Listen to this
As I write this for the 25th anniversary 300th edition of CYC-Online , I am struck by the timing of its inception as a major contributor to the field of practice and thought for our work with young people. CYC-Online comes into existence in the last year of the 20th century. In doing so, it symbolically closes the work of the last century and opens the field of CYC to the emerging life space of the 21st. I am not at all sure how much awareness there was or is about the significance of this timing, but looking back it seems quite critical to me.
As a site of theory and practice, CYC-Online offers a continuation of many of the ideas and practices of the 20th century. Many of the regular contributors came into the field and were well into our careers by the time CYC came into being. Because of this, at times I feel a certain tension between an almost nostalgic desire to keep the spirit of the past century alive as we have headed into new century and those who would like to open new lines of thought and practice.
This tension that has emerged, as we have crossed from century to the next, is certainly not unique to the field of CYC. It is endemic across so much of what comprises our society worldwide. Certainly, one could chalk this up to generational differences. Many of us nominally called “boomers,” yearn for a world that continues to make sense for us. 21st century ideas, proposals for radical practice, and forms of youth culture that we don’t understand certainly have the capacity to open a generational rift. However, it is not just “boomers” who seem to yearn for what is being portrayed as a simpler and more functional set of social coordinates. Across the planet there are endless repetitions of nostalgic re-enactments of a world that no longer exists.
We can look through the pages of CYC since the turn of the century and find article after article without a single reference to anything directly pertinent to 21st century concerns. If 21st century articles are cited, the writers and thinkers being referenced are recycling slightly updated versions of 20th century ideas. That is not to say that there aren’t important and key pieces of writing that address the problematics of the 21st century or that there is any editorial policy keeping such ideas out of print. Quite the opposite, CYC has always welcomed diverse voices to the table and opened new streams of conversation about contemporary issues. The issue is more that the 21st century has had difficulty gaining traction in the popular vernacular of our field. Of course, we can find what appear to be new concepts such as trauma informed care, neurologically informed practice, broad swipes at social justice, but generally even these “new” approaches to working with young people tend to echo 20th century investments in bio-sciences and social justice.
From my perspective, we don’t have nearly enough voices that speak directly to the lived space that is the world of young people in the 21st century. We don’t have enough of us asking what it is like to live now in a world of massive transition at every level of our social world.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a very consistent voice who does do that within these pages and that is Kiaras Gharabaghi. However, while Kiaras is often cited in the literature of our field, it is not generally his critiques and commentaries on our contemporary world that are referenced. No, oddly enough, we as a field seem oddly vacant when it comes to wrestling with the true madness of the world that young people inhabit today. We remain concerned with treatment approaches, outcome measures, new diagnostics, how young people are doing within institutions, and so on. We worry more about how young people are managing their deteriorating mental health, than how to shift or change the toxic social environment that perpetuates epidemics of depression and anxiety. We worry more about how to get young people into soul killing jobs and failing schools, than working with them to explore life affirming methods of labor or learning. That is not to say that there are not CYC workers out there who are doing life affirming work day after day. It is simply to note that their work isn’t yet penetrating the pages of our professional literature in any great numbers.
Of course, we could say that it is too early in this new century for such radical ideas to take hold. But it is nearly a quarter of a century and 300 issues of this journal and we have not yet really entered the 21st century in a way that can make a difference in the suffering we see on a daily basis. We remain largely focused on the life world of young people within the care of various institutions. Certainly, this is important work, but on the whole we continue to fail to seriously interrogate the very premise that perpetuates foster care, residential treatment, group homes and so forth. We almost seem to take for granted the suffering that young people, their families, and communities are experiencing that drives the removal of our children from their world of origin. It is often as though we have given up on addressing the world from which they are taken and to which they will return. And of course, there are millions of children and youth whose circumstances are such that we never see them. And by seeing them, I mean both in terms of meeting them in care, but also those millions of youth that are just outside the vison of the world of work we call CYC.
These are the growing numbers of our children being bombed, shot, displaced, jailed, starved, and murdered. They are not in care, but in refugee camps and war zones among other desperately dangerous circumstances. I use the term our children because their lived experience of horror, pain, trauma, and death is directly attributable to the system of global capitalism that pays for and sustains all of the institutions of care in which we work and from which we make a living. In the world of the 21st century we are all profoundly interconnected in ways that brings a savage reality to the phrase “the human family.” We are indeed an extended family to all of the children existing in the world today. The way we live and the society that supports our lifestyle as CYC workers is built on the back of all children, not just the ones we see. In this sense, we could reasonably be asked, what is our accountability to our children? Particularly those that seem to largely absent from our conversations about care.
Make no mistake, the bombs that are killing them, the borders that are refusing them, the famines that are starving them, the wars that are traumatizing them, the climate change that is destroying the sustainability of their homes, and the genocide and ethnic cleansings that are erasing them, all originate from social institutions such as governments and corporate investments that we CYC workers sustain. Even when we protest or fight for justice, it tends to be on a case-by-case basis rather than an insistence that the system itself is corrupt and toxic and needs to be completely and radically changed. To some degree, the fact that so much of our work addresses the mental health of young people in care, while ignoring the physical actuality of their life world is symptomatic of the kind of limited vision we have developed as we have moved into the 21st century.
And it is the world of the 21st century that is at stake and it is indeed a world that we have never seen before. While this may seem a truism and maybe even trite, I would argue that the 21st century is historically notable in that it marks a massive transition between what Marx would call the mode of production. The mode of production is the way that we produce our world. In this sense, we are in a transition between the industrial capitalism of the 20th century and the emerging virtual capitalism of the 21st. Social and cultural transitions of this magnitude are messy and often violent. In many instances, they signal the fall of empires and entire ways of life. Everything changes while most of us try to cling to whatever we can to sustain a world that makes sense to us. However, that world is already gone and we are clinging to bits of wreckage before they slide away into the slipstream of history. As I tell my students, most of us are living in a world that is already gone, while the children that you will work with are already living in the future.
I should be clear here that while the children are living in the future, the future they live in is a horizon that is constantly moving ahead of them. Whatever the virtual society will become, at the moment, it is sheer transition. It is a world of postality. We used to define postmodernity as that which came after modernity but wasn’t anything fully formed yet. It was still made up of fragments of old-world logic, deconstructed and displaced into an ever shifting mosaic of new modes of art, language, philosophy, politics and so forth. It was a world of “post” which simply means after. I would argue that the world we live in today is even more “post” than the postmodern. The world of the 21st century is absolute transition in every sense.
The intersection of the biome and the virtual in combination with the world of abstract capitalism has accelerated shifts in society and our bodies that are impossible to fully comprehend in any comprehensive way. The door to the 20th century is closed and the door to the future is visible, but not open to us yet. That means that we are stuck in the hallway called the 21st century. As a friend of mine used to say, while it is true that when one door closes, another opens, but what they don’t tell you is that it is hell in the hallway.
And it is the hallway that makes up the world of young people today. Their lived experience of the chaos and violence of this transition from one way of life to another would seem to me to be centrally important to the work we do in CYC. I would think we would be seeking to know what comprises their lifeworld in this constantly emergent world. I have harped on and on in these pages about the fact that we need to focus more on the “care” in Child and Youth Care. By that I don’t mean symptom remediation or behavioral adjustment. I mean the ability to relationally engage with young people in the lived actuality of their day-to-day experience, without translating their lives into terms that make sense to us from the past century.
In the first decade of the 21st century, I wrote a book on youth and subculture to try and understand how the world of early 21st century subculture presaged shifts in society that were beginning to emerge. I made the argument, that if we would really listen to subcultural young people, they could inform us about what the world was becoming. I also argued however, that the ability to really listen was significantly compromised by the ways we translate youth voice into adult speak. I referenced Gayatri Spivak, whose writing in and of itself is a refusal to accommodate the translation of radically innovative ideas into plain speak. However, what I was interested in, was her thinking on the ways that colonial powers force the colonized to always translate their experience into colonial speech. In her writing, she argues that this requirement, that those colonized must always translate, makes it impossible to ever really speak. By speaking here, I mean the kind of speech rooted in the actuality of lived experience. In my book, I proposed that this is also true of young people in relation to the world of adults. We are constantly colonizing their expressions in such a way as to make them comfortable for us but incomprehensible as an expression of their life world. In short, it raises the question of can children and youth really speak or is their speech lost in a world of translation.
As we engage the 25th anniversary of CYC-Online , I hope that in the next 300 issues and 25 years (which will take us to mid-century), will open avenues to hearing much more about this new century from the young people who will be living it. I hope we will listen and provide care that is truly responsive to the lived experience of the coming generations. Our world depends on it.
