On the 26th November we were lucky enough to join forces with In Defence of Youth Work for a workshop exploring young people, celebrity and entrepreneurialism.

We are really excited to announce that we have a new event which you can now register for! The event is a half day workshop in colloboration with In Defence of Youth Work and Kings College London entitled: ‘Exploring young people, celebrity and entrepreneurialism: an event for youth workers and practitioners’  on 26 November 2015 10am-2pm (lunch included) at Kings College, University of London.

The event will explore the findings and resources from the CelebYouth project as well as exploring the work of In Defence of Youth Work and Tania de St Croix.

As part of our Knowledge Transfer programme Akile Ahmet is interviewing key people in the field of youth work, careers education, and schooling to help us make our findings relevant to their work. The first of her interviews was with Tania de St Croix. Tania is a youth worker and a postdoctoral research fellow at King’s College London. Her PhD explored grassroots youth work and this is affected by policy changes and how youth workers respond and resist some of the policy changes that have been happening. Tania is also a member and spokesperson for ‘In Defence of Youth Work’. In this post Akile describes what happened when she went along on Friday 19 June to talk with Tania and discuss some of the project findings.

Our intention for this project is that it has genuine relevence beyond our academic communities; that the findings can be useful to those people working with young people or on issues that affect their lives – from education policymakers to youth and education practitioners.  As a team, we’ve written critically about how we are positioned in relation to the ‘impact agenda’ and the challenges we’ve encountered in communicating our research to the media and policy communities.  However, we have enjoyed and benefited from productive and generative conversations with practitioners who have engaged with the research – from teachers who have supported us on Twitter and came to hear our talk at the Media Education Association, to careers educators who attended our workshop at the CDI conference, and the many practitioners from across teaching, careers and youth work who came along to our interim workshop in October.  One participant at the workshop was Tania de St Croix – a researcher, campaigner and youth worker. In this guest blog post, Tania shares her thoughts on our emerging findings and the challenges in making these meaningful and useful to those working with youth in times that are challenging for both young people and the sector itself.

On 15th October we held an interim workshop in which we shared our findings so far with practitioners drawn from a range of fields, including teaching, youth work, media and careers education. In the lovely surroundings of C4CC and with delicious food provided by Itadaki Zen, we discussed connections between our work and ways that findings from CelebYouth could be made useful for practitioners working with young people. Above you can see photographs of the event taken by Brunel’s Sally Trussler. You can watch videos of our presentations at the event below…