- From Anti-oppressive Practice to Community Cohesion
Kalbir Shukra
The fury of young black people that blazed through the streets of many conurbations in 1981 was reshaping social policy when the first issues of Youth & Policy emerged in 1982. In the wake of the riots, multiculturalism became the new orthodoxy and was the touchstone through which policies affecting minority communities were developed.
More recently multiculturalism has lost its allure. Today the management of ethnically diverse areas is framed by New Labour's cohesion agenda. To accommodate the new framework, many in community and youth work have rejected the anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory practice paradigms that a special edition of Youth & Policy in 1995 was dedicated to understanding.
Whereas an anti-oppressive approach was rooted in the legacy of the 1970s and 80s social movements and focused on interpreting what it could mean for practice, community cohesion is the new touchstone in political, policy and practice debates of how best to shape and maintain a diverse yet acceptable multi-ethnic Britain. Conferences on developing black perspectives have been replaced by conferences on developing Muslim youth work.
This article explores the shift from an anti-oppressive to a community cohesion approach to youth work and considers the challenges to progressive youth work that are posed by this new consensus.
Kalbir Shukra is at Goldsmiths, University of London
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