Community-based youth work, through which young people are engaged in community-based educational spaces (CBES; e.g., after-school programs, out-of-school time settings, youth organizations, etc.), is celebrated for supporting youth academically, socially, culturally, and politically. However, when these spaces receive attention, their social and political complexity is often overlooked. Studying the complexity of community-based youth work in education requires interrogating the multiple systems of oppression that impact young people’s lives. It also demands examination of the sociopolitical context of youth work, including how race logics and economic pressures inform the construction of CBES and how these forces surface and intersect with market logics and educational policy reform. Building on existing scholarship on community-based youth work and my current research, I present the youthwork paradox, a framework that captures the complexity of the field and its relationship to structural forces and larger systems of oppression. I detail how this paradox does not always lead to dichotomous discourses; rather, CBES can encompass many logics at once. To illuminate the usefulness of this framework for deeper theorizing of community-based youth work, I ground this concept in an empirical case focused on Black youth workers.

中文翻译：

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青年工作悖论：以社区为基础的青年工作在教育研究中的复杂性的一个案例

以社区为基础的青年工作，通过青年人参与以社区为基础的教育空间（CBES；例如，课后计划、课外时间设置、青年组织等），以在学术上支持青年而闻名，在社会、文化和政治上。然而，当这些空间受到关注时，它们的社会和政治复杂性往往被忽视。研究以社区为基础的青年教育工作的复杂性，需要探究影响青年生活的多种压迫制度。它还要求检查青年工作的社会政治背景，包括种族逻辑和经济压力如何影响 CBES 的建设，以及这些力量如何浮现并与市场逻辑和教育政策改革相交。基于现有的基于社区的青年工作奖学金和我目前的研究，我提出了青年工作悖论，这是一个捕捉该领域复杂性及其与结构性力量和更大压迫系统关系​​的框架。我详细说明了这个悖论如何并不总是导致二分论；相反，CBES 可以同时包含许多逻辑。为了阐明这个框架对以社区为基础的青年工作进行更深入的理论化的有用性，我将这个概念建立在一个以黑人青年工人为重点的实证案例中。