2nd Edition
Youth Working with Girls and Women in Community Settings A Feminist Perspective
This fully revised and expanded edition of Janet Batsleer’s (1996) Working with Girls and Young Women in Community Settings provides a significantly updated text, incorporating new research, which will serve practitioners and academics well into the twenty-first century. Youth work with girls and young women has taken inspiration from feminisms and THE women’s movement, focussing on the strength and potential of girls as beings in their own right, rather than as carriers of social problems. Autonomous community-based projects of can affirm young women’s lives and creativity and seek to challenge oppression. Addressing the significant shifts in the social, political and professional context for informal education, this book makes clear the continuities in community-based informal education with girls and argues for its continuing importance. The impact of neo-liberal approaches to empowerment is highlighted throughout. Drawing together historical, theoretical and practice-based work, including case studies from a range of projects, Batsleer offers an analysis of the significant issues that will affect practice in the future and the significance of feminist inspired informal education rooted in specific community contexts. These include: The impact of violence, coercion and resistance, across a range of practices Female sexuality as a contested space The impact of poverty and the creation of networks of care and mutual support Difference and cross-cultural work, including inter-faith work and practice which challenges racism. This is an important source book for youth workers, social workers, and others involved in education outside of school as well as researchers in the practice and politics of youth work. It is an essential reference tool for researchers, as well as for both lecturers and students involved in the education and continuing professional development of youth and community workers and for those who wish to keep alive a radical alternative
Biography
Janet Batsleer is Principal Lecturer for Youth and Community Work at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
'This revised and updated book is a wonderful resource for students and practitioners of youth and community work and all who want to understand what feminism has to offer in shaping provision for girls in a way that promotes equality and is rooted in anti-oppressive practice. It is clearly written, insightful and accessible with valuable historical as well as contemporary content and reflection.' Kalbir Shukra, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK ’The new edition of this unique and important book, demonstrates Batsleer’s continued critical involvement in informal educational work with young women. Her insights, drawn from personal, professional and political activism, and well informed by contemporary theory and practice, challenge the reader to think beyond the mundane and mechanistic, to pursue a reflective and creative youth work approach.’ Jean Spence, Durham University, UK ’This is an intelligent book with a well-researched historical and contemporary critique that I found informative, stimulating and inspirational. The examination of theory and policy, whilst remaining grounded in practice, provides an excellent and much needed resource for understanding and/or engaging young women in communities. Having read this book once, I will be sure to revisit it many times.’ Susan Morgan, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland ’This is the book I wish I had read when I was a brand new girls’ work worker and thought I had to invent the wheel! Having said that, I am really glad I am reading it now, as it is packed with new things to mull over, as well as a thoughtful and considered framework ideal for teaching new youth workers. Janet ingeniously weaves the past and present into a coherent pattern of how girls’ work emerges, operates and remains continually under threat from patriarchy. Wonderful!’ Amelia Lee, Feminist Webs, Manchester, UK 'Youth work with girls has taken inspiration from feminist theory and the women’s movement, with communit
