Dr Pete Harris

This article explores the interweaving of desistance from violent offending and professional identity formation via a psychosocial case study of a youth worker undergoing training in the UK. It follows the trainee for five years as he attempts to leave his past as a football hooligan behind him and construct a new professional identity as a youth worker. I argue that the case exemplifies how some youth professionals with lived experience of violence, if not given the time and space to build reflexive awareness, may struggle to meet the demands of professional roles such as youth work. I identify what I see as some implications for the promotion of ex-violent offenders as role models to young men involved in violence, as has recently found support within popular and political arenas in the UK. The article concludes that training and continuing professional development regimes, when designed for those with a history of violent offending, might benefit from the deep understanding of violence, professional identity formation and desistance that psychosocial analysis offers.

This article critically examines the employment of male youth workers in the field of youth crime prevention. It focuses on how their relationships with young men involved in violence might (or might not) support young men and promote desistance. It does this via the presentation of a single psychosocial case study that examines the relationship between a Black male youth worker and a young Black man who becomes involved in violence and then falls victim to violence to other young men in his neighbourhood. It illuminates how some male workers’ resources of masculine and street capital may be advantageous in terms of reaching some young men, but may also create barriers to reaching others. The study focuses on how both men in the case struggle to ‘give up the ball’ – a metaphor the article adopts for the act of conceding masculine capital in the street field. I suggest that for the relationship to provide the support this young man needed, it required the creation of a third space between him and his youth worker, that is, a vantage point from where they could both examine their masculinity and how this was related to their respective psychic vulnerabilities. I argue that the two men’s investments in different discourses of masculinity were more significant (in terms of the desistance-promoting potential of their relationship) than the similarity in their racial or class backgrounds. The case highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of youth work relationships and for provision of adequate support and supervision for all male workers that incorporates thorough consideration of their personal and professional identity formation, especially the most heavily gendered aspects.

This article charts an attempt to fuse two arguably incompatible formulations of social research; one rooted in a commitment to democratic, participatory practice and the other rooted in a psychosocial epistemological frame. After setting out the broad precepts of the two methodological approaches, the article explores some theoretical and practical tensions that surfaced during a doctoral criminological study examining the desistance-promoting potential of relationships between male youth workers and young men involved in violence. I show how the professional context in which the study was conducted (youth work) afforded the opportunity to work with participants while also retaining a psychosocial epistemological and analytic frame. The article concludes that while the two approaches are likely to remain ‘uneasy bedfellows’, more researchers in the youth work field might consider adopting a psychosocial standpoint as a means of keeping in sight both the psychic and the social forces imbricated in young people’s lives and within their relationships with youth professionals.

In this article, Pete Harris considers the need for a psycho-social approach in the forms of youth work that employ ex-offenders as role models with young people involved in violence. Harris recognises the potential of this form of youth work practice but emphasises a need for professional training and supervision that draws on reflexive processes for the worker. He argues that psychodynamic approaches are useful in the training and supervision for this form of youth work.

This article argues that psychosocial theory can enhance understanding of intersubjective dynamics between workers and young people involved in crime and violence. After introducing some conceptual tools from psychoanalysis and post-structural theory, a case study follows a worker’s efforts to bring about a young man’s desistance (including the worker’s use of self-disclosure) and how this is stymied by systemic failings in a home- less hostel in the UK. The article concludes that professional work in services targeted at young people with multiple support needs requires a deep sensibility to intersubjective and unconscious dynamics within professional relationships and organisations.

This article explores late modern Black and Muslim young men’s and women’s experiences of higher education. Carrying out qualitative research with 14 male and female young people, these students claimed that their Youth and Community Work course at their university made available an alternative representational space, enabling them to develop a major transformation of their sense of identity and self. In deploying the term pedagogical self, we are attempting to capture their naming pedagogy as central, in their terms, to the ‘reinvention of their selves’. We conclude by suggesting that our research participants’ narratives are located within an exploration of late modern identity and the self in higher education. In turn, this enables us to reflect on a generational shift in meanings around racialisation and difference in thinking about the future of higher education in Britain.

This paper argues for the foregrounding of improvisation and education ‘in the moment’ within youth workers’ professional development. Devised in collaboration with third-year Youth and Community Work students and lecturers at a university in Birmingham, this participatory action research project drew on work of jazz ethnomusicologists and educationalists that details the extensive preparation involved in acquiring the ability to improvise within jazz in order to counter the misconception of youth work as educational practice ‘on the wing’. Through analysis of students’ reflective writing, lecturer feedback, interviews with lecturers and video footage of students leading improvised dialogues with their peers, the study sheds light on the challenges and possibilities involved in the teaching and assessment of improvisation in youth work and suggests that students can be encouraged to actively structure their awareness of improvisation and take responsibility for developing a disposition towards it. The author argues that this is important, not only because such improvised practice ‘works’ instrumentally in terms of engaging young people, many of whom are disengaged from formal education, but because it is also closely aligned ideologically with the value-driven purpose of youth work.