Disrupting Colonial and Neoliberal Logics: Rethinking Inclusion for Racialized Youth in Ontario’s Youth Work Sector

Abstract

Abstract Guided by Foucauldian governmentality and critical race theory (CRT), this study undertakes a genealogical analysis of the knowledge frameworks and practices that govern the youth work sector in its efforts to include and support racialized youth. Youth work is often framed through progressive social justice commitments; this study argues that reliance on liberal social justice frameworks and expert scientific knowledges constrain these efforts within enduring settler colonial and neoliberal logics. The genealogy examines key youth policy and strategy texts in Ontario from 1992 to 2019, complemented by interviews with sector actors, to interrogate the systems of power, rationalities, and discourses that organize youth inclusion. The findings demonstrate that Western liberalism’s racialized underpinnings remain obscured yet operative within the youth work sector, authorizing forms of biopolitical governance over racialized youth despite claims of equity and inclusion. Drawing on Stoler’s (2011) concept of colonial aphasia, this obfuscation is understood as a dissonant process through which colonial relations of power are displaced and rendered unintelligible through attachments to liberal social justice frameworks. Strategies related to space, public health, managerialism, youth development, and youth participation are shown to reproduce neoliberal subjectivities while simultaneously veiling Canada’s ongoing colonial governance. At the same time, the study identifies emergent forms of counter-knowledge and critique that disrupt sanitized narratives of inclusion and gesture toward alternative possibilities.