YAW is an independent practice that begins from an understanding of youth work not simply as a type of service, but as an orientation towards relationship, power, participation and young people’s place in the world. It brings that orientation into conversation with artistic practice and with the institutional conditions that shape both.
YAW takes seriously the questions that arise in everyday practice. How is trust built? Who is able to make decisions? How are young people described and understood? What is being called participation, and how much influence does it carry? Does a service widen a young person’s world or narrow what is possible?
Relationships do not happen outside systems. Staffing, time, resources, policies, referral information, recording requirements and organisational decisions all enter the encounter between a practitioner and a young person. YAW is concerned with this whole field: the relationship itself, the conditions shaping it and the cultural assumptions through which young people are understood.
Artistic practice enters this work as more than an activity added to a service or a means of producing visible evidence of engagement. It can create room for attention, uncertainty, experimentation and forms of knowledge that do not fit easily into a support plan or expected outcome. YAW does not, however, treat either art or youth work as automatically liberating. Both require reflection on power, authority, authorship and purpose.
Rather than offering a fixed model, YAW provides a place in which these questions can be explored through practice.
How YAW works
YAW develops through writing, creative projects with young people, facilitation, and reflective and practice-development work with practitioners and institutions. Work is shaped in relation to particular people, places and questions rather than delivered as a predetermined programme.
The Journal is a working space where questions arising from practice are explored in greater depth. The Practice Principles set out the commitments running through YAW without turning them into a formula. Projects brings together current work developed through YAW and selected earlier practice that informs it.
About me
I’m Tanya Judd, an artist and youth work practitioner with more than twenty years’ experience of direct relational work with young people across youth work, homelessness services, supported housing and creative engagement.
My youth work and artistic practice have developed alongside and through one another, although they have often been treated professionally as separate fields. I established YAW to make that relationship explicit, examine its tensions and develop the work with young people, practitioners and institutions.
YAW 