My paper at the Annual Conference of The Professional Association of Lecturers in Youth and Community Work in the University of Hull, UK (6 July 2017)

1. Youth and community
work in emancipatory
interconnections of
marginalised young
people with museums
Ioannis Athanasiou
6 July 2017

2. Working title
Museum education for
development and social
justice: Exploring young
people’s experiences of
museum spaces for
‘youth development’

3. The policy context
Published by the Department for Media,
Culture and Sport in March 2016, the first
White Paper for Culture in over 50 years
emphasize the importance of increasing
access to the arts organisations for young
people from disadvantaged backgrounds and
promises meaningful engagement with their
culture and heritage (The Culture White
Paper 2016: 20, my emphasis).

4. 1st case study
“The Stories of Becontree”
heritage not only as a way to develop historical
knowledge of young people or form new
territories of interpretation, but also as a catalyst
for identity work and social change

5. How museums define social
exclusion and inclusion in youth
work development?

6. Museums attracted visits from schools located in
areas with some of the highest levels of deprivation in
England and where child poverty was highest
measured by the percentage of pupils eligible for free
school meals (Hooper-Greenhill et al. 2009).

7. ‘youth were considered at risk if they
lived in rural communities where
resources were scarce, were children
of colour, were impoverished, came
from single-parent homes, or were
young girls – all young people cut off
from access to the so-called
‘American Dream’’

8. an ‘underlying perception of youth
deficiency reinforced by the demand of
museums to measure and demonstrate
social impact’ under the pressure of
funding (Tsibazi 2013)

9. What does the underlying perception of cultural
deficit in museums’ work with young people
mean for museum and education professionals?
How do discourses of ‘risk’ influence museum
cultures of learning, participation and social
justice?
How can museums evolve into spaces of change
for one of the most underrepresented museum
audiences?

10. The impact of risk society on
youth identity formations and
professional museum practices is
better analysed on the
contradictory and risky ground of
young people being simultaneously
‘consumers’ and potential
‘problems’ individuals (Powell
2014, original emphasis); or more
accurately being designated both
‘at risk’ and ‘as risk’ by public and
institutional discourses (Nichols
2017).

11. 2nd case study
“Objects in
transition”

13. ‘the emotions and sensory skills
are hardly utilised or encouraged in
academic, textually based
education [an approach to social
issues through the arts] encourages
a sense of place, new modes or
perception and enhancement of
older and taken-for-granted
modes, teaches new skills and
promotes often high impact but
non-verbal means of
communication and consciousness
raising’ (Clammer 2015:124).

14. ‘our ideas about ‘other’ people could be ‘questioned in
between locations, at the frontiers of traditional
disciplinary boundaries, and beyond the confines of
institutional spaces’ (Golding 2009:2, original emphasis)
At the museum frontiers …

15. • Youth and community work as emancipatory museum
practice moves away from a conception of youth work
development as primarily an economic phenomenon to
understanding it as a socio-cultural one ‘to be
measured in terms of quality of life, self-reliance,
cultural viability and vitality, human freedom, civil and
social justice and equality of opportunity for health,
growth and creativity’ (Murphy 1999).
• It can develop young people’s awareness of a reality, in
which ‘imagination and conjecture about a different
world than the one of oppression are as necessary to the
praxis of historical 'subjects' (agents) in the process of
transforming reality’ (Freire 1994:39).

16. Thank you …
http://youtopias.org