Youth work as heart work in turbulent times

This article reflects on the author’s personal, professional and research-based entanglements with youth work, as a critical practice of informal education. Based on a speech at a Journal of Youth Studies conference, the article proposes an understanding of youth work as ‘heart work’, an emotionally and politically engaged practice within a wider social and global context that is not only turbulent, but also heartbreaking – in the political and collective sense, as evoked by Gargi Bhattacharyya in their book, ‘We, The Heartbroken’. At this time, everyday living and working can be experienced as contradictory, distracted, futile or sometimes even impossible. In response, there is a renewed need to interweave the personal, professional and political; foregrounding what is heartening, heartbreaking and heartful in our practices of youth work and youth research. To consider this, the article departs from standard academic structure, and includes ‘heartfelt’ creative non-fiction alongside more ‘scholarly’ reflections on reading and empirical research. Turbulent times require turbulent thinking (and turbulent writing, perhaps) to engage with the personal and political, emotional and material, local and global, as a contribution to social change and transformation.