TOWARD QUEER POTENTIALITIES IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE

Arguably, from the invention of adolescence at the beginning of the 20th century, developmental theory has served as the foundation of disciplinary study and professional practice with children and youth across the global West. Despite their founders’ assertions that development is culturally constructed, in educational and youth work practice contexts stage-based trajectories of normative human growth are largely erroneously accepted as ahistorical, apolitical, naturally occurring, and universally applicable. This paper presents critiques of developmentalism from historical, reconceptualist, and queer perspectives, calling into question the underlying principles of normalcy and abnormality that run through the developmental project. We pay particular attention to the potential of queer theory as an analytic to deconstruct developmentalism in the context of child and youth care, opening new possibilities for critical engagement with children and youth outside the context of development.

A REFLECTION ON QUEERCRIP CHILD AND YOUTH CARE PRACTICE: DREAMS OF CARE AND FUTURITY

This paper engages with a reflection on the author’s embodied queercrip youth care praxis. The author uses queercrip theory to examine child and youth care practices and the relationships they hold to structures of power and domination. In so doing, he uses the terms eliminatory logics, survival dreaming, and crip constellations to understand the dynamics that undergird care and liberatory futures. Exploration of the (re)emerging queercrip paradigms that are the foundation of this work finds that these practices of care require moving beyond current imaginaries in youth care spaces. The paper concludes with recommendations for practice.

INTRODUCTION: POSSIBILITIES, FUTURES, AND QUEER WORLD-MAKING IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE

In this introduction, the authors situate this special issue within the current sociopolitical contexts of child and youth care (CYC) and offer potentialities through “queering CYC”. They consider how CYC might be analyzed through a queered lens, outline ways CYC has, and has not, taken up queer theory, and imagine what a queered CYC might (un)become. The authors provide context for this issue and invite queer generosity in reading how queering can be in conversation with CYC.

RADICAL CARE AND DECOLONIAL FUTURES: CONVERSATIONS ON IDENTITY, HEALTH, AND SPIRITUALITY WITH INDIGENOUS QUEER, TRANS, AND TWO-SPIRIT YOUTH

The spirituality and health of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit people occurs within and responds to contexts of extreme colonial violence. However, few studies have examined the relationships among the identity, health, and spirituality of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit youth and their perspectives and activism work in relation to the context of this violence. This study aims to better understand the importance of the connections among identity, health, and spirituality and their role in supporting Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit leadership in the enactment of care practices to promote health amidst colonial violence and the worlding of decolonial futures beyond and outside it. Informed by key insights from the grassroots movements and fields of Indigenous feminism, Indigenous queer thought, and radical resurgence, this study brings these insights into conversation, via qualitative interviews with five Indigenous youth activists (18 to 35 years old) from across the part of Turtle Island now known as Canada. Our analysis results in four themes: (1) identity, (2) spirituality, (3) the multidimensional nature of colonial violence, and (4) radical care. We delineate activating practices for decolonial futures, and signal the value of grounded, context-reflective, culturally safe, and intersectional health and youth services. This research demonstrates that spirituality is constitutive of and foundational to the identity and health of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit youth, and shows that health promotion and youth services must address the multidimensional nature of these needs if they are to truly support Indigenous young people, their movements of radical care, and the creation of a decolonial elsewhere marked by belonging, love, self-determinism, responsibility, and joy.

MOVING QUEER VISIBILITIES INTO IDENTITY-SUSTAINING PRACTICES IN CYC: TOWARD QUEER(ED) FUTURES

This essay aims at connecting child and youth care (CYC) to U.S. teacher education, educator pathways, and schooling in the United States. Further, this essay addresses Wolfgang Vachon’s call to push the boundaries of CYC, specifically in queering the field. I offer ways U.S. teacher education contexts and practices might be considered as guidance in supporting queer identities in CYC. I posit that there is a corporeal pedagogy that queer CYC practitioners enact that is effected beyond simple visibilities, and that they sustain their own identities and survival in CYC spaces through this practice. I also offer a testimonio of my practice as an out genderqueer, Chinese Mexican teacher educator who works in U.S. field-based teacher training and after-school CYC spaces. Further, I argue for critical engagement with curricula and field work in our training programs and make a call for training programs to support CYC practitioners in sustaining their queer identities. Finally, I argue for a need to continue to archive — and perhaps rescue — the practices and collective memories of queer CYC practitioners in order to advance a meaningful sustaining of queer identities in CYC.

QUEER (RE)VISIONS OF ARCHIVE, AFFECT, AND PLACE IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE

This article presents an autoethnography that interweaves the queering of archive, affect, and place using an object-oriented method. Engaging with a hundred-year-old antique photo album found in a thrift store, this article brings forth queer (re)visions of past, present, and future that (re)imagine queer (be)longing, which expand spheres of ancestral consciousness in 2SLGBTQIAA+ communities. Situated in the United States, this work traces the entanglements in this object-oriented autoethnography through a mapping of queer identity in the Pacific Northwest, capturing temporal reflections that reach from the present back into 1918 and back further still into the early English colonies. In orienting towards the realm of queering child and youth care this work seeks to contribute to a cultivation of discourse of collective (re)visions of past, present, and future that uproots the enshrined settler-colonial, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, capitalist ethos that continuously crafts the layered erasures of sex, gender, and sexually diverse people in the United States. I endeavour in the threading of autoethnography, both as a white settler and in my being and continually becoming, a genderqueer, trans person struggling and thriving, to critically query the implications of this history within the present and to (re)affirm the possibilities for queer and trans youth in the future.

EXPLORING THE CYC CIS-TEM: A LITERATURE REVIEW OF QUEER AND TRANS TOPICS IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE

Although Child and Youth Care (CYC) sees itself as a field that embraces diversity and complexity, there is a notable lack of discussion of sexual and gender diversity: queer and trans topics are rarely taken up across CYC research, practice, and pedagogy. Through a systematic literature review of articles published between 2010 and early 2020 in six journals with a focus on CYC practice, research, and theory, this article assesses how queer, trans, Two-Spirit, and nonbinary identities and topics are being discussed in the current CYC literature and reveals a conspicuous absence of publication on these topics. In a 10-year period, across six CYC publications comprising over 4000 published articles, only 36 articles focused on queer and LGBT issues (by covering both sexual and gender diversity) and, of those, only eight articles specifically focused on gender diversity or trans topics. No articles were found within any of the reviewed publications that specifically focused on Two-Spirit identities or topics and only one article mentioned nonbinary identities. Through exploring how and where queer and trans, Two-Spirit, and nonbinary identities and topics are being discussed, this review asks how we as a CYC field might begin to make space for these topics within our field and practice, in order to work towards social change that shifts our field and challenges the cis-heteronormative CYC system.

QUEERING CYC PRAXIS: WHAT I LEARNED FROM LGBTQI+ NEWCOMER, REFUGEE, AND IMMIGRANT STUDENT EXPERIENCES IN CANADA

This exploratory autoethnographic study, undertaken by a White straight cisgender child and youth care practitioner, seeks to understand the experiences of LGBTQI+ newcomer, refugee, and immigrant students in Canada. It highlights the nuances of creating safe spaces for young people who experience harm due to the intersections of systemic racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia. The overarching finding of this study reveals a culture of silence. Queer newcomer, refugee, and immigrant youth in Canada are often reluctant to disclose or explore their queerness due to their fears of discrimination and violence. This fear exists notwithstanding the pride Canada takes in its efforts to protect LGBTQI+ rights. Inspired by findings from interviews with two women, one who supports LGBTQI+ newcomers, refugees, and immigrants to Canada, and one who researches policy affecting all Canadian refugee experiences, I utilized a self-reflexive deep-dive approach to learn about the events and policies that have shaped LGBTQI+ newcomer, refugee, and immigrant students’ access to postsecondary education in Canada. Central findings in this study point to barriers emerging from homonationalism, colonization, religion, culture, race, White-centred gay–straight alliances in schools, and immigration policies pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity expression (SOGIE). These findings problematize the White, Westernized, liberal, out-and-proud policies that child and youth care practitioners are accustomed to.

BEATING BROKE BY GETTING OUT? EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERSONAL DEBT AND COMMUNITY-OUTMIGRATION

Scholarship on young people’s geographical mobilities tells us that young adults move away from their childhood communities for a complex mix of economic “push-pull” reasons, including relationships, aspirations, attachments to place, identity, and belonging. In this abundant research, particularly that which focuses on youth outmigration from rural and peripheral communities, there is surprisingly little attention paid to an issue that is top-of-mind for many young adults today: personal debt. In this paper, we draw insights from extant literature on youth mobilities to make the case for a greater examination of the role of personal debt in young people’s migration decisions. We hypothesize that youth and debt increase a person’s likelihood of moving away from peripheral regions. We test this hypothesis using data from a 2019 survey of Atlantic Canadians and find some support for it, and some interesting nuance, suggesting that there is good reason to examine debt’s role in youth mobilities in greater detail.

HOW IMPORTANT IS A SCHOOL? EXAMINING THE IMPACT OF REMOTENESS FROM A SCHOOL ON CANADIAN COMMUNITIES’ ATTRACTION AND RETENTION OF SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN

Many Canadian communities, especially rural communities, are concerned about youth outmigration as a cause of population decline, which is associated with fewer services and amenities. Proponents of keeping underattended schools open argue that removing a school from the community means that fewer families will want to live there, and that more families will consider leaving. Others view school closures as a rational response to population decline. Still other perspectives complicate the correlation between schools and population, noting phenomena such as children “learning to leave” and “place attachment” that modulate the temptation to move away. This paper offers an empirical test of discursive connections between school closures and mobilities by studying the population change of school-age children in Canadian census subdivisions indexed by distance to the nearest school. Based on this method, we conclude that there is a positive correlation between the school-age population in a community and proximity to a school in that community. Although our data do not answer the question of whether school closures cause population decline, or such a decline causes school closures, or both, we provide a quantitative foundation on which to ask it.