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The Child and Youth Care in Action VI Conference — Moving Through Trails and Trials Toward Community Wellness took place April 25–27, 2019 at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. Working from the position of trying to inhabit the space of a good relative, all conference preparations and work, all details, protocols, and calls to community were guided by the desire to achieve optimal and positive outcomes. From this location we are very grateful to provide this special conference edition of the International Journal of Child, Youth and Families Studies.

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What does it mean to be an ally? More specifically, what does it mean to do the work of allyship in support of Black young people and families? As educators, researchers, and practitioners in the child and youth care field, we seek to initiate a conversation pertaining to the epistemological make-up of child and youth care practice and the movement towards persistent and intentional solidarity work as a framework for cross-racial engagement. Through a series of critical questions, this paper seeks to deconstruct the taken-for-granted practices of White Eurocentric allyship in favour of a new vision for the future of solidarity work with African-descended children, youth, and their communities.

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This article is based on a plenary held during the Child & Youth Care in Action VI Conference: Moving Through Trails and Trials Toward Community Wellness, held in Victoria, British Columbia in April 2019. It explores how we can re-imagine child and youth care practice with African Canadian youth. This emerging paradigm aligns with child and youth care politicized praxis as well as trauma-informed and strengths-based approaches in the field’s literature. We highlight the importance of mobilizing critical and transformative theoretical frameworks along with an Africentric worldview to substantially support youth of African descent with a strengths-based approach. Moreover, the protective role of Black-affirming spaces is developed and articulated.

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As three white educators working in three different post-secondary contexts, teaching child and youth care (CYC) to diverse undergraduate students, we are interested in exploring the ethical, political, and pedagogical challenges and opportunities of creating learning spaces that can support concrete actions towards decolonizing praxis, social justice, and collective ethics. In order to support each other’s developing praxis, we have recently begun meeting monthly to explore various questions and tensions that exist for us in this work. These meetings have been deeply generative for us in that they have produced a sense of solidary and accountability to each other and our developing pedagogies. This paper attempts to capture some of this experience by sharing three perspectives reflective of the challenges and successes each of us have experienced in our respective institutions.

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Building on queer theory, on formative and current discourses of child and youth care (CYC), and on feminist and other ethics of care theorizing, this paper applies queer analytics to CYC by considering how desire, identity, sexuality, theory, and politics may be taken up within CYC.

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This article explores the popularization of gender reveal parties and considers what they can tell us about current societal expectations around gender, parenthood, and consumption. Gender reveal parties are events in which expectant parents reveal, or even learn, the sex of the child-to-be through a surprise display of something pink or blue, typically using innocuous means such as confetti, balloons, or a coloured cake. However, methods for revealing fetal sex have become increasingly bizarre and dangerous, involving firearms, car fires, and, in at least one case, an alligator. This article examines digital media depictions of gender reveal parties and their aftermath; discusses sexing technologies and diversity in biological sex and gender; looks critically at how capitalism and the White neoliberal state have constructed the gender reveal party as a performative event for parents-to-be; and explores the physical and affective violence done to individuals, families, and the natural environment by gender reveal parties.

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This article explores the complexities of settler relations within the context of an academic conference hosted by Indigenous hosts and inclusive of Indigenous ceremony and content. The authors explore a range of questions related to their settler identities as participants in the conference. How are we as settlers to engage in a conference entitled “CYC in Action”, held at an institution constructed on Indigenous land, and dedicated to the promulgation of Western thought and culture? How are we to encounter the ghosts of those Indigenous peoples destroyed and removed from this very geography? How are we to be positioned in relation to our Indigenous colleagues who are reclaiming fragments of this colonized space through ceremony, buildings, and the introduction of sacred objects and totems? Should we adopt the studied neutrality of scholars, the moral high ground of activists, or the inclusive posture of the “good” settler? Do we find ways to be comfortable in the space? Is it an option to seek to be comfortable? Is our “Whiteness” as settlers our passport to enter Indigenous space and claim a right to be there as “friends”? Under the contested relation of a conference taking place on stolen lands that includes both the thieves and the survivors of the theft, who is the host and who determines the conditions of inclusion?