Youthsites Histories of Creativity, Care, and Learning in the City

This book is an original study of the youth organizations in London, Toronto, and Vancouver that offer creative and arts programs mainly to youth from diverse and socially marginalized backgrounds. It describes a sector that is often not recognized, organizations that don't like being institutionalized, forms of education that exist outside the mainstream, types of aesthetic expression that often go unrecognized, and unusual learning and cultural opportunities for socially marginalized young people. Rooted in the history of community arts movements from the 1970s, Youthsites, or the non-formal youth arts learning sector, is now part of cities around the world.

Technological change, shifts in educational discourses, changes in policy rhetorics, including a turn away from traditional public institutions and a decline in funding of formal public schooling have all impacted the growth of youth arts organizations. Yet there are to date no systematic studies of the history, structure, and development of this sector. Youthsites: Histories of Creativity, Care, and Learning in the City fills this gap and is the first book to develop an internationally comparative, evidence-based, structural analysis of the development of the youth arts sector. Based on an original 4-year study examining the history, priorities, and tensions within this sector between 1995 and 2015, Youthsites explores the organizations and people who are helping young people to become creators, citizens, or just themselves in times of austerity, crisis, and change.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Stuart R. Poyntz is Director of the Centre for Community Engaged Research and Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. He was President of the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People from 2012-2017.

Julian Sefton-Green is Professor of New Media Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has published 15 books, including recent contributions such as The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age (New York University Press, 2016), Learning Identities, Education and Community: Young Lives in the Cosmopolitan City (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Learning Beyond the School: International Perspectives on the Schooled Society (Routledge, 2018).

Heather Fitzsimmons Frey is an Assistant Professor of Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.