Flemish youth work is a difficult thing to introduce. On one hand, it is an incredibly vast and well-respected form of social work in Flanders, with recent numbers suggesting around 60% of Flemish youths have taken part in youth work in 2023 (Lagaert et al., 2024). On the other hand, youth work in Flanders is very difficult to define, as it has a wide variety of methods, participants, resources, and goals depending on which organization you are speaking about. In spite of this diversity, Flemish youth work, in research and policy discussions, is often discussed as a very abstract and instrumental practice that can be used to “get youths on the right path” (Coussée, 2006; Van de Walle, 2011). Not only has this meant, historically, that youth work in Flanders is often imagined to fulfill policy-goals, – and indeed policy makers argue that youth work should be instrumentalized to fulfill policy goals – but this abstracted and instrumental discourse has lead research to ignore the concrete daily realities and practices of Flemish youth work. Furthermore, this ignorance has been mostly been expressed as a lack of care for all non-youth actors that make up youth work, including youth workers themselves, but also the materials that make up youth work practices (Van de Walle, 2011; Coussée & Nolf, 2012).

Based on a long-term research project in Flemish youth work from November 2021 until Januari 2025, this paper argues that youths together with other youth work actors, both human and nonhuman, constitute a specific educational environment in youth work practice. The core of this practice lies in the fact that youth workers and youths, and just youths amongst themselves, work together on specific activities. In organising festivals, running a bar, or simply creating a hangout space, youth work practices resist being coopted into market-driven or youth service discourses that have colonial and elitist connotations (see: Baldridge, 2020; Torenbosch, 2024; Torenbosch et al., 2024). Ultimately, this paper argues that a specific kind of imagination becomes visible in the moments in which this resistance is enacted in Flemish youth work practices. Importantly, this imagination resists the current instrumentalization of both labour and youth work, that occurs in Flanders and throughout Europe and the rest of the world (Baldridge, 2020; Torenbosch et al., 2024).

To make this argument, this paper closely examines two youth houses in Belgium: a youth house in Molenbeek situated in a marginalised area in Brussels which is subject to islamophobia and  high numbers of youth delinquency and unemployment, and a youth house in Lokeren (Flanders) that works specifically with young refugees and newcomers to Flemish society. Youth houses are a specific Flemish youth work practice, though a reader might compare these with youth or community centres. Importantly, both youth houses discussed in this paper use labour, such as carpentry and construction, as activities to engage youths and as such, they create a specific educational labour environment.

This paper is inspired by two approaches: the first of which is a sociomaterial approach of ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology refers to a kind of research that borrows research methods from ethnography, without claiming to be an ethnography (e.g. Markauskaite, Freebody & Irwin, 2011). That means that the research that is presented in this paper uses ethnographic tools, such as participant observation (both human and nonhuman), interviews, focus groups, and personal research reflections. However, these methods are used to research a specific sociomaterial sensibility. As noted before, in research and policy, the non-youth actors in Flemish youth work have been historically ignored. Thus, inspired by sociomaterial authors (e.g. Barad, 2003; 2007; Kemmis, 2019), this paper works from the sociomaterial argument that ‘all things are what they are –and can only be what they are– in relation to other things’ (DeCuypere & Simons, 2016, p. 31). These things are not only human, but also include the materials and other nonhumans (e.g. plants and animals) that collectively make up specific youth work practices and the meanings in them. Thus, this research, in order to better open up the kind of imagination that is created in youth work practices, maps the various human and nonhuman actors that make up these practices in the first place. Considering the role of imagination in this paper, the second approach used is a sensibility on the radical imagination (based on: Khasnabish & Haiven, 2014; see also: Khasnabish, 2014, 2020). This sensibility, coming from sociomaterial and social justice literature, approaches imagination not as something individuals possess. Rather, radical imagination emerges from sparks between people and nonhumans as they work together in the moment to confront the inequalities, and the injustices of the dominant social order that they encounter in their shared practices (Khasnabish & Haiven, 2015; see also: Ginwright, 2008; Kelley, 2022). The word “radical”, then, does not refer to any specific political movement or orientation. Rather, following the word’s etymology meaning “root”, the word traces imagination to its roots based on the interaction between humans and nonhumans (Scurr & Bowden, 2021). In this sense, the radical imagination does not necessarily show itself in the results of the practice as such, as judging actions directly by their outcome ignores the imaginary force behind them, nor can it be captured by any pre-decided images of what a practice should be doing.

Through the exploration of labour in Flemish youth houses, this paper finds that, within youth work, labour is constructed through continuous and radical invitations by youth work actors, both human and non-human. Therefore, these labour activities are made possible by actors which function, as one youth worker notes, as a ‘constantly outstretched hand’ (12-07-2024). What is imagined through this labour is a different practice of life, in which labour is not seen as an investment to create participants in a labour market, but rather as a constant invitation to take part in a community. Especially in the case of the tools and materials in the youth houses, these are invitations to maintain the community of the youth house as an equal and contributing member of that community. Thus, this labour does not reduce the youths to a target group to be serviced but rather, in inviting work and equality in this way, the “outside” and discriminatory labels placed on youths are temporarily suspended through labour activities. This allows youths to experience an environment in which they are equal to anyone else, but importantly, also an environment to which they can contribute and be valued for their contribution. Thus, by working with youths, youth work becomes ‘a practice of living – another frame of life’ (24-01-2025). What ultimately lies at the root of these invitations is a radical care for the place that the youth work actors maintain together. It is this maintenance that resists the instrumentalization of youth work, in favour of creating environments in which youths can not only simply be, but imagine and experience what it means to work and live differently than is made possible for them in a hostile society outside the youth house.

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