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This article explores the complexities of settler relations within the context of an academic conference hosted by Indigenous hosts and inclusive of Indigenous ceremony and content. The authors explore a range of questions related to their settler identities as participants in the conference. How are we as settlers to engage in a conference entitled “CYC in Action”, held at an institution constructed on Indigenous land, and dedicated to the promulgation of Western thought and culture? How are we to encounter the ghosts of those Indigenous peoples destroyed and removed from this very geography? How are we to be positioned in relation to our Indigenous colleagues who are reclaiming fragments of this colonized space through ceremony, buildings, and the introduction of sacred objects and totems? Should we adopt the studied neutrality of scholars, the moral high ground of activists, or the inclusive posture of the “good” settler? Do we find ways to be comfortable in the space? Is it an option to seek to be comfortable? Is our “Whiteness” as settlers our passport to enter Indigenous space and claim a right to be there as “friends”? Under the contested relation of a conference taking place on stolen lands that includes both the thieves and the survivors of the theft, who is the host and who determines the conditions of inclusion?

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the question of what we do and why we do it as CYC workers cannot be ethically separated from the lived suffering, social and cultural marginalization, and direct oppression of the young people with whom we engage. The fundamental question is whether we accede to the demands of an ever more indifferent and brutalizing system of abstract economic rule, or respond with new forms of value, ways of living and caring for one another. This article will propose a framework of revolutionary love in partial response to these questions. The article will present a theoretical framework for a politics of Child and Youth Care premised in the post-Marxist writings on love and capitalism in the work of Gille Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Antonio Negri.

In the spring of 2011, we had the pleasure of participating in the 3rd Child and Youth Care (CYC) in Action Conference hosted by the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. We were invited by conference chairs Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Jennifer White to participate in a roundtable discussion on the theme of “Conversations on Conversing in Child and Youth Care”. This theme was inspired in part by a recent posting to the CYC-Net listserv, which asked, “Why are people speaking about the field in ways I don’t understand?” Veronica and Jennifer sensed that this question – and the spirited, and at times fractious, discussion that it generated on the listserv – would provide an excellent platform for mutual learning, critique, and reflection. Thus they capitalized on the opportunity to extend a conversation that was already underway, and used the question as a departure point for our roundtable discussion. In this paper, four of us who participated in the roundtable continue this conversation, with each of us probing deeper and pushing further along the themes and ideas we discussed in Victoria. We are not so much responding to any particular questions here, but rather trying to articulate some of our critical reflections on the field as we each are experiencing it. We hope that readers might engage with some of ideas we present in this conversation on their own terms.

This paper will argue that child and youth care is a kind of social diagram that maps the relations of children and adults. It will propose that residential care in particular, when thought of as a machinic social diagram, has certain characteristics that map its functions and capacities. Perhaps the most central of these is the fact that it is an institution that houses people. The paper will trace the roots of residential care to the model of the asylum. It will go on to explore the door or entrance to the asylum/residential care program as a significant component in the production of the machinic social diagram of residential care.

It has been argued that the field of child and youth care is founded on a relationship. Generally, this relationship has been posited as being between two identifiable subjects, a worker and a child or youth. In this paper, I will argue for both a different theoretical framework and significant rethinking of the human individual as the central player in a relation of care. In recent writings on feminist thought, several authors have proposed what they have termed nomadic feminism. This work focuses on developing a theory of the human organism that is no longer centered in a binary with nature. What if we began to see care as an interdependent bringing together of all elements in our environment? What if we began to think consciously about the mingling of human and non-human form as platform for experimentation? What might happen if we broke down the rigid distinctions between staff and youth, neighborhood and agency, male and female, gay and straight, our racial and ethnic identities, not so much to abandon them but so as to open them to experiment, to see what bodies can do together?