Youth Work, Galleries and the Politics of Partnership

This book sheds critical light on the routinely debated issue of how to create sustainable, equitable and meaningful partnerships between visual art organisations and youth organisations. Using a Bourdieusian framework, this book analyses the different social and professional worlds of youth work and gallery education and explores why tensions often arise between partners and young people in these fields. Written at a time of significant crisis for the UK youth sector and in the context of an entrenched neoliberal policy climate, this publication seeks to highlight hopeful, experimental practice and possibilities for creative resistance. With public organisations and services under ever-greater governmental pressure to pursue collaborations within and across sectors, this is a timely moment to examine the challenges, ethics and advantages of working together, and to bring theoretical discussion to dominant yet vague understandings of partnership.