Street Kids Streetscapes

This book illuminates how panhandling acts as the embodiment of the experiences of street life for kids as well as how the streetscape functions as the interface between street kids and the mainstream.

Building on the success of their Global Street Design Guide, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)-Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) Streets for Kids program has developed child-focused design guidance to inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities around the world to consider their city from the eyes of a child. The guidance in Designing Streets for Kids captures international best practices, strategies, programs, and policies that cities around the world have used to design streets and public spaces that are safe and appealing to children from their earliest days. The guidance also highlights tactics for engaging children in the design process, an often-overlooked approach that can dramatically transform how streets are designed and used.

Street outreach workers comb public places such as parks, vacant lots, and abandoned waterfronts to search for young people who are living out in public spaces, if not always in the public eye. Street Kids opens a window to the largely hidden world of street youth, drawing on their detailed and compelling narratives to give new insight into the experiences of youth homelessness and youth outreach. Kristina Gibson argues that the enforcement of quality of life ordinances in New York City has spurred hyper-mobility amongst the city’s street youth population and has serious implications for social work with homeless youth. Youth in motion have become socially invisible and marginalized from public spaces where social workers traditionally contact them, jeopardizing their access to the already limited opportunities to escape street life. The culmination of a multi-year ethnographic investigation into the lives of street outreach workers and ‘their kids’ on the streets of New York City, Street Kids illustrates the critical role that public space regulations and policing play in shaping the experience of youth homelessness and the effectiveness of street outreach.

Critical and postmodern perspectives have been largely underexplored in the field of child and youth care. This book addresses the gap, showcasing cutting-edge approaches to policy, pedagogy, and practice from diverse perspectives and professional settings. The authors of Child and Youth Care challenge deep-seated assumptions about child and youth care by reinterpreting core concepts such as ethics and outcomes and raising questions about underlying goals and premises. Can the ends of practice be separated from the means? For whose benefit are interventions designed? By recognizing a range of social and political influences on children and youth, this volume bears witness to exciting developments in child and youth care.

Being homeless in one’s homeland is a colonial legacy for many Indigenous people in settler societies. The construction of Commonwealth nation-states from colonial settler societies depended on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. The legacy of that dispossession and related attempts at assimilation that disrupted Indigenous practices, languages, and cultures—including patterns of housing and land use—can be seen today in the disproportionate number of Indigenous people affected by homelessness in both rural and urban settings. Essays in this collection explore the meaning and scope of Indigenous homelessness in the Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They argue that effective policy and support programs aimed at relieving Indigenous homelessness must be rooted in Indigenous conceptions of home, land, and kinship, and cannot ignore the context of systemic inequality, institutionalization, landlessness, among other things, that stem from a history of colonialism. "Indigenous Homelessness: Perspectives from Canada, New Zealand and Australia" provides a comprehensive exploration of the Indigenous experience of homelessness. It testifies to ongoing cultural resilience and lays the groundwork for practices and policies designed to better address the conditions that lead to homelessness among Indigenous peoples.

Education's Prisoners sheds light on the complicated relationship among the educational system, the political economy, and the prison industrial system in the United States. Working within the tradition of critical theory, this critical ethnography posits a more than accidental connection among these phenomena, and engages in a debate with existing literature within critical theory related to structure and agency. The life stories of the participants and their perspectives on their social circumstances provide a tool for deepening and questioning our understandings of these matters. In addition to its substantive findings, this book allows us to see in human terms how structures and forces in society contribute to the outcomes of school failure and incarceration that are usually measured in percentages and correlations. It suggests ways of improving classroom experiences and improving the life chances of young people.

A thoroughly revised & updated edition, this volume includes new chapters on auto-ethnography, critical race theory, queer theory, & testimonies.