Online Event with Special Guest Dr. Bianca Baldridge // Precarity and Promise: Youth Work as the Process of Futuring

To commemorate #YouthREXat10, we’re excited to host an online event that continues YouthREX’s 10-year tradition of co-creating spaces for the Ontario youth sector to learn and reflect together about the possibilities and limitations of youth work.

Our special guest is Dr. Bianca Baldridge, Associate Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Critical Youth Work Collective, a research lab committed to humanizing research, critical youth work pedagogies, and honouring youth work professionals.

Bianca’s presentation on Precarity and Promise: Youth Work as the Process of Futuring will draw from her new book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work, to underscore the significance, fragility, precarity, and power of youth workers, their essential work, and the possibilities they create for youth.

Bianca will highlight the structural challenges in youth work and the nonprofit sector that shape youth workers’ personal and professional lives. Despite these challenges, youth workers cultivate experiences and opportunities for young people to thrive.

Considering the complexity and precarity of the youth work landscape, including the pressure the field is under to address societal and educational problems, and the quick decisions youth workers are forced to make daily – under what conditions does the process of conscious futuring and dreaming occur? Bianca’s presentation radically reclaims the space needed to contemplate the viability and sustainability of youth work as a process of futuring.

The event will also include:

• A Q&A with Bianca and a community dialogue for event participants to share their youth work stories and explore transformative youth work practices that are attentive to the structural contexts that shape young people’s lives. 
• A performance of a specially commissioned spoken-word poem by Eddie Lartey, award-winning poet, creative, and author. In this spoken word poetry, Eddie draws on metaphors and imagery about music to paint a picture of what youth workers do and what their work is really like.