This article draws on our practice and research experience in diverse residential settings to examine structural inequities facing children and youth in residential care. Our overall goal is to conceptualize residential care as a site for radical advocacy and social change. We track the impact of minoritization by exploring links between historical structural inequities and the positioning of minoritized groups as being in need of professional intervention. Drawing on queer, anti-racist, Indigenous, postcolonial, and feminist theories, we explore how interplaying processes of racialization, gendering, classing, and sexualization (among others) produce unequal circumstances for some groups of children and youth in residential care. We situate our critique in an analysis of two important structural forces that shape contemporary social services in the West: neoliberalism and neocolonialism. We propose that employing a critical social justice analysis in our engagement with children, youth, families, and communities -and with the systems in which they and we are embedded -can open alternative possibilities for residential care praxis.
<p>This paper explores how a dominant Western ontology rooted in white masculinity and coloniality is embedded in the systems and structures of professional helping in Canada. With a critical, post-colonial feminist analysis, this paper locates Canada’s colonial history as fundamental to ongoing policies and practices in the human services and child and youth care (CYC). The implications of coloniality for CYC suggest that as practitioners we might consciously engage in deconstructing the theories, structures, and values that shape how we practice. Cartographies can assist us in reflexive and deconstructive endeavours. As one maps out the parameters and identifies the existing horizons, one might begin to envision how to then move beyond them. In examining the hegemony of professional helping, the intention is an invitation to work collectively toward models that foreground the social context of problems faced by individuals as well as creative, collective responses. Strategies of an engaged solidarity and a model of socially just, decolonizing praxis offer potential sites for affirmative and transformative social change.</p>
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