Alison Baker – författare

This book foregrounds the provision of education for young people who have been remanded or sentenced into custody. Both international conventions and national legislation and guidelines in many countries point to the right of children and young people to access education while they are incarcerated. Moreover, education is often seen as an important protective and ‘rehabilitative’ factor. However, the conditions associated with incarceration generate particular challenges for enabling participation in education. Bridging the fields of education and youth justice, this book offers a social justice analysis through the lens of ‘participatory parity’, the book brings together rare interviews with staff and young people in youth justice settings in Australia, secondary data from these sites, a suite of pertinent and frank reports, and international scholarship. Drawing on this rich set of material, the book demonstrates not only the challenges but also the possibilities for education as a conduit for social justice in custodial youth justice. The book will be of immediate relevance to governments and youth justice staff for meaningfully meeting their obligation of enabling children and young people in custody to benefit from education; and of interest to scholars and researchers in education, youth work and criminology. 

This book bridges the fields of critical youth studies, community psychology, and sociology to offer a transdisciplinary analysis of youth voice, participation, and activism, as well as of creative and inclusive knowledge-making practices. Presented in three parts, the book traces our journey of praxis as we documented the narratives and testimonies of young people and then mobilised this knowledge to co-imagine and co-create a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) collective aimed at fostering connection and healing during the stringent lockdowns of 2020 in Victoria, Australia. Community building and art-making became central to memorialising their experiences of grief and loss, whilst also opening up new ways of seeing, being and doing. With no end in sight to our current coalescence of crises, this book serves as an invitation to those working alongside young people to consider what we must carry with us if we are to reimagine and remake our world.