In Search of Reflexive Approaches to Risk in Residential Youth Care: The Critical Potential of a ‘Rhetoric of Risk’

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of critical social work research that calls for alternative and more reflexive approaches to dealing with ‘risk’ in the domain of child protection and welfare. This paper responds to this call by proposing rhetorical studies as a fruitful theoretical and methodological perspective to examine the constructed, contested and discursive nature of risk and risk‐based professional practice in youth care. Our contribution is based on a qualitative study of how risk rhetorically operates in a residential youth care facility in Flanders (Belgium). Building on the method of rhetorical fieldwork and additional focus groups with practitioners, we examine the constitutive and persuasive functions of risk discourse as well as potential instances of ‘speaking back’ against dominant risk discourses. Our analysis reveals three main findings: (1) the constitution of ambiguous youth as/at risk identities, (2) risk as a procedural, spatial and institutional construct and (3) reflexive re‐constructions of risk. Given that even more reflexive professional approaches in our data remain largely structured around the notion of ‘risk (calculation)’, we discuss what rhetoric can offer in the challenge of developing reflexive practices that move beyond risk and/or invite rather than avoid risk and uncertainty in youth care.