Eigenzinnigheid wordt van moment tot moment gemaakt: Praktijken van arbeidspedagogiek in en door het Vlaams jeugdwerk

Youth work is important in Flanders and has historically formed the core of Flemish youth policy. As a result, it has often been instrumentalized in research and policy for various policy, social, and economic goals. What is often overlooked, however, is that youth work requires work. This thesis, therefore, asks what a labour pedagogy of youth work is. In doing so, it moves beyond a functional perspective on both youth work and labour towards an educational one, and across four sections, develops a pedagogical vocabulary to address youth work labour practice. The first section of this thesis (a step in place) further explicates how and why this thesis approached youth work as an educational labour practice. Furthermore, this section articulates both the theoretical and methodological foundations of this thesis: a sociomaterial ontogenesis; an approach through the theory of practice architectures, as inspired by Stephen Kemmis; and an approach of labour theory through the work of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. The second section of this thesis (from the outside looking in) explores how youth work is constructed as an educational practice through an analysis of entrepreneurial education. This reveals a stark reality: respondents never framed youth work as an educational practice in itself. What is at stake, then, is youth work's very existence as an educational practice. The second half of this section, drawing on Jacques Derrida, lays the groundwork for understanding and rethinking youth work as an educational practice through introducing the framework of dangerous supplementarity. The third section of this thesis (moving in and through youth work), by concretely analysing two youth houses in Brussels and Flanders and through the work of Negt and Kluge, as well as Thijs Lijster, finds that youth work practices can resist instrumentalization through their everyday labour. This resistance should not be seen as politically inspired, but as expressing the concerns of a youth work community. Youth work labour offers what this thesis calls "radical invitations" to join this community. Therefore, these invitations create the attraction of youth work: the possibility for youths to commit as imagined, suspended, and counter-public actors sharing in a community. The fourth and final section of this thesis (from the inside stepping out), working from the concept of "thoughtful obstinacy," inspired by Negt and Kluge, finds that through labour, youth work performs a pedagogical gesture: a gesture that not only invites all youth work actors who are present to be part of the community of youth work, regardless of who or what they are or what they are capable of, but also a gesture that is present in the products of that labour, regardless of whether or not someone contributed to the making of that product. In the final chapter of this section, then, this thesis concludes with the articulation of a labour pedagogy, which it calls "a labour pedagogy of the present," nuanced through articulations of community and obstinacy that have emerged as important for youth work labour through its investigations.