The SAGE Handbook of Youth Work Practice

This book remarkably covers the breadth of youth work in all its diversity while capturing the common threads and principles that make for its distinct practice. This book maintains academic rigour while retaining an eye for the nuances of practice, which it contextualises beautifully. It gives insight into the practice of youth work for both the novice and the seasoned activist and archivist.  Perhaps most importantly it re-affirms the need to defend youth work in times of uncertainty and with the creeping malaise of neo-liberalism, neo conservatism and new managerialism. This book is a must for any pedagogue, practitioner, student or policy maker with a concern for young people and the practices and professionals who work with them. I would recommend it becomes essential reading list on any youth and community work course.

Authors from ten countries contribute to this expansive and detailed description, analysis, and understanding of that direct work with young people and indirect work on their behalf called “youth work” – an emergent semi-profession in some places, a full profession with long and deep historical roots in others.  This book tells both the youth work family of resemblances and the families of practices which constitute much of what is both youth work and work with youth in some of the North, with South examples from Brazil, Ghana, and India.  In this very broad Handbook of youth practice authors typically locate this practice within their local to national spaces and to youth issues and problems therein, with emphases on social and cultural, and at times economic and political contexts, and responding policies, programs, and services.  Less present are the guild attributes of the family of youth work or understanding of youth/young people/adolescents, how they are seen and understood.  Strong is the book’s substance of how young people are responded to and the rationale for these approaches.
This Handbook is an excellent overview of one take on the family of youth work, helpful to beginners who will be given a range of families of responses to youth, for experts in youth work practice who are always on the look for programmatic ideas, and for university faculty who want a text useful for classes on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and for these same reasons, for those in youth work professional development.

Containing over forty stimulating contributions by youth work practitioner educators and researchers, this collection explores contemporary practice examples and innovative approaches to youth work and features chapters from the UK, Australia and USA. It’s an essential resource for youth and community work students and practitioners alike, for work with young people in reflective, participatory and ethically conscious ways. The chapters offer critical perspectives that are sure to stimulate discussion and debate to enhance everyday practice and a broader development of youth work.

The SAGE Handbook of Youth Work Practice is a must read for all those interested in youth work and its affiliated professions. True to its name, the Handbook covers some of the most important issues affecting the field of contemporary youth work, drawing on the work and experiences of scholars and practitioners from around the world. The editors have carefully chosen important theoretical issues, contemporary challenges and practical examples from among the many faces of international youth work. It is by far the most comprehensive volume on youth work I have seen to date and highly recommend it for youth practitioners and scholars everywhere.

Of all social professions youth work is undoubtedly the most diverse in shapes and methods. This book gives an overview of this incredibly resourceful, yet vulnerable practice, with appropriate attention to evolutions over time and space. A broad scale of Anglophone authors, spanning various fields of practice, succeed in this mission impossible. This book is an indispensable source of inspiration for practitioners, students and teachers who believe that an emancipatory youth work practice is of utmost importance in the development of young people, and in the maintenance of a sustainable democracy.

Critical assessments of the ways in which professionals engage with young people remain imperative to capacity-building for youth work practitioners and researchers. This is a valuable compilation of a diversity of practices in local contexts around the world which offers historical and contemporary critique of “Youth Work” without losing sight of the positive contributions of youth work practices. I recommend the volume as a key resource to support reflective practice and as an inspiration for further advancing research on global youth work.

This SAGE Handbook offers an excellent overview for deliberating the values, ethics and conceptualization of youth work. It examines diverse working approaches to working with youth, and scrutinizes the major themes for promoting the well-being, well-belonging, and well-becoming of young people in an age of increasing uncertainty and insecurity. It is a must-read if you care to know the why, what and how of youth work across time and space.