Youthsites: Histories of Creativity, Care, and Learning in the City

This book explores the youth organizations in London, Toronto, and Vancouver that offer creative and arts programs to marginalized youth, providing an evidence-based structural analysis of the development of the youth arts sector. It highlights the importance of these organizations in helping young people become creators, citizens, and themselves in times of austerity, crisis, and change.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 12 May 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

This book is a groundbreaking exploration of youth organizations in London, Toronto, and Vancouver that provide creative and arts programs primarily to youth from diverse and socially marginalized backgrounds. It delves into a sector that is often overlooked, organizations that resist institutionalization, alternative forms of education that exist outside the mainstream, underappreciated aesthetic expressions, and unique learning and cultural opportunities for socially marginalized young people. Rooted in the history of community arts movements from the 1970s, Youthsites, or the non-formal youth arts learning sector, has now become a global phenomenon. Technological change, shifts in educational discourses, changes in policy rhetorics, including a shift away from traditional public institutions and a decline in funding for formal public schooling, have all played a significant role in the growth of youth arts organizations. However, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies that examine the history, structure, and development of this sector in a systematic manner. Youthsites: Histories of Creativity, Care, and Learning in the City aims to fill this gap and is the first book to offer an internationally comparative, evidence-based, structural analysis of the development of the youth arts sector. Drawing upon education from an original 4-year study that examined the history, priorities, and tensions within this sector between 1995 and 2015, Youthsites explores the organizations and individuals who are empowering young people to become creators, citizens, or simply themselves in times of austerity, crisis, and change. This open-access title is available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, making it freely accessible to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Weight: 510g
Dimension: 160 x 243 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197555491