the drugs awareness approach reveals it to be the educational wing of  a failed global ‘War Against Drugs’ strategy?

Brazil’s former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, co-authored the recent Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy. He declares the emperor naked. “The tide is turning,” he says. “The war-on-drugs strategy has failed.” A Brazilian judge, Maria Lucia Karam, of the lobby group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, tells the Guardian: “The only way to reduce violence in Mexico, Brazil or anywhere else is to legalise the production, supply and consumption of all drugs.”

This passage is taken from a challenging counterweight to prevailing orthodoxy, The War on Drugs is Immoral Idiocy, written by Simon Jenkins. I don’t agree with him at every turn – not least with his opening sentence – but there is much here for youth workers to ponder. Does this wider political context carry any implications for practice?

TT

Published in: on September 6, 2009 at 1:46 pm  Leave a Comment  
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