Reassembling anti-oppressive teaching practices in professionally qualifying youth and community work education
New and continuing formations of oppression remains a contemporary 21st Century challenge compounded by a fracturing of democratic structures that give rise to intolerance of difference and threaten social bonds. The big questions about the type of society we want to live in, what it means to be human, and the role of education are questions that are increasingly alienated from everyday lived experiences and a collective commitment to shape a fairer and more socially just world. Thus, the scale of challenges underscores a need to think differently about how Anti-Oppressive Practice (AOP) in professionally qualifying youth and community education is taught and its role in enacting a commitment to social justice. The inquiry worked with Collective Biography (CB) (Davies and Gannon, 2006) to ask how posthuman and new materialist concepts might facilitate such processes and how practices generated through CB might themselves re-orientate and extend approaches to teaching. The CB was created by nine UK academics experienced in teaching professionally qualified Youth and Community Work (YCW) programmes and was conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was conceptualised as a rhizomatic research assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 2014), orientated by phEmaterialism (Niccolini, Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018), and drew on Manning’s (2016) account of ‘staging a minor disruption’ in taken-for-granted teaching practices. Through cartographic mapping (Braidotti, 2018), the CB produced a multi-layered account of 21st century challenges. These mappings were constituted as thresholds that opened conceptual space for reimagining and enacting how AOP might be taught. The inquiry addressed a gap in the YCW literature by proposing posthumanism as a navigational tool, enabling the emergence of an Anti-Oppressive Praxis as part of a critical becoming pedagogy (Bowler et al., 2021). This praxis functioned as an affirmative ethical strategy with generative capacity to engage with new formations of oppression and carried implications for professional identities in YCW as fluid and in-formation (Gale, 2023). Panversality, conceptualised through the process of inquiry was proposed as an affective micropolitical strategy for generating new subjectivities in YCW. Collaborative writing, anarchiving, and memorly worldling emerged in relation to panversality as three experimental pedagogical exemplifications. The thesis advances and ongoing commitment to working creatively, relationally and experimentally with concepts, extending the terrain and tuning into the potential for teaching AOP in contemporary YCW education in more than human ways.
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