She also employs various strategies to keep herself safe from sexual predators when she is using or acquiringĪround 2 million youth experience homelessness each year, and LGBTQ youth are estimated to make up at least 40 percent of the population of youth experiencing homelessness in the United States, despite being about 5-8 percent of the U.S. Ironically, she hides her drug use and her risky homeless behaviours (such as sleeping in the streets) from youth services providers in order to maintain her eligibility for this kind of work and to serve as a " good role model " for other youths. Tara is a bright, articulate, and vocal advocate for safe injection drug use and harm reduction, and was given a position in a youth drop-in centre as a peer support worker because of her experience and her ability to communicate her insights. Their daily routine consists of making $20 a day (in several different legal and illegal ways) to acquire the drugs they need to maintain their usage. Tara explains that her current boyfriend whom she lives with on the streets introduced her to injection drugs. She made a gradual, more permanent move to the streets after her mother was no longer able to care for her and her father was too abusive to live with. Tara shuffled into and out of emergency shelters, foster homes, and family shelters after her parents' separation a few years ago. Tara is sixteen years of age and states that she is a responsible injection drug user. I argue that bridging subjectivity, situated ethics, and anti-oppressive research practices may provide meaningful ways to address these misgivings. I propose ways in which I could have better reflected upon, and negotiated, these issues in my doctoral project as lessons for future researchers, in particular, practitioner-researchers. Specifically, I describe my lack of acumen related to positionality and subjectivity and to asymetrical power dynamics. In this article, I explore my own attempts, as a social work practitioner and budding researcher, to engage in research that aimed at destabilizing dominant discourses of homeless youth and privileging homeless youths' diverse articulations of risk in their day-today lives. Largely left out of dominant discourses are youths' own voices, perceptions, and experiences relative to their individual efforts to engage in, confront, and negotiate the various risks associated with street life. Deemed to be at risk and vulnerable to a range of dangers related to living on the street as well as risky due to their delinquent behaviours, homeless youth tend to be reduced to narrow conceptualizations bereft of complexity, variability, or respect for individual agency. Manuscripts involving qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods are welcome to be submitted, as are papers grounded in one or more theoretical orientations, or those that are not based on any formal theory.įocuses on social work practice with children, adolescents, and their familiesAddresses current issues drawn from theory, direct practice, research, and social policyExamines problems affecting specific populations in special settings It has an SJR impact factor of 0,487.Risk pervades contemporary discourses surrounding and describing homeless youth. Appropriate fields of practice include interpersonal practice, small groups, families, organizations, communities, policy practice, nationally-oriented work, and international studies. CASW welcomes a range of scholarly contributions focused on youth, including theoretical papers, narrative case studies, historical analyses, traditional reviews of the literature, descriptive studies, single-system research designs, correlational investigations, methodological works, pre-experimental, quasi-experimental and experimental evaluations, meta-analyses and systematic reviews. The range of topics includes problems affecting a variety of specific populations in special settings. The journal addresses current issues in the field of social work drawn from theory, direct practice, research, and social policy. The journal features original articles that focus on social work practice with children, adolescents, and their families. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal (CASW) has now been accepted to the SSCI!
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