Critical Voice Articles

Youth Work and Respect

Critical Voice NI's seminar series continues by creating space for youth workers, activists and researchers to pause, reflect and think critically about youth work in a rapidly changing context.

The second session, facilitated by Dr Siobhán McAlister (QUB), Dr Gail Neill (Ulster University), and RADICAL youth co-researchers Rebecca Deane McCann and Cara Kerlin, explored how children and young people understand and experience respect, and why it matters. Drawing on the ESRC RADICAL research project, the seminar highlighted youth work as a key site of positive practice, inviting practitioners to reflect on the conditions that enable respectful relationships and the risks of undermining them through increasing pressure on outcomes and service delivery.

Alongside the seminar, participants were supported to capture their reflections in writing, helping extend the conversation beyond the room. This briefing brings together key ideas from the presentation and the insights of those who attended.

👉 Read the full briefing here

When Monitoring Becomes Meaning-Making: Youth Work, Belonging and the Politics of Counting.

Read the full response to the first Critical Voice workshop 'Peacebuilding in a Divided Society' by Dr Cathy Bollaert and Joanne Stainsby. Their paper, When Monitoring Becomes Meaning-Making: Youth Work, Belonging and the Politics of Counting, explores how monitoring systems shape identity, participation, and power in peacebuilding practice in Northern Ireland. You can read the full paper here.

Peacebuilding in a divided society

Critical Voice NI has launched a new seminar series creating space for youth workers, activists and researchers to pause, reflect and think critically about youth work in a rapidly changing context. The first session, facilitated by Eliz McArdle and Dr Andy Hamilton (Ulster University), explored peacebuilding in a divided society - inviting practitioners to consider how their own role, perspective and positionality shape the work they do with young people, and how peacebuilding connects to young people’s lives today. Alongside the seminar, participants were supported to capture their reflections in writing, helping extend the conversation beyond the room. This briefing brings together key ideas from the presentation and the insights of those who attended 👉 Read the full briefing here✨

Youth Work Isn’t Optional — It’s the Backbone of communities in NI

By Sean McMullan

Youth work sits at the heart of Northern Ireland’s most challenged communities, often without the protection it needs to survive. Drawing on a journey that began in Ardoyne Youth Club and led to frontline practice and sector leadership, this article by Sean McMullan, explores how youth work is life-changing — and why that matters. As demand grows and practitioners face burnout and uncertainty, this article argues that youth work must be essential for all young people. Sean McMullan is the Senior Youth Worker at New Lodge Youth Centre and a field officer with the Youth Work Alliance. Sean is committed to continuing to develop his skills as a youth worker, graduating with a Masters Degree in Counselling and Therapeutic Communication. He is passionate about developing partnerships across the youth sector and his article seeks to spark conversation and about future of the youth work sector in N. Ireland.

You can read Sean's article here.

Intercultural dialogue in ni - too late to talk?

This article from Prof. Brandon Hamber and Eliz McArdle (UU) explores how young people in Northern Ireland navigate dialogue across increasingly complex identities. It highlights why traditional community-relations labels no longer reflect their lived reality, and how emerging issues are reshaping what meaningful dialogue looks like today. You can read the article here

Responding to ‘Heartwork’

reflections on the Stop the Clock Conference keynote by Dr Tania de St Croix

By Debs Erwin and Gail Neill.

The Stop the Clock Conference was, in part, a celebration of 50 years of Community Youth Work training at Ulster University. It was also about creating space for practitioners and academics to pause and reflect on youth research and practice. Tania’s work reminds us that “love and passion might help youth workers to work in authentic ways despite having to deal with systems which treat people as commodities” (de St Croix, 2013: 48) and her keynote highlighted the radical and transformative possibilities of centring “heart in our work with young people as a form of liberatory and revolutionary practice” (2024).

You can read the full article here

Bringing our hearts and setting our sights on liberation

By Debs Erwin.

Coming off the back of Dr Tania de St Croix’s ‘heart-full’ exposition of youth work and what it means to bring our whole selves to our work – both in terms of the gains and the losses, the successes and the disappointments, the clarity of purpose and the turbulence, the liberation and the oppression, the joy and the cost – that moment to be enjoying each other’s company, to let our hair down and shake it all out, to celebrate – all of that meant something. I now understand why ecstatic dance is a thing, because we need those kinds of moments, they may be few and far between, but they act as fuel, a binding agent, a chance to be more fully present, to reconnect with ourselves and others, to know that we’re part of something bigger, this collegial family full of care and passion that knowledge is used for good. Dancing might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s one way of looking after the heart.

You can read Debs full article here

Towards a nested model of Youth Work.

By Dr Dean Farquhar and Michael McKenna.

The quality of engagement in youth work projects has long been a central concern for practitioners, researchers and policymakers. Much work has been undertaken formulating principles of practice aimed at ensuring appropriate provision and developing evaluative techniques well-suited to measuring impact. Collectively, this work forms a contested conceptual terrain that youth workers must negotiate in order to legitimate their practice. This paper provides a synthesis of aspects of this work that is conceptually robust and practically useful. The paper delineates a practitioners’ ethos, explains its significance and sets out the merits of visualizing the process it aspires to through a nested model. This will equip youth workers with an additional tool to communicate the values-based and process-driven nature of their practice.

The nested model brings together past and present insights into the nature of youth work practice and challenges workers to question taken-for-granted practices.

You can read the full article here

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