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Male child and youth care (CYC) practitioners have rarely been queried about how, or if, they use therapeutic touch (TT) with clients. A significant amount of literature suggests that TT with children and youth can have a positive impact on development, social, emotional and physical wellbeing, and a reduction of aggressive behaviour. However, for male practitioners, using caring touch with clients grows ever more precarious given the increased perception that they are vulnerable to allegations of misconduct and concern that touching clients could be triggering. This narrative inquiry examines how male CYC practitioners make sense of, and engage in, the use of therapeutic touch. Through interviews of five men from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, stories were collected about experiences, values, and personal histories to discover how they were informed about and navigate therapeutic touch with clients. Four themes were identified including, the story of patriarchy, fear, vulnerability and connection. How participants approach their use of therapeutic touch was found to depend on early life experiences, important life events, anecdotal evidence that reinforced fears about using touch, and the current social and political culture such as the #metoo movement. This study also finds that more research, dialogue and training is needed in order for male CYC practitioners to feel safe and competent to use therapeutic touch in a way that is beneficial for clients. / Graduate

This thesis explores and seeks to unsettle the tenacity of white settler privilege in child and youth care (CYC). I first acknowledge the significant leadership of Indigenous and nonwhite activist-scholars to address the ongoing overrepresentation of Indigenous families across colonial systems in which CYC practitioners work. This qualitative study interrogates how white settler CYC practitioners approach issues of colonial and systemic racialized violence targeting Indigenous children, youth, families, and communities. Experienced, politicized frontline practitioners working in the CYC field were invited to examine how they understand, name, reproduce, contest, and struggle with white settler privilege in their practice. My study findings are organized along four themes that attend to systemic issues and the difficulty of challenging dominant white norms and conventions in the CYC field: (1) working in colonial violence and racism; (2) white settler fragility; (3) power and privilege; and (4) troubling allyship in the CYC field. The findings explore the complex individual and collective ethical responsibilities of white settler CYC practitioners and formulate responsive, embodied ethics rooted in solidarity and an anticolonial, antiracist, intersectional praxis. / Graduate / 2020-09-04

This research suggests that Child and Youth Care based reflexive practice contributes to crucial shifts in perspective in both international and national staff in humanitarian contexts, and blurs the line between beneficiaries and practitioners in humanitarian intervention. I maintain that national staff (people hired in country by international organisations) to care for affected populations in humanitarian contexts are a distinct group within a vulnerable population, and with whom integrative, focused efforts in practitioner development must be made. Specifically, this research suggests that an emphasis on reflexive practice with this group in Malawi, Sierra Leone and Sudan facilitated small but crucial increments of human change processes which led to increased responsibility as part of developing practitioner identity and wider social change. All of this is important if effective practice towards targeted beneficiaries and humanitarian protection aims are to be fully realized.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Apr. 21, 2010). "Department of Psychology." Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-43).

This research suggests that Child and Youth Care based reflexive practice contributes to crucial shifts in perspective in both international and national staff in humanitarian contexts, and blurs the line between beneficiaries and practitioners in humanitarian intervention. I maintain that national staff (people hired in country by international organisations) to care for affected populations in humanitarian contexts are a distinct group within a vulnerable population, and with whom integrative, focused efforts in practitioner development must be made. Specifically, this research suggests that an emphasis on reflexive practice with this group in Malawi, Sierra Leone and Sudan facilitated small but crucial increments of human change processes which led to increased responsibility as part of developing practitioner identity and wider social change. All of this is important if effective practice towards targeted beneficiaries and humanitarian protection aims are to be fully realized.

The term care has been part of the CYC title since the University of Victoria School of Child and Youth Care (CYC) opened in the 1970’s, making care a central aspect of CYC’s public and professional identity. The purpose of this research is to explore how care is conceptualized in Foundations of Child and Youth Care Practice; a Canadian textbook widely used in CYC postsecondary education programs. This text introduces future CYC practitioners to important aspects of CYC praxis, such as care. In this research I use the Trace method developed by Selma Sevenhuijsen (2004) to analyze the text. In this analysis, feminist ethics of care acts both as a lens for analyzing care and as a framework for renewing ways of thinking about and doing care in CYC. Key findings show that conceptualizations of care in the text are deeply influenced by neoliberal ‘justice’ frameworks leading to care being framed as always ‘good’ and understood as apolitical, simple and instrumental. This reveals a lack of theorizing about care in the text and suggests that understandings of care are taken for granted and devalued. These conceptualizations of care cannot account for the complexities of the care relationship and do not adequately reflect the lived experience of young people and families. This research advocates for engagement with feminist ethics of care as a starting point for re-imagining care in CYC and offers suggestions for what this might look like. / Graduate

Due to the long duration required to perform manual knowledge entry by human knowledge engineers it is desirable to find methods to automatically acquire knowledge about the world by accessing online information. In this work I examine using the Cyc ontology to guide the creation of Naïve Bayes classifiers to provide knowledge about items described in Wikipedia articles. Given an initial set of Wikipedia articles the system uses the ontology to create positive and negative training sets for the classifiers in each category. The order in which classifiers are generated and used to test articles is also guided by the ontology. The research conducted shows that a system can be created that utilizes statistical text classification methods to extract information from an ad-hoc generated information source like Wikipedia for use in a formal semantic ontology like Cyc. Benefits and limitations of the system are discussed along with future work.

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