Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness

‘This work is a fantastic example of ethnographic research and is put together in a way that allows the research to tell a story. A story indeed worth telling.’

Chad Brown, The Journal of Youth Adolescence April 2015

“The case studies in Youth Work present the reader with the complexities and nuances of bureaucratic worlds within social services, exploring an area that has had little academic attention.” Jeff Karabanow, School of Social Work, Dalhousie University

“Youth Work is a valuable contribution to the Canadian literature on homelessness and to institutional ethnographies in general. The book’s key insight is chilling: that the work of these institutions is organized in response to market-logic imperatives of ‘accountability’ and ‘risk management,’ not in response to young people’s immediate needs for food, shelter, safety, and care.” Emily Paradis, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto

“Youth Work offers distinctive new information on the intersection between vulnerable youth and the agencies to which they turn for help, or which try to manage their risky behaviour. Nichols’s data are in-depth and insightful, and she links her work extensively with other relevant institutional ethnographic studies focusing on social service delivery, public management, and policy studies.” Sylvia Hale, Department of Sociology, St Thomas University