This is a book about the tensions, pleasures and confusions that lie behind the rhetoric of ‘partnership’. Specifically, this text looks at the partnership working between youth organisations and galleries, and the unique characteristics of these relationships. Partnership is a term so heavily inscribed across funding applications, within programmes, and throughout public sector work, that its very utterance often sends eyes rolling. And yet as human beings, we also instinctively gravitate towards partnerships. In work, play and leisure, we have a natural impulse to cooperate and collaborate (Sennett, 2013). And digital communication has given us new platforms to work together beyond conventional physical boundaries (Brown, 2012). Yet invariably the notion of partnership has become tainted and dulled by its overuse in policy directives, funding literature and corporate rhetoric. Those who have worked on cross-organisational partnerships know them to be hard work and full of complex power dynamics (Isaacs, 2004; Miessen, 2010). This is a book that seeks to unravel that complexity, using theoretical tools and stories of practice.

Workers in the youth and visual art sectors are particularly familiar with the dominant discourse of partnership (Douglas, 2009). They are also often deeply passionate about working with others in creative, democratic ways. But while there is a long history of cross-organisational work between galleries and youth services, relationships are frequently short-lived or troubled by different issues—such as the retention of marginalised young people. The stakes are exceptionally high in this area of work. If a partnership gets derailed, the hard-earned trust between a youth worker and young person might be at risk. A young person who has been let down countless times in their life may end up feeling disappointed, disempowered or perhaps worse—abandoned and excluded. But if a partnership is successful, a young person might gain new access to enriching cultural experiences that motivates a life-long engagement with the arts, or that changes their worldview, or that enables their own creativity and confidence to thrive. As I have witnessed first-hand on multiple occasions, a young person might develop a relationship with a cultural institution that is so personally significant that the institution becomes their “home” or sanctuary.

Youth and arts organisations and practitioners also stand to gain and lose a great deal from partnership working. A problematic relationship may consume precious time and waste organisational resources. It can damage professional confidence, exacerbate inequalities or tarnish a practitioner’s perceptions of art practice or youth work. But a meaningful partnership can invigorate, inform and expand practice. Organisations and workers can exchange knowledge and share experiences of working with young people, youth cultures, the institutional visual arts and practicing artists. In some instances, this type of work has the potential to change the nature of organisations and push practice forward into new, innovative spaces.

Drawing and expanding on the findings of a four-year PhD and parallel evaluation work since 2013, this book offers a framework for understanding the challenges that frustrate partners, and raises issues that often go under-discussed when practitioners and young people from different backgrounds and sectors work together. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s connected concepts of ‘habitus’, ‘capitals’ and ‘fields’, this framework outlines the factors that consciously or unconsciously guide individuals’ actions when working with others. Questions around why people end up working or socialising in a particular field, and why they might experience discomfort when engaging with other fields may seem basic, but they are fundamental to understanding where conflict or difficulty originates. Bourdieu’s theory of fields encourages detailed analysis of the histories, traditions and cultures of different professional fields, so it is possible to identify what types of social and educational capital are valued within them. This book presents insights into the nuances and journeys of youth work and gallery education, and the professional identities of the youth worker and gallery practitioner. One aspiration of this project is to support practitioners in either field to be better informed about their partners—their needs, strengths, values, internal conflicts and the logic that drives the way they work.

The youth and gallery practice discussed throughout this book is limited to the UK context (England and Wales in particular). However, the learning and messages about partnership working are relevant to practitioners and researchers operating internationally. The political and economic conditions affecting practice in the UK are felt to varying degrees across Europe and further afield (Alldred et al., 2018). The cultures and policies of neoliberalism and the effects of austerity have led to widespread changes and cuts across the public sector. In the last decade in the UK, funding reductions, youth centre closures and job losses have consistently threatened youth work as a professional field (UNISON, 2018). Meanwhile the boundaries of ‘gallery education’ have been tested over the past decade as participatory work has in many cases moved from being confined to specific departments to being at the centre of cultural institutions’ work (Matarasso, 2019). These shifts in institutional practice are by no means restricted to the UK, but are part of a broader pattern of curatorial engagement with collaboration and social action across the contemporary art world (Byrne et al., 2018). The arguments made in this publication should therefore speak to both UK-based readers, and an international audience.

This is also a time when the global labour market and workforce is dramatically changing. The concept of the ‘multi-hyphen’ career suggests that the traditional pathway of training and remaining a specialist in one field is becoming outdated (Gannon, 2018). Partly driven by job insecurity and partly motivated by new technologies and the proliferation of more flexible ways of working, greater numbers of people are diversifying their skills and adopting composite professional identities. Rather than carve out a career for life in a single sector, this type of new professional identity demands that the (often self-employed) worker operate seamlessly across different sectors. With these conditions in mind, this book is orientated towards practitioners who are rooted in either youth work or in gallery education, as well as those who are active across and between these fields of practice, including artists, evaluators and facilitators.

Another ambition of this book is to lay bare (in ethnographic detail) the fundamental inequalities and power imbalances underpinning partnership work between galleries, youth organisations and young people. By mapping out the policy histories of gallery education and youth work in the UK, it is possible to identify how galleries have benefitted from a greater affordance of agency and autonomy than youth organisations. Unequal distributions of power are shown to have an effect on every relationship in a partnership—at organisational and human levels. By exploring the expectations of peer-led programming and partnership projects involving cultural institutions, I highlight instances of what Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic violence’ in these relationships. Symbolic violence is not an overt violence but a subtle, often completely unacknowledged or well-intentioned set of forces that can make individuals (who lack specific forms of knowledge and privilege) feel inadequate and out of place. In the context of gallery/youth organisation partnerships, there is typically an orchestrated encounter between young people who have experienced social disadvantage and an art institution that is symbolically wealthy, and that is populated by predominantly white middle class audiences, behavioural codes and cultural references. Projects or events are sometimes set up in a way that unintentionally alienates (particularly working class) young people, whose own cultures and knowledges may not be represented or valued.

The examples of practice and interviews cited in this book offer an account of how this symbolic violence affects youth workers and young people and why gallery projects often struggle to enable the long-term independent engagement of marginalised young people in their wider programmes. At the centre of these examples is the thorny issue of how different communities interpret culture and creativity. Differing tastes, differing experiences of art education and differing levels of creative confidence are all signifiers of social disparities, but they are also factors that tend not to be discussed at the onset of a partnership. Throughout this text, I present evidence of the challenges involved in partnership development and suggest ways for practitioners and young people to get to know one another’s worlds in advance of project work. By creating opportunities for acknowledging difference and building mutual respect, I argue that partners and organisations can learn to understand and value different types of cultural capital, which can promote diversity and spread agency within a partnership.

Despite the challenging outlook, this book is written from a place of optimism about the ongoing potential for the youth and visual art sectors to work together in meaningful, inclusive ways. While the situation for open access youth work is bleak, the arts sector is one area where youth and community engagement is growing in importance and where creative, critical and democratic relationships with young people are (at least in theory) prioritised. During the time the research for this book was in progress (between 2013 and 2019), there was also a popular explosion of conversation across social and traditional media around structural racism, the class divide and intersectionality—in other words the intersecting oppressions experienced by marginalised communities (Mckenzie, 2015; Hanley, 2016; Eddo-Lodge, 2017). The call to “check your privilege” became widely mobilised online (Freeman, 2013) and a new generation of young c...