[Editoral] Ethics of youth work practice in the twenty-first century: change, challenge and opportunity

Our editorial introduces this Special Issue devoted to exploring the ethics of youth work practice in the twenty-first century. The call for papers for this Special Issue went out in October 2022 with an aim to provide a specific focus on youth work and its shifting relationship with ethics in light of contemporary developments and precarities such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, the intensification of neoliberal policy agendas and concerns about the silencing of youth work values in certain policy contexts including the UK and Ireland (McMahon, 2018; Kiely and Meade, 2018; Coburn and Gormally, 2017). For us, the call sought to move beyond the structural and neo-liberal logic that emphasises codification and standardisation of ethics,to attend to everyday ethical dilemmas and related messiness. Our desire was to interrogate the dominant view surrounding youth work ethics that tends to construct youth as objects of policy intervention and without voice, expression and agency (Wadhwa, 2021). In doing so, our interest was to create a space for re-imagining the ethics of youth work that takes into account the complex multi-layered navigations of specific socio-cultural contexts and involves both dialogue and contestation within its practice.