The Edges of Belonging: Youth Work, Participation, and Everyday Resistance in the Gaps of Policy

Abstract

This article explores youth work as a form of everyday resistance and relational care that emerges in the cracks of policy and provision. Drawing on practice-based experience in a grassroots youth project in Glasgow and doctoral research using photovoice methods, it considers how young people experiencing structural violence through poverty, criminalisation, housing precarity, and exclusion co-create alternative forms of support and belonging outside formal systems. These young people are often described as ‘hard to reach’, yet their daily acts of resilience, refusal, and mutual care reveal complex survival strategies and political agency. This article argues that informal, care-based youth work does not simply supplement statutory services but actively contests dominant discourses of resilience, participation, and wellbeing. Through a first-person, reflective narrative, I explore how small acts form a radical practice of care rooted in solidarity, not service logic. This survival work frequently falls outside official outcome frameworks but is essential to the relational trust that underpins meaningful youth work. I critique tokenistic models of youth participation and argue for reframing wellbeing as collective, structural, and co-produced. In doing so, the article contributes to theorisations of radical youth work, affective labour, and ethics of care. It calls for greater recognition of the moral tensions and emotional demands of practice in austerity contexts, and more honest engagement with the political nature of care. It ends by asking: What does it mean to practice belonging in a world that so often denies it?