Risking Attachments in Teaching Child and Youth Care in Twenty-First-Century Settler Colonial, Environmental and Biotechnological Worlds

Abstract

As a way to implicate ourselves in the politics of teaching child and youth care, we write as witnesses of the world and, in so doing, we make risky attachments by exploring a politically engaged child and youth care education that does not promote insurance, control or detachment. Rather, in this paper we critically locate child and youth care education within the political and economic realities of today’s world. We grapple with the complexities of educating child and youth care practitioners deeply embedded in neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, and explore the conceptual shifts that we are experimenting with in our own teaching practices to engage in human service work that responds with care to individual and family need and suffering by engaging with the very structures that perpetuate harm and violence in our society.