Abstract

This short video focuses on emancipatory approaches to youth engagement. Evoking ideas of freedom, release, and liberation, the workshop explored youth engagement as a means to facilitate social change, to improve organizations, and to build healthier communities. Broadening and deepening youth engagement beyond a shift from youth as objects to subjects necessarily entails youth workers and educators grappling with the significance of engaging in respectful and transformative youth-adult relationships. In taking up this agenda, youth and adults collaboratively explored opportunities and obstacles, and made recommendations for extending youth engagement beyond a mere trend or project, to constitute a value system that underlies practice.