Young People Making a Life

Researching and writing about young people when you have been a practising youth worker can be a risky business. You are open to accusations from the field of being a poacher-turned-gamekeeper and from academia for staying, rather than going, "native".

There are weaknesses attached to such transitions but there are also enormous strengths: a real sensitivity for the focus of enquiry, a capacity to draw out the humanity and feelings from the more dispassionate research, and - crucially - the possibility of linking the personal and local story to much wider theoretical and political debates.

Ani Wierenga falls firmly into the latter camp. Though it was disillusionment with youth work practice that led her into academia, this book reflects her deep commitment to the young people with whom she forged contact as a practitioner in the early 1990s. In the middle of the decade, as she puts it, she withdrew from youth work to do some thinking and some listening. That is what she has been doing ever since and this powerful book is a result. It may be about Myrtle Vale, a small rural community in Tasmania, but it is also about rural young people from all over the world, whose roots, traditions, aspirations and prospects are breaking down.

This book is all about how young people respond to this. In particular, it is about the resources at their disposal (or the lack of them) that influence how they might and can respond. There are, as Wierenga puts it, "interwoven layers of resource", both practical and interpersonal, but whether it is family, friends, school or those in the wider community (including youth workers), the question of trust in these relationships is paramount.

Young people cannot wait for research findings or policy interventions. They have to make a life, and they do so in myriad ways. This is what Wierenga, who followed "her" young people for a decade or so, speaks to with both the proximity of the youth worker and the distance of the academic.