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Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 |  Vol. 3 (2015) A19 

  

	
  
	
  
 
Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground 

 

 

 

Morten Nissen 
Aarhus University, Denmark  

 
 
 
Abstract 
The article articulates an educational motto – expressed in the title – found in a ‘prototypical narrative’ of social youth 
work carried out by activists in Copenhagen in the 1990s. This way of modeling pedagogical practice is first outlined 
as different from the standardizing approach dominant in science. As a prototypical narrative, the story alternates 
between descriptions and contextualizations of events, theoretical debate, and analytical suggestions. The key idea 
that is unfolded is the ‘critical trans-pedagogy’ of a creation and tinkering of collectives and their participants in 
struggles for recognition, and for the democratic social engineering of a responsive welfare state. It is suggested that 
a singular historical situation spurred this development, both in the practical youth work, and in the theoretical 
traditions with which I could articulate it. This included the post-industrial crisis of labor, the post-cold-war shaking of 
state forms, New Public Management, and the simultaneous expansion and attack on the welfare state. It also 
included how the Foucauldian rethinking of power and the performative turn in the social sciences informed the 
broadly Vygotskian traditions. On these backgrounds, the youth work practices could be approached as generalizing, 
performative reenactments of social problems. The approach is finally spelled out in and around the story of one 
participant, before the concluding remarks return to the issue of how a prototypical narrative deals with theory. 

 

Morten Nissen is professor at the Danish School of Education (Aarhus University) in Copenhagen 
(http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/morten-nissen(32db3c54-6233-4faa-b12a-2e031c1fa8dc).html). His 
research areas are: Theories of subjectivity, collectivity, standards and participation. Practices of 
education, social work, health, prevention, and motivation. Psycho-social issues and approaches and 
methodologies and epistemologies of practice. He currently heads the research program “SUBSTANce – 
Subjects and Standards” (http://substance.ku.dk/english/). In addition, he is attached to the Ostfold 
university college in Fredrikstad, Norway. 

 

��� 

 

  

ISSN: 2325-3290 (online)  



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34  |  Vol. 3 (2015) 
 

A20 

Introduction 

The article represents an elaboration of a lecture given to the “Active Citizens Symposium” at the 
Pontifica Universitate do Sao Paulo, in November 2012. The lecture tried to represent and discuss 
lessons learnt from collaborating with a community of youth workers in Copenhagen in the 1990s. 
“Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground” was a motto of that community that neatly captured 
some key aspects of their form of youth / social work / education, which I came to articulate as a ‘critical 
trans-pedagogy’. Although I recently published a book that unfolds and explains that articulation to an 
international readership (Nissen, 2012a), the question whether and how standards of educational practice 
can be transferred across great spatio-temporal and socio-cultural distances is far from straightforward 
and simple: addressing a Brazilian audience with Danish experience, I was impelled to reconsider it. After 
all, as readers of a journal of Dialogical Pedagogy will appreciate, I was not exactly out to standardize 
education or youth work, urging my Sao Paulo colleagues to buy (into) ‘critical trans-pedagogy®’ as an 
evidence-based program.   

That consideration, however, was not an obstacle or a detour, since the questions of standards 
and standardization are both very contemporary and at the same time at the heart of why it makes sense 
to work with theory1. The globalized empiricism of standard educational methodology sets the scene for a 
renewed meta-scientific and trans-disciplinary reflexivity, once we realize that rejecting standards by 
invoking idiographic situated complexity in a text (or in a lecture two decades and 10.000 km away from 
those situations) is necessarily self-refuting2.  

Accordingly, the issue of standards frames the present argument: Theory is considered in the 
light of standards, that is to say: how practices may be articulated as relevant across important 
differences. We come across that frame as we enter and as we exit this article.  

Still, the narrative form, which derived, first, from the genre of an oral address, is retained at 
several levels in this text. Indeed, it is argued that some narrative structure must be crafted to connect the 
temporalities and tensions of individual, socio-cultural and theoretical developments, and thus to facilitate 
the reflection of the singular historicities of experiences, concepts, and standards. However, this does not 
imply or suggest any immediate common-sense, i.e. everyday sense-making as the counterpart to 
standards.  It is true that narrativity sometimes serves as a vehicle for a critique of ‘abstractions’ and a 
claim to what is then cherished as ‘concrete’, while, in the same moment, veiling its own work of 
abstractions. But instead of this ideological trope, I intend to mobilize narrative as explicitly prototypical, 
as carrying standards, and thus as a way to accentuate the irreverence and dialogicality that is inherent to 
theoretical analyses, and cultivated by their textual form, which cannot help but continuously defer sense 
into meaning, in something like what Fernanda Liberali (2009) calls a ‘creative chain’. 

Forming Persons: Standards and Concrete Universals 

How is the practice of forming persons – pedagogical practice – transferred? Two simple answers 
to this question are dominant: There is a) the blank rejection of standards that I have just rejected (and 
which will not occupy us more in this text), but the general scientific understanding is that b) this is a job 
of abstracting and focusing on specific causal relations by clearing away differences: Ceteris paribus, all 
other things being equal.  

                                                        
1 That whole issue is the topic of a research program I am currently involved with on “SUBSTANce – Subjects and Standards”. See 
http://substance.ku.dk/english (April, 2014). 
2 Derrida (1981) makes this point nicely in his discussion of Plato’s (textual) critique of textuality in Phaedrus – so the issue is not 
only contemporary, but also very old. 



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34  |  Vol. 3 (2015) 
 

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Thus, for instance, the world’s most cited living psychologist, Albert Bandura, staged experiments 
that sought to strip away everything else so that only universal psychological mechanisms appeared; he 
famously proved that people can learn from observing each other (‘social learning’), and that you’ll be 
more motivated to do things if you believe you are able to do them (‘self-efficacy’). Banal as it may look, 
this mock rephrasing comes quite close to the actual scientific findings, precisely because Bandura did 
such a good job of clearing away complexities. For the same reason, they seem to be easily applicable to 
all kinds of situations.  

At a closer look, it takes quite some effort to make these generalized statements in ways that will 
be accepted as relevant and significant, rather than as signs of utter simple-mindedness. As in many 
crafts, the art is to conceal the effort – not the effort of scientific abstraction, but the effort of making it 
relevant. The great effort of standardizing psychology lies in restructuring the practical field of relevance – 
in this case into one where learning is conceivable as an individual’s collecting of information (even when 
it is ‘social’), and where the presumed feasibility of actions appears as stable patterns of that same 
individual’s way of dealing with herself. In many parts of the world, that has taken, and may still take, 
some very hard work. Typically, though, it forms part of the establishment of larger institutional structures, 
and it is rewarded with the authority of expertise that comes from referencing ‘the world’s greatest’ 
psychologist. 

It is a general point about standardization that there is a lot of work of providing the conditions 
necessary for the standard to be relevant and to work; and that, once it is in place, that work is typically 
overlooked, because the standard also directs the gaze (see e.g. Bowker & Star, 1999; Busch, 2011; 
Timmermans & Berg, 2003). Indeed, that is often part of the point in standardization: to allow us to focus 
and forget. In many cases, this is achieved mostly through a material and technological automatization in 
a global division of labor (as with e.g. computers, smartphones and cars); in other cases, it is more of an 
imposition of habits and institutional structures that have to be reaffirmed each time anew (as with e.g. 
forms of pedagogy). All cases, indeed, include both these aspects. Further, in all cases – but more 
obvious and immediately pertinent in the latter type of cases – simplifications are not achieved by 
eliminating differences, since they cannot be removed, but rather by pushing them aside and covering 
them, paradoxically adding to the complexity they appear to reduce. 

It is typically easy to let one’s gaze be directed by the standards of a car, and forget about the 
complexities of carbon emission, health issues etc. But in the case of pedagogical standards – standards 
for the practice of forming persons – the complex ecology of the imposition of the standard remains in 
view in a different way. This makes the choice between a standardizing and a reflexive standpoint 
especially acute: Although institutional power is invested in such standards – as we shall discuss further 
below – they are never quite taken for granted, since pedagogy itself necessarily includes a precarious 
imposition, adoption, and recreation of standards. For this reason, the tradition of conceiving of general 
relevance within the framework of standardization – the scientific ceteris paribus – has never achieved a 
complete hegemony in pedagogy. There is room for an alternative. This alternative does not, of course, 
imply a denial of standards, but a kind of modelling of standards that does not conceal, but includes a 
reflection of their concrete conditions, realizations, and relevance. It creates vulnerable and contestable 
prototypes rather than clear-cut blueprints. It thinks in, and with standards, but, crucially, also about, 
around, and sometimes against them3. 

                                                        
3 This paraphrases and expands Wolf Haug’s characterization of critical theory as thinking about, rather than in, the thought-forms of 
a bourgeois society (Haug, 1977). 



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34  |  Vol. 3 (2015) 
 

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As an example, Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientization (Freire, 1996) models a standard of 
pedagogical practice. But if one looks into Freire’s texts (or secondary texts about them) for simple and 
transferrable cause-effect formula, one does not find any. Freire’s legacy remains bound to his time and 
place. For this reason, one might guess that his texts would be relevant only for specialists in Brazilian 
educational history. But this is, as is well-known, far from true. Rather, they are taken up world-wide as a 
key reference in a critical pedagogy that seeks relevance in conditions that differ widely from Freire’s. 
Parts of this bid for relevance are disputed – as, for instance, the question whether the concept of 
‘empowerment’ in a mostly North American community education should be referred back to Freire’s 
‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, or should rather be described as a form of psychologization of issues of 
power and privilege that Freire would probably detest (see, e.g. Cruikshank, 1999 and below). But, 
precisely since the context of relevance is itself part of the knowledge, that dispute is, too.  

The reason a work like Freire’s can be transferred is not that it is simplified and appears to be 
easily applied. On the contrary, it is that, with all its complexities, it can be seen to address fundamental 
issues. Freire’s pedagogy was revolutionary, not only in a direct political sense, but also in the sense of 
ground-breaking contributions to an ongoing discussion of applied philosophy. Although Freire’s texts, as 
any model must, works with abstractions, they visibly and reflectively add to the complexities of any 
pedagogy by posing the question of how it connects to social transformation in a wider political meaning. 
They pose this question while maintaining that it must be a rich and complex question, in Freire’s Brazil 
as in, for instance, Copenhagen 40 years later. But they also suggest that this troublesome work is worth 
the effort, since it addresses core issues. 

Learning from one of Freire’s favorite philosophers, Hegel, we can call such issues concrete 
universals: Issues that can never quite be abstracted from their time and place, but still useful to learn 
about at other times and places. To learn from them, we have to engage with specifics. The more we 
engage with different specifics, the deeper we can understand the universal concepts. Again and again, 
this movement requires us to reflect on the concepts. As we reflect on their differential referents, this 
implies that we also reflect how they are distinguished from and related to other concepts, as proposed 
and carried by different traditions. For instance, how did conscientization develop from Christian 
conscience and Enlightenment consciousness, and how did it later transform into a psychologized 
empowerment? Thus, to the complexities of reference and relevance are added those of cultural and 
scholarly traditions. In other words, concrete universals are theoretical. They do not easily translate to an 
immediate common sense as do the simplistic and reductionist standardized concepts. That is to say, 
they do not lend themselves to ways of hiding complexities of transfer. To use them, we need time and 
effort to first take them seriously, in their own right, and then time and effort to make them relevant. 

Thus, we need some kind of academia – some kind of school. But this does not mean we need 
the school as we mostly know it – an institution which typically, by not addressing relevance as 
problematic, sanctions the unreflective imposition of standards, and pretends to ignore it. Although it may 
appear paradoxical, empiricism and scholasticism are two sides of the same coin, and conversely, 
theoretical work is closely related to practice and social transformation. Recently, Anna Stetsenko has 
coined the term transformative activist stance for this epistemology of practice (Stetsenko, 2013), which 
originates in the philosophical tradition going from Spinoza through Hegel to Marx, explicitly stated in 
Marx’ Theses on Feuerbach (Marx, 2003, see also Jensen, 1999). Freire was one of the most important 
in a line of pedagogical theorists who drew out the implications of this general epistemology for education: 
working with concrete universals, engaged in transforming fundamental socio-cultural standards and 
conditions, is formative of persons as well as of theories.  



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34  |  Vol. 3 (2015) 
 

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We could say that this work of changing standards, conditions, persons and theories, is basically 
what ’meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground’ means. But spelling out the implications of this 
pedagogy is more than merely exemplifying Freire with Copenhagen social youth work. 

Forming and rethinking collectives 

My collaboration with the experimental social youth workers in Copenhagen took the shape of a 
‘joint venture’ where our different, but ethically allied projects met and exchanged, transforming 
references from their experience and from my theoretical traditions. I did general ethnographic fieldwork, 
interviewed all kinds of participants and stakeholders, and participated in more or less formalized 
discussions; I fed back my analyses in numerous ways, including lectures, webpages, and various other 
genres. Twice, I was formally appointed evaluator on behalf of the State. Overall, I worked to articulate 
the standards of their collective practices by modelling those practices as prototypical, that is, as 
embodying concrete universals4. 

When I engaged with them in 1990, I was soon impressed with their skills in mobilizing and 
organizing. This was not surprising, since many of them, like myself, had experience and schooling from 
organized political work. And of course, if you are trying to do practical experiments in pedagogy, that is a 
good deal of what you will be doing: You must create, maintain, modify, develop etc. not only participants, 
but also what they participate in – arrange meetings, provide venues, establish groups and activities, 
secure funding, decide on names and logos, etc. 

That is not usually considered part of education itself. But in this community, and in our 
discussions, it was deemed crucial. One important reason for this was that, although we shared a 
tradition of political organizing, that tradition was changing. Even before 1989, and even in the most 
militant quarters – such as communists and Maoists – the hierarchical and rationalistic organizational 
traditions were crumbling on the European left, not least through the demise of industrial labor, and the 
rise of the peace, environment, feminist and student movements. Notions of ‘grass-roots’ or ‘flat 
democracy’ were ready at hand, but they were obviously simplistic and did not much address the key 
issues of pedagogical design and development of collectives. 

This set of practical problems matched a problem in the theoretical traditions that I had been 
working with. Contrary to the individualism of the standardized psychology exemplified above with 
Bandura, the cultural-historical psychology, from Lev Vygotsky (1962) and on, was broadly speaking 
collectivist, maintaining that people develop through the appropriation of culture in social interaction. But it 
was not easy to take the step from that psychology to the question of the formation of collectives.  

The social psychology of the time, even in off-mainstream versions, was dominated by the 
agency/structure model that blocked attempts to overcome divisions between disciplines. Thus, regarding 
individuals as social almost certainly implied their more or less smooth fusion into given structures or 
systems, which, in turn, formed part of the reproduction of society5. In the Vygotskian tradition, those 
theorists who were most keen to take up the radical implication that human subjectivity arises through 
participation – rather than mere interaction – were struggling with that functionalism, in different ways and 
with different solutions. Leontiev’s activity theory (Leontiev, 1978) presented a bluntly functionalist 
sociology, from which he tried to shelter subjective agency by insisting that personal sense could not be 
reduced to objective meaning – although he could not quite explain why, since he saw sense as anchored 

                                                        
4 I have unfolded this methodology in Nissen (2009a) and of course in the above-mentioned monograph (Nissen, 2012). 
5 Some theorists – most prominently, at the time, Giddens and Bourdieu – declared agency and structure to be mutually constitutive 
or internally related, but since they could not escape the model, they had to declare that intention over and over. 



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34  |  Vol. 3 (2015) 
 

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in motives that were socially produced. Engeström and his colleagues solved the problem by fusing 
sense into meaning and focusing on ‘activity systems’, hoping instead to avert functionalism by seeking 
out their ‘contradictions’ (Engeström, 1987). Holzkamp (2013) and his followers, by contrast, developed a 
‘subject-science’ by reducing meaning to sense; this increasingly phenomenological approach then 
merged in many ways with Lave and Wenger’s theory of ‘communities of practice’  (1991), most 
characteristically in Dreier’s work (2008). Whereas Engeström ends in functionalism each time he 
proposes an ‘activity system’, Lave (2008) refuses it by denying the ontic reality of collectives as singular 
entities at all (see, on this issue, Nissen, 2011, or 2012, ch. 5).  

This may all appear a quagmire very ‘internal’ to a particular theoretical tradition in psychology. 
But, in fact, these were broader ideological issues as well. The privatization of agency is a cornerstone of 
capitalism, and functionalism is deeply rooted in the constitution of social sciences as practices of social 
regulation that claim political neutrality. Further, as could become clearer as the dust settled on the 
rubbles of the cold war, even the Marxist traditions that tried to overcome just those ideologies, practically 
and theoretically, had severe problems with collectives from the start.  

Through many years of interdisciplinary collaboration, I have learned to wonder about how so 
many Vygotskian and otherwise Marxist psychologists could insist that “society” is vital to understanding 
persons, yet give it so little attention. A part of this could be attributed to divisions between scientific 
disciplines, as mentioned. But it is not only in psychology. Sociology, right from its foundation by 
Durkheim, Tönnies and others, outlined ‘society’ as a strangely fuzzy unit of analysis, sometimes covering 
the entire globe in all its history, at other times only the territories of present nation-states or even smaller 
units. How one ‘society’ was constituted as distinct from another was considered a minor practicality and 
largely ignored. This, in turn, can be seen as a result of sociology’s place within an unchallenged political 
territory6, and the identity of society and politics are of course obscured also by another division of 
disciplines, the border onto political science.  

Of course, we would expect something radically different from a Marxist social theory that was 
trans-disciplinary and allied with projects of socio-political change from the beginning. But it turns out the 
problem is even deeper. Marx himself and his followers would largely think of those projects of socio-
political change as the dissolution of social units, most famously in the Communist Manifesto’s utopia of 
the withering away of the state. This was probably a reaction both to Hegel, for whom the given 
(Prussian) state was the epitome of a concrete-universal collective formation, and to the grim realities 
(largely unaddressed by Hegel) of the ‘night-watch states’ of the time. Societies were formed as distinct 
units, as states, in processes of alienation, in dirty wars that unfailingly served the interests of the 
privileged, even as they presented themselves as embodiments of universals values. The Marxist utopia 
was one of an emancipation of the true substance of society, “the real individuals, their activity and the 
material conditions under which they live” (Marx & Engels, 2000), and this emancipation would finally free 
the universal from the impurities and distortions of its particular and singular formations. From this 
perspective, concrete collective formations were either considered purely instrumental to the higher cause 
of a revolutionary vanguard – as in Lenin’s political theory and practice – or rejected as false and 
oppressive (by an even more revolutionary vanguard – such as the Trotskian opposition). As the Soviet 
Union consolidated itself in a very concrete and bloody state formation, this ‘eschatological’ ideological 
dynamic contributed to the emergent Stalinism (cf. Zizek, 2001). No wonder that Vygotsky and his 
colleagues, although in the early Soviet years eager to contribute to forming the ‘New Man’ of the ‘New 
Society’ (Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004), stepped back from explicitly engaging with the political formation 

                                                        
6 So, for instance, Tönnies declares explicitly on page 1 of his seminal ‘Community and Society’ (Tönnies, 2001) that his theory 
exclusively concerns social relations that are mutually beneficial, that is, both community and society are abstracted from power.   



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34  |  Vol. 3 (2015) 
 

A25 

of collectives and finally accepted the functionalist division of knowledge. Understandable, also, that 
many theoretical reflections on collectivity, after the fall of communism, would be attracted to the idea of a 
truly ‘inoperative community’ (Nancy, 1991), or accept as inescapable the Modern paradox that we can 
only define ourselves as “the community of those without community” (Derrida, 2005).  

In other words, the split in the Vygotskian traditions between functionalist (Engeström) and 
utopian (Lave) collectivity that I found around 1990 was far from accidental. But there were two elements 
of that historical situation which suggested ways toward overcoming it. First, the acute dilemma that the 
political struggle in Western Europe for more democratic forms of welfare state took place at a time when 
this welfare state was under increasing pressure from global neo-liberal deregulation and dismantling. 
This nurtured an appreciation of the concrete state formations that had come out of the political struggles 
of the 20th century, even as those formations were also obviously problematic. It taught (some of) us that 
a successful revolution is one that cultivates the state, not one that tears it down. It also helped to make 
clear the difference (and thus, the dialectics) between the negative and the positive aspects of political 
transformation7.  

Secondly, and in partial contradiction to this, there was the rethinking of power in the increasingly 
influencial Foucauldian tradition in social theory. Although Foucault certainly represented a ‘negativist’ 
ethics – an ethics of ‘refusing what we are’ rather than one of collective construction (even if he does, 
vaguely, open to a positivity of self-creation in his later writings) – his generalization of power to being a 
fundamental and productive expression of the objectification implied in inter-subjectivity provided a way of 
approaching the ‘politics’ of practices that are not defined as political, as well as that of the discourses 
with which they are regulated. This helped to escape the functionalism/utopianism oscillations by making 
it evident that society’s various collectives and their participants are neither cogs in well-greased 
machineries nor innocent and free. It did not provide an approach to how collectives are constituted, let 
alone how this might be conceivable and cultivated as a kind of empowerment, but it pushed toward a 
rethinking of power as a way of approaching it. 

For this, it was necessary to dive even deeper into the theoretical relations of power and 
subjectivity. Foucault’s concept of subjectification could be seen as one development of a tradition of 
theorizing agency and selfhood that goes back to Spinoza and crucially includes Hegel’s theory of the 
emergence of consciousness as the self-consciousness of a subject in a dialectics of recognition (Hegel, 
1977). Theories of recognition have formed a curious side-current, spanning versions of Marxism, 
pragmatism and critical psychoanalysis, but they never much influenced the Vygotskians. Seen from the 
vantage point of recognition, the Foucauldian narrative of the diffusion of sovereign power into societies 
of loosely coupled governmentalities – from which we can pick technologies to build ourselves – appears, 
after all, ideologically affirmative and a continuation of the sociological evasion of politics. Recognition 
provides a much more troublesome and fertile general approach. To be sure, this presupposes a reading 
of recognition which takes off from an epistemology of practice and social transformation.  

In my 2012 book, I suggest the concept of ‘collective’ as a kind of subject: A community whose 
singular existence is no longer accidental, nor simply a function of a shared project, but self-constituted 
and self-conscious, mediated by its precarious relations to other subjects – including, importantly, 
participants – as these relations are formed in and with cultural standards under singular circumstances. 
Recognizing itself as recognized by these others. In the terms of Hegel’s dialectics, it is a singular ‘we’ 
that exists in and for itself as an ‘us’ (Nissen, 2012, ch. 7). The implication is that true empowerment 
involves recognition as participant of recognized collectives. 

                                                        
7 One expression of this is the ‘state and life-mode theory’ developed by Thomas Højrup and colleagues, see (Højrup, 2003) 



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34  |  Vol. 3 (2015) 
 

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Let us return to the pedagogical practices and see how this spells out. 

The Ama’r Total Theater Project 

My community of Copenhagen ‘wild’ social youth workers originated in the middle 1980’s, when a 
small group of students formed a youth work project called the Ama’r Total Theater (ATT)8. They had, as 
mentioned, a background in union work, peace movement, and youth politics, and they knew how to 
mobilize and organize people. Now they wanted to use their know-how to help young people who had 
dropped out of school and faced the high levels of youth unemployment of the time, and who were 
vulnerable to various social problems such as crime and drugs. 

In Denmark, it is not that there are no institutions or that children are not allowed into decent 
schools because they are too poor. We Danes have been luckier than most. By the 1980s, Denmark had 
developed quite far in the direction of a universalist welfare state. To a large extent, schools were tax-paid 
and free and the same for all, as were child care, hospitals, and many other welfare institutions. Youth 
clubs were universal and almost free of charge, established as a crime prevention measure, to help first 
of all those young people who dropped out of schools. But the fact was, as the ATT activists saw it, still 
many young people in Copenhagen City could or would not use these clubs. They were often half-empty, 
and the kids were bored with them and would often vandalize them. They were not very well-equipped (by 
Danish standards), but even the resources they had seemed to be in the wrong place, useless. The 
Ama’r Total Theater activists were not very keen to see themselves as future staff in those places. 

Now, they could finish their training, get jobs there and suggest changes: table football instead of 
leather workshop; computer games instead of basketball; dance instead of sewing etc. And hope for that 
to appeal to young people more than drug dealing; for a time… But they did something else. They 
established the Ama’r Total Theater, in a way that they would later refer to as “meeting youth on neutral 
ground and in movement”.  

The Total Theater was never established as a standard institution. Instead, it had the form of a 
social movement. Grass-root democracy decided everything. No structures existed except the ongoing 
campaign for the next event (no staff, no executive). These events were street theater happenings, 
musicals, festivals, parties etc., culminating in a grand-scale participation in the “Next Stop Soviet” anti-
nuclear movement in 1989, where they went to Moscow and performed a big total theater event.  

Funding, recruitment, targets, and all kinds of resources and defining elements were debated, 
worked and fought for, in a kind of tinkering, from event to event. The concept of tinkering, or ‘bricolage’, 
taken from science and technology studies in the ‘actor network theory’ tradition (e.g. Callon & Law, 1997; 
Latour, 2005; Mol, 2002), conveys how an ongoing process can imply an emergent and heterogenous 
collection of all kinds of elements, e.g. who are we, what are we doing, for which purposes, using which 
tools, in the interest of whom etc. 9 

This was neutral ground, not only because all positions were precarious, at stake, but also 
because one of the most vital resources was always the participation of the young people who were 
otherwise marginalized. Some of the activists of the Total Theater later went on to target even more 
excluded young people, like street kids and drug users, in other communities and projects that I shall 

                                                        
8 Ama’r is a Copenhagen neighborhood. 
9 Note, however, that my use of the concept is itself a tinkering, in the sense that I don’t accept the more general ontological premise 
in the ANT that such a ‘dynamic ontology’ necessarily implies a rejection of more encompassing concepts such as not least those 
that carry the differences between human agency and other kinds of effects. 



Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground  
Morten Nissen 

 
 

 
 

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return to below. Still with the same, or almost the same, basic method, of meeting young people on 
neutral ground and in movement. Without the visible success in mobilizing trouble-making youths 
(delinquents, drug users, gang-members etc.), the ATT activists would not be able to persuade authorities 
and funding bodies that they should be supported. And conversely, without the visible success in securing 
that support, they could not persuade the young people that here was something really powerful going on, 
something that could form their motives and their dreams. 

This was politics and education at once. In a way, this is well-known from most political 
organizations. There is always an issue of leadership, ‘cadre work’ etc., of making sure that newcomers 
can learn and grow. But the difference was that here, the organization deliberately and successfully 
reached out to include the socially excluded, while still doing politics. All through the many shifting 
constellations of their ‘bricolage’, the radical inclusion of the socially excluded as participants was one of 
the main ethical and political values with which they defined who they were. In this, they were different 
from many others who took up the ‘entrepreneurial’, neo-liberal spirit of New Public Management (see Du 
Gay, 2000, Rose, 1999) at the time, and were funded by the state or the EU to organize social 
development projects. These would typically end up either recruiting more resourceful participants, or 
returning to more traditional institutional forms with more rigid divisions between positions (staff / inmate, 
teacher / student etc.). 

Of course, this intention is ubiquitous. We are many who wish to flag a social responsibility and 
blame social exclusion on external forces. But in order to articulate what I came to regard as the 
exceptional inclusive success of the ATT collectives and their successors, it is necessary to go deeper 
into the harsh power dynamics of how each “we” is constituted. The first part of this route we can follow a 
Foucauldian track. 

Foucault’s lesson 

Politics have been traditionally understood as a set of institutions and practices that provide the 
macro structures that in turn give us the foundations, or the overall frameworks for our practices and our 
everyday lives. For instance, educational politics lead to the building and regulation of schools, as a civil 
right and a requirement for post-industrial production. Once these macro structures are in place, the 
politicians can attend to other matters, and the teachers and pupils can begin their peaceful work in 
harmony. In the ideal liberal society, power is only relevant in exceptional and unfortunate instances; with 
Freudian metaphors, we can say that it is repressed and returns as phantasy through Hollywood. 

But Foucault taught us that power and politics are everywhere. His analysis of clinics, prisons and 
mental hospitals gave us crucial keys to how all institutions work, including schools and social work 
projects (Foucault, 1967; 1973; 1997). First of all, these institutions perform a kind of power of 
distribution. People are moved between institutions, and inside institutions, they are moved between 
wards, cells, classes, positions etc. Secondly, this kind of micro-power is based on a more or less 
scientific assessment of individuals. Participants are tested and classified so that they can be put in the 
right positions. Thirdly, this power is often almost invisible and uncontested, since participants mostly do 
what is required in order to achieve or maintain desirable positions. Finally, this implies that their 
subjection to the power of potential exclusion leads people to participate reflexively, or we could say, 
responsibly, in their own normatively governed development.  

So the power mechanism that appears to be external and is typically disregarded, ignored, is in 
reality at the core, crucial to the forming of self-reflexive and ‘responsible’ subjectivity. This takes place 
even in very rich societies in states with a highly developed structure of welfare institutions. One of 



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Foucault’s main points is that this should not be seen as violently repressive and irrational, but rather to 
the contrary, it is economic and productive. This is ‘bio-power’, the power of life – which takes ‘life’ as its 
object, its instrument, and its aim. 

This is where many readers of Foucault (e.g. Dean, 1999) conjure up an image of a total system, 
a smoothly functioning apparatus of subtle power mechanisms that transform all kinds of resistance into 
affirmative self-care. Thus, as I hinted at above, the reception of Freire’s pedagogy as “empowerment” 
into the “war on poverty” in the US in the 1960s can be interpreted as a “will to empower”, a new way of 
subjecting and subjectifying democratic citizens (Cruikshank, 1999), by representing and amplifying those 
parts of the discourse that merged into US liberal traditions and emphasized individual growth. 

This ‘totalizing’ reading of Foucault has come to be dominant, even though Foucault actually 
warned, at the end of his book on Discipline and Punish, that everything is precarious, and behind it all 
“we must hear the distant roar of battle” (Foucault, 1997, p. 308). In fact, Foucault himself never focused 
much on that battle, probably out of a wish to escape from certain restrictive forms of Marxist 
partisanship. So, struggle and antagonism diluted into differences, heterogeneity and paradoxes that 
never did much to challenge the idea of a “system”. Foucault’s main project was to describe the 
machinery, after all, with the roar of the battle quite distant. 

But if we take his warning seriously, we can tune in to the battle cry. We can begin to notice that 
every time an individual is excluded, there is possible alternative which is to turn the gaze the opposite 
way and ask ourselves how we can change the institution, or even build new institutions. And often, we 
should do this because the problem of the excluded is always somehow also a problem for the rest of us: 
a general issue.  

The social problem 

For instance, if some students are too restless to concentrate and be quiet in the classroom, we 
might diagnose them with ADHD and see if we can get a doctor to prescribe some Ritalin. But we might 
also think of such things as: How are their relations to the other students who bully them, and how do 
these relations form part of the way formal and informal collectives interact at the school? What kind of 
problems do they face when they go home, in terms not only of family dynamics, but also of (often 
problematic) relations between the institutions of family and school? And not least, how can we change 
ourselves as school collectives and practices so that they – and, most likely, in the long run, the rest of 
us, too – can better participate (etc. - cf. Kristensen & Mørck, 2014; Mathiassen, 2013; Varenne & 
McDermott, 1998)?  

These lines of questioning and action are generalizing in a sense described by Haug (1999), 
Holzkamp (2013) and others: They reach out to general conditions in a move that is at once 
epistemological and ethical, establishing an approach based on participation, as a larger framework 
within which the singular events and individual actions can be approached. Whenever this generalizing 
alternative is taken up, the political struggle over conditions that had been hidden as premises for 
individuals’ choices and actions comes to the surface. In fact, a good part of the history of the emergence 
of welfare state institutions is a history of that struggle. This has often emerged in the shape of what has 
been called the social problem. When too many individuals have been excluded, they tend to make 
various kinds of trouble and disturb the society of normal people. Something has to be done. This is the 
historical origin of social work, and in many ways, this history is ongoing: Social work is often ‘reinvented’ 
as reactions to social problems that do not quite match existing institutions (see e.g. Philp, 1979, and 
Nissen, 2012, ch.3). The story of the trouble-making youth that the ATT activists could mobilize in 



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Copenhagen in the 1980s is one among countless such ‘reinventions of the wheel’ that characterize 
social work.  

Often, what has been reinvented as social work can be looked back on in a Foucauldian way as a 
gentle kind of policing (as does most famously Donzelot, 1979). But if we tune in to the roar of the battle, 
and remind ourselves to appreciate the historical cultivation of welfare state institutions that came out of 
it, there is a different kind of story to be told. For instance, in Danish and Scandinavian social history, we 
have the story of how youth clubs emerged in the 1950s, at a time of rapid industrialization and 
expanding educational institutions, when many working-class kids had trouble with the often contradictory 
demands of school and industry (much like it is described in Willis, 1977), and when the powerful labor 
organizations were keen to prevent the development of a lumpen-proletariat. Or, how pre-school child 
care institutions were established in the 1960s, when feminists such as my own mother struggled for the 
idea that combining career and family should not be the problem of the individual woman and the 
individual child. Now, more than 90% of Scandinavian children attend pre-school child care, and their 
mothers are all on the labor market.  

This understanding of the welfare state as emergent in response to social problems as these 
have been defined and struggled over has been described as the ‘responsive state’ (Tilly, 1975). When 
the state becomes responsive as the result of political struggle allied with social sciences adopting a 
‘transformative activist stance’, there is a possibility of a democratic version of ‘social engineering’ 
(Nissen, 2009b).  

Not all conditions are available for transformation, of course. In both these latter cases, part of 
what made it possible was a growing economy, a strong labor movement, and a position as a cold war 
front-line state that would make it seem reasonable for the ruling classes and for the US led allies to buy 
loyalty with welfare provisions (Højrup, 2003). This was not quite the situation in the 1980s and 1990s, 
and even far less today. 

Performing History 

Still, the Copenhagen youth workers precisely took up that kind of struggle, facing the social 
problem of unemployed young people and street kids in the 80s and the 90s. But they did not only do 
what historically has been done most often: Fight for the establishment of a specific kind of standardized 
institution to secure the provisions for a particular target group. 

Instead, they made the historical process itself into the principle of their own way of doing youth 
work. The slogan of Holzman & Polk’s book: “History is the Cure!” (1988) captures this version of 
empowerment: ‘Curing’ social problems requires the creation of intensified events or performances where 
people can become participants in relevant historical processes of transformation. Similarly, when the 
ATT activists talked about meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground, they spoke of their 
‘bricolage’ or tinkering practice of continuously forming and shaping ever new events and collectives, 
according to the social issues they proposed to identify, and depending on what and whom they could 
mobilize. 

But, in distinction from Holzman and colleagues who went on to claim that performance in and of 
itself is identical to development and enough to create history (Newman & Holzman, 1996; 1997, see also 
our review in Nissen, Axel, & Bechmann, 1999), the ATT activists and their followers in the subsequent 
years – as I and my colleagues came to articulate their work – took on the challenge of the coincidence of 
social and personal transformation in the creation of collectives in a much wider sense, far beyond the 



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stage. This is why their story can be a general story of collectivity – why they can be modeled as a 
prototype of the general problem of creating collectives and forming participants: This was in fact the kind 
of know-how they developed.  

Yet, it should be noted that this generalizing modeling of their ‘know-how’ could not have been 
done without learning from the ‘performative turn’ in the social sciences. It is not only the case that people 
‘do things with words’ (Austin, 1962), but, more widely, any practice is itself a performance and a 
production (a creation and a display) of ontologies (Mol, 2002). The ‘tinkering’ of elements to form events 
and collectives is crucially an enactment of categories. In itself, this can be reconstructed as implications 
of a Hegelian-Marxist epistemology of practice (Jensen, 1987; 1999). But this way of reading the 
performative turn highlights in a new way the question of how any one situated practice or performance 
connects with praxis, conditions, and history in a larger sense – precisely since it sets off at a point 
beyond the agency/structure dichotomy described above. That is, ‘performance’ can be taken as a way of 
rejecting the whole issue as moot, as Newman and Holzman exemplify. But it is much more productive to 
take the Hegelian-Marxist insistence on objectivity as an impetus for theorizing about performances as 
relations between practices, mediated by standards and models.  

In fact, this connects with another side of the ‘performative turn’, developed in interactionist 
sociology (Goffman, 1981; 1986; 1990) and anthropology (Geertz, 1973; Schechner, 1985; Turner, 1987): 
When “all the world’s a stage” (as Shakespeare already noted), this is because everyday action routinely 
implies creating and recreating relations between practices, mediated by models. If one looks closely into 
the composition of routine interaction, one finds complex and continuously revised structures of actions 
that produce (create and display) certain standards, and actions that are to be taken as citations of, or 
dialogic objections to, such standards. If performance is doing, an important part of doing is modeling. 
The abstraction of standard ‘acts’ to be perhaps transferred to other situations was not invented by 
Western psychology in the late 19th century; it emerges in everyday interaction and was cultivated and 
stylized in ritual, ceremony and theater long before and elsewhere. 

Thus taking performance seriously also implies acknowledging that performance does not rule 
out, nor even bracket, power, but rather, mediates it. Children’s play (Winther-Lindqvist, 2009) and school 
teaching/learning (Davies, 1990) can thus be seen as particular performances that mediate demands, 
authority, and exclusion, and thereby enforce certain subjectivities. More generally, performing as citation 
implies submission or resistance to standard categories and identities (Butler, 1993; 1997). As nicely 
described by Emily Martin (2007), in today’s America (and, let me add, elsewhere), ‘being bipolar’ is 
inevitably performing and quoting versions or subject positions available from, say, commercials, popular 
psychiatry, mutual-help fellowships, cinema, etc., perhaps confirming, perhaps rejecting certain of their 
implications. This is no different from e.g. ‘being melancholic’ 100 years ago, except perhaps that in 
today’s culture, performative reflexivity is more ready at hand. The self-help culture, with its 
autobiographies – Martin’s book is actually one of these as well – has helped make identities like ‘bipolar’ 
be recognized as something one can be – in particular forms and under particular conditions; and at the 
same time, ‘being’ bipolar, at least potentially, becomes something one can externalize – display, quote, 
control, ‘act out’ etc. 

 

 

 



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The Crew 

It is this performative reflexivity which was utilized and 
cultivated in a project that developed from the Ama’r Total 
Theater, and which is the main community discussed in my book: 
The Crew. In the early 1990s, a new social problem was 
designated in Copenhagen: Street kids. In a Danish landscape, 
this is far from what is known from, e.g. Latin American cities, as 
street kids: Survival was rarely at issue. But these were young 
people out of reach of existing institutions, often involved with 
drugs, crime, or prostitution. The Crew, inspired or influenced by 
the growing self-help culture, developed the ATT’s mobilizing and 
tinkering approach by putting up the words “street kids”, “socially 
excluded youth”, and later “wild youth” as signals that defined the 
collective and its participants, and this was typically done in 
activities that included elements of display and performance. With 
The Crew, the youths ‘came out’ as ‘street kids’ etc., directly and 
publicly addressing and articulating their own situation as part of a 
social problem, and as part of its solution. The Crew quickly 
attracted media attention with events like hearings, theater shows, and street happenings, and from then 
on, their fame created a demand for them to give interviews and lectures to journalists, researchers, 
students and school classes, as an ongoing activity. It also made it fashionable for politicians to support 
them, which resulted in grants and other kinds of recognition and material resources, including my own 
participation as researcher. 

There were two typical reactions to The Crew’s version of the performative turn in social youth 
work. The dominant reaction was to embrace the apparent success visible on the surface, perhaps with 
the recognition that, no matter what happened to the youths on the longer term, at least now they were 
within reach. The opposite reaction was to reject it all as a case of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’: a 
community of people who keep confirming to each other the illusion that this works for real. 

In my analyses, I took up the performative side of Althusser’s concept of interpellation (1994): 
Ideology is first of all practiced, then perhaps reflected – also present as wisdom in the mutual-help 
movement: Fake it till you make it, as the AA motto goes. But, even if I granted that both phases are 
important, including the phase of ‘faking it’ wearing ‘the emperor’s new clothes’, it necessarily led to the 
question: what constitutes ‘making it’? How does performance achieve objectivity – resources, power, 
and recognition – beyond the stage?  

One kind of answer – increasingly important in today’s post-industrial societies – lies in the socio-
materiality of the stage itself. Resources, power and recognition obviously concentrated in The Crew 
itself, even as it ‘merely’ staged social problems. The youth who might talk with a therapist about her 
loneliness could instead get new friends by participating in The Crew’s staging of a performance about 
loneliness; rather than complain about being disenfranchised she might represent The Crew in 
negotiations with City officials about an EU-funded project for Youth Participation, or witness unskilled 
self-helpers barely older than herself giving interviews and lectures to respectfully listening social 
workers; or she could simply participate in refurbishing the most recently acquired venue for The Crew’s 
activities by painting “The Crew Man”, an iconic representation of ‘Wild Youth’, on the wall. The stage 
itself, as it were, goes far beyond the stage.  

Figure 1: The Crew Man - Logo, 1993 



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Still, there are obvious limits to this kind of answer. These were expressed in educational terms 
as the reality that very few of the participating youths would develop careers in either The Crew itself or in 
the entertainment business, and even those who would, would at some point be faced with the kinds of 
institutional demands that had excluded them in the first place (see Langager, 2003). They could also be 
backed by references to much of the performance literature (Turner, Goffman, Willis), according to which 
reflexive performance is generally a liminal experience that eventually gives way to a normal state of 
affairs, or at least only marginally challenges it. Further, could it be the case that the ‘neutral ground’ and 
the ‘movement’, and thus the tinkering approach that provided for inclusion and generalization in the first 
place, in fact depended on the liminality, and thus exceptionality, that was only ever meant to be a fleeting 
glimpse? And thus, that, rather than really ‘making it’, the pedagogy of The Crew consisted in the ‘Road 
Runner’ habit of not looking down to see that there is no ground under one’s feet?  

Another kind of answer would point to the general historical tendency toward more frequent and 
more reflective reorganization which is also a feature of post-industrial societies. Important parts of The 
Crew’s resources came from various state development grants; could The Crew perhaps be regarded as 
achievements of a class struggle in the sense that here, such post-industrial resources flowed into 
tinkering and self-constituting collectives, ‘ad-hocrasies’ (Mintzberg, 1993), that realized social inclusion 
instead of, say, new niches in marketing? If this was the case, the tradition of ‘reinventing the wheel’ in 
social work could be reframed as a vital resource for a welfare state that could now be ‘responsive’ in a 
greatly accelerated meaning.  

This interpretation was very ambitious and in its own way also a radical break with the legacy of 
the building of welfare state. Traditionally, knowledge and resources come with stability. Under poor 
conditions, flexibility equals poverty and oblivion. The homeless are those who can most effortlessly move 
their home. You can easily change directions of you are not burdened by resources and by the concerns 
of those who provide them. And above all, those directions and dwellings will not seem important to 
remember. On the other hand, if you want to secure reasonable social conditions, you must fight for 
standardized rights. If you win, you have a clear hallmark of social change. Social equality is achieved as 
a kind of standardization, and this is where the generalized knowledge lies – even in a ‘democratic social 
engineering’. Thus, it is no coincidence that political struggles for welfare for many decades had to take 
the form of demands for bureaucratic state institutions driven by professionals. But the downside of this 
has been precisely the power structure of social exclusion that Foucault described. This is why it made 
such an important difference when the activists of the Ama’r Total Theater invented the ad-hoc institution 
that continuously reinvented the wheel, so that the processes of building and re-building institutions could 
be part of the know-how of pedagogy itself.   

But it was only in The Crew’s performative development of the approach that this was taken to its 
full implication. The traditional formation of institutions as described by Foucault and others was always 
closely connected to specific forms of problematization, standards, and discursive categories which were 
more or less taken as essences. Thus, the framing of clinical wards embodied diseases; school divisions 
anchored standards of qualifications; and mutual-help fellowships such as the AA defined themselves by 
their disease, etc.  But the 'performative' interplay of category with collective, and thus, the very 
‘enactedness’ of these categories, was rarely reflected as such. This is not only because of a certain 
cultural inertia of organizational forms – often lamented in post-industrial management - but first of all 
because the founding category was always at the core of each institutional collective's constitution in 
power relations and identities; essentialism comes both from habit and from ideology (see, to this Derrida, 
1981, Højrup, 2003).  



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Thus, The Crew’s adoption of performance as fashionable self-display could be articulated as far 
more wide-reaching than as a culturally obvious way of securing funding. What these reflexive 
performances enacted was a democratization of the emergent post-industrial practice of ‘tinkering’ 
pedagogical collectives. 

Senko’s Story 

Let us finally unfold these suggestions by engaging briefly with the story of Senko, one of the 
characters in my 2012 book. This is roughly how he presented himself when I interviewed him, and when 
later my colleague Line Lerche Mørck took over and developed a closer collaboration with him (Mørck, 
2000, 2006; 2007; 2010).  

Senko was an immigrant boy who in 1994 was dealing drugs with his friends. Bored from sitting 
around smoking weed all day, they would find adventure in nightly burglaries. Some of the activists from 
The Crew approached Senko, and it was arranged so that he could be officially recognized as a ‘client’, 
as participant in The Crew. This way, he could keep the social workers off his back, and he had a place to 
relax, with a small but steady income. In other words – still of Senko’s own – he used The Crew for his 
own purposes. 

But when The Crew arranged a big street festival on the central neighborhood square, in 
collaboration with various local groups, they made sure to invite Senko and his group and involve them as 

Figure 2: The poster for the "Know your place" Festival 



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activists. Senko took charge of the falafel booth. As Senko described it, he and his friends got involved 
because it was easy. The festival was inclusive. Even very marginalized groups such as the homeless 
were there, doing something to contribute, even while still drinking their beers, because that was how the 
neighborhood community, as organized by The Crew, wanted to see itself. The “Seeing itself” of the 
community was a key idea of the festival, expressed in the title Kend Din Plads  (Know Your Place) – the 
Danish ‘plads’ means both ‘square’ and ‘place’, so the title used an ironic allusion to a classic 
conservative motto to express the opposite: The aim was for different groups “around the square” to 
‘come out’ from their ‘place’ and see themselves in new ways as participants in a community that cared 
for itself. 

They also got involved because it was not a shame to be part of The Crew. It was not just a place 
for losers, for people whom you pity. On the contrary, it was in fact a powerful agent in local politics, as 
the great mobilization to the festival would testify. Finally, they got involved because it was fun. The event 
itself was tailored to participants’ ideas of having fun – featuring a ‘stunt’ performance, a “funny smoking 
instruments contest”, popular live music, etc. – and these activities had promising future perspectives and 
made sense in terms of these, even if vaguely. Senko could see himself as that kind of organizer; he was 
already a somewhat leading figure – if at a small level – in the criminal business, and he liked being 
recognized also for organizing other things. 

Senko’s involvement was to be a turning point for him. Not long after, he would be recruited as 
key activist in a project for sports and other youth activities in a nearby park – the very place where he 
had himself been selling drugs. The next year he was already one of the founders of a youth club called 
The Street Pulse. Later still, he developed into a so-called “wild social youth worker”, responsible for 
recruiting and training other youth workers.  

For Senko and many others around him, one crucial kind of condition of development were what 
my colleague Line Lerche Mørck called the ‘boundary communities’, where he could participate in 
undecided or double-faced identities (ibid.). He could belong both to the marginalized criminal 
communities and those of youth work, at the same time. In fact, this is another relevant meaning of the 
term ‘neutral ground’. 

Of course, this was not all. Stories like this, with real people, are always many-sided. There was 
also the fact that his girlfriend got pregnant at just the right moment; there were the childhood friendships 
he happened to have in the neighborhood, the lessons he had learnt from spending a few years in a 
different country, and much more. And just like it was the case with the youth clubs and the child care 
institution on a national level, political conditions made it possible. This story is in fact also part of the 
story of the emerging social and youth policies of a City District Council that elected a new progressive 
leadership who invited Senko and others to provide ideas about how they should deal with the social 
problem of gangs of young immigrants in the neighborhood. 

But the collectives they made and maintained were important nonetheless, right on the boundary 
between the different social worlds. Mørck uses the term “boundary communities”, but I still suggest we 
talk of collectives rather than communities, because they were deliberately established; they established 
themselves in a deliberate design that included a concern for, and a recognition of, participants – and 
because this self-constitution was always a precarious matter of recognition by relevant others, including 
youth, local agencies, and of course various state authorities.  



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The concern for and recognition of participants were crucial to Senko’s development, and they 
were clear for him to see, and eventually to take part in himself. Through that participation, he learnt 
specific kinds of self-reflection, a.k.a. responsibilities. In Vygotsky’s terms, here was a crucial ‘zone of 
proximal development’ of self-hood: In The Crew, Senko could perform a new kind and level of care for 
himself. Because The Crew and The Street Pulse were broad-scoped, open-ended collectives, the 
responsibility that Senko learned through participating was of the flexible kind that he could tentatively 
generalize to other places as he learned about them. And because they were constantly engaged in 
struggles in which Senko’s own identity was at stake, it was also disciplined. 

For, of course, as we have learnt from Foucault, power is still everywhere. Empowerment is never 
a one-sided process, and growing as a subject implies not only expanding agency, but also moments of 
subjection. This may sound paradoxical, but it makes sense when we remember that agency is always 
developed though participation (see, to this, Nissen, 2002; 2013). Senko only won his recognition through 
a process where, being met in movement and on neutral ground, he surrendered to the powers of The 
Crew and the District Council. For instance, as part of the disciplined care for himself, he gradually 
stopped doing burglaries and reduced his cannabis smoking. This submission was implied in the 
processes of development that led to Senko’s increasing agency, as he co-constructed the park project, 
the Street Pulse youth club, and more.  

Around the turn of the millennium, Mørck and I focused our research on the issue of power, in 
part because there were intense political discussions about how to confront the rising neo-conservative 
and anti-immigrant sentiments and policies. Activists like Senko, constantly engaged in ‘street-level 
politics’, were not happy with the general liberal appeal to a beneficial human nature that they would learn 
from most of their friends in the social or youth work professions. So, Senko became one of our key 
informants, with many dramatic stories to tell us.  

Often, neighborhood boys or groups of them challenged him and his authority as leader of The 
Street Pulse, perhaps more or less consciously jealous with what he had achieved and how his 
collectives competed with their gangs for the kids’ attention. It took some intense and even, at moments, 
violent confrontations to assert The Street Pulse as gang-neutral and non-violent territory, especially 
since Senko kept pushing for generalization across boundaries that existed between gangs, communities, 
neighborhoods etc. Often, he had to walk a tight-rope to secure alliances, including some with family 
networks that more or less overlapped with criminal gangs. Sometimes, he also struggled with younger 
colleagues who would keep a low profile to postpone what they perceived as a radical break with their 
past. 

At the same time, Senko struggled with the welfare bureaucracy. In his work of tinkering to get 
any other funding than the – after all, limited – development funds, he kept encountering one great 
barrier. This was the way that social work with marginalized youth always had to be accounted for in 
terms of particular individuals with specified diagnoses or social issues, in the bureaucracy of welfare 
institutions. Senko and his Street Pulse group would often sketch projects that could mobilize groups of 
youths to divert them from criminal careers, but in vain, since he could not refer to individual case-files 
with sufficiently well-described criminal or psychiatric problems. Through this activism, it was made 
apparent that, even as a great collective achievement in welfare states, the institutions of social work – 
such as those of education and health – also work as individualizing machineries. As Mørck documented 
in her further studies, this was finally also a great problem for Senko and the other ‘wild social workers’ in 
their ensuing struggles for recognition and learning in a trade that could not be helpfully articulated as 



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either standard self-help or standard professional youth work, and where the standards of their education 
were abstracted from their relevance and attached to them as individuals (Mørck, 2007; 2010). 

I was increasingly clear that the leverage of the forces and resources that The Ama’r Total 
Theater and The Crew had been able to mobilize, and which The Street Pulse could still exploit, was 
finite. The unique historical situation of the 1980-90s changed, with not only a marked growth in the 
standardized governance of New Public Management and a general political push to the right, but also a 
sharp decrease in local autonomy. In the present century, even in Denmark, the post-industrial increase 
in wealth and productivity has been all but reserved for high-tech commercial enterprise and the 
economic elite, while public sector development is all about cutbacks and re-bureaucratization. As even 
the left is driven to defend the welfare state in liberal rather than social terms – minimal standard 
provisions, consumer rights, harm reduction etc. – the hope of an accelerated responsiveness of the 
universalist welfare state fades away. Those who wish to learn from the unique Nordic welfare state 
experience had better hurry up. 

In Conclusion: Theory as Prototypical Narrative 

This somewhat unhappy ending of the story is probably partly unfair, but it serves to once again 
highlight the historical singularity of any pedagogical practice. Writing this text is to maintain that there are 
important lessons to be derived about possible forms and preconditions of a critical trans-pedagogy that 
implies a creative and performative tinkering of collectives, even if that particular historical window of 
opportunity is closing.  

The theoretical work of articulation has addressed deep and far-reaching issues, issues of 
general relevance, but precisely prompted by a situation that turned out to be more one-of-a-kind than 
immediately expected. While our spontaneous ideology tends to assume an easy relevance of empirical 
experience in a static world of variation, we only arrive at concrete universals by a process of 
enstrangement (a.k.a. defamiliarization or exotization; or in Bertolt Brecht’s German, Verfremdung). 
Although I was partly prepared for this task by some dialectical training, it was mostly through the 
repeated trouble with describing and explaining the idea of “meeting youth in movement and on neutral 
ground” that I gradually realized how utterly eccentric yet widely relevant it is, or could be. In this text, I 
have tried to highlight some of the connections between the singularity of the historical situation and the 
profundity of the questions it poses. 

As an alternative, we might briefly consider a different way to articulate much of this. As 
mentioned, Senko initially spent much of his time intoxicated, and in his own recollection, part of what 
spurred his criminal behavior then was the edginess he felt from doing nothing much beside smoking 
cannabis. He could easily have been treated in some addiction treatment facility, like many others from 
The Crew. Thus, it would have seemed quite easy to frame Senko’s as a story of addiction, and The 
Crew as a new form of addiction treatment (although perhaps I would have then chosen a different venue 
for publishing). Is not cannabis, and the chemistry of our brains, much the same all over the world? To 
some extent yes, I could argue, and so are treatment clinics, and even self-help groups like Narcotics 
Anonymous10. But precisely the discipline of keeping to that standardized framework would have 
encouraged us to create collectives that were not so good at meeting Senko on neutral ground and in 
movement; and not so easy to move and recreate. There would have been a much stronger focus on 
failure and choice. It would have been much harder to see Senko as a participant in collectives. The 

                                                        
10I could argue, that is: I could perform that ceteris paribus manoeuver, even though it would gloss over many contradictions – such 
as the fact that despite appearances, the NA does not at all address the same ‘disease’ as the professional clinics (cf. e.g. Keane, 
2011). 



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drama would have been almost exclusively about his struggle with himself, his addiction and his level of 
motivation, and perhaps about how we, as therapists, could or could not cure him in ways that are based 
on calculated evidence and described in standard textbooks. Instead, Senko’s story, here, is a story of 
social transformation, of politics at many levels, and of concrete pedagogical universals, precisely 
because it does not begin or stay with a disease category that is easily computed through the 
machineries of measurement and management of individuals in standardized institutions. 

Articulating a pedagogical practice as a prototypical narrative is a ‘normative’ modelling, the 
setting of a standard as against other possible standards, even when it does not standardize. This 
articulation of The Crew’s pedagogy as part of a radical transformation of institutional forms and forms of 
knowledge is an expression of what I referred to above (with Stetsenko, 2013) as the “transformative 
activist stance” which is implied in an epistemology of practice. Thus, I am not claiming that this is the 
only possible way to articulate it; when I suggest this articulation as prototypical, it is because I believe 
that learning from it can be relevant in practices and struggles that aim for a democratic kind of social 
engineering. In other words, it is an expression of hope.  

In fact, looking back on the historical situation in Copenhagen in the 1980s and 1990s, it is 
debatable whether what was going on, in general, was a democratization of welfare institutions, or rather 
a neoliberal dissolution of them. Most likely, it was partly one, partly the other. This is a general point in 
the methodology of social science: There is always more than one thing going on, more than one 
tendency. If we regard practices and collectives in their historical context, they are contradictory. And it 
makes a difference what we choose to articulate – sometimes the difference between despair and hope  
(for this idea of contradictory articulation, see Jensen, 1999, and Mol, 2008). I am aware that the term 
‘hope’ is sometimes read as implying passivity, perhaps especially on the background of a Latin 
etymology that brings it close to waiting and expecting. My use of the term, on the contrary, derives from 
practice-based philosophy and cultural anthropology, in which it designates the possible futures we 
actively and performatively imagine and strive for; the projects that co-define who we are and the 
meaning of what we do (Bloch, 1995; Crapanzano, 2004; Mattingly, 2010). 

What I am doing here, then, is articulating the hope, the possibility, the deeply historical emergent 
narrative, still very much unfinished – and perhaps temporarily halted – of a trans-pedagogical tinkering of 
collectives as part of an expanding and responsive welfare state. The precarious nature of this possibility, 
the way it points to requirements that are far from given or simple, and thus connects with and demands 
much wider social transformations, makes this a ‘blues hope’ in Cheryl Mattingly’s sense of the term 
(2010) – the kind of hope that remains close to its dialectical counterpart, despair. It shares with certain 
religious utopia a counterintuitive radicalism that calls forth doubt. But, contrary to religious versions of 
blues hope, this is written as inherently contestable, in the way that it still claims to present a real 
possibility, a concrete utopia in Bloch’s sense (1995). 

This combination of radicalism with realism is what calls forth theory. It is to this end that a 
narrative form is used. A prototypical narrative presupposes theoretical reflection in its very genre – that 
is, in how its form works to fix a chronotope (a unique structure of past, present and future), and a 
constellation of author and reader positions (Bakhtin, 1986; Holquist, 1990). These inter-subjectivities and 
inter-temporalities are disputable at every point. Engaging with them requires problematizing concepts 
and knowledges, because it shows how these are contingent and invites the reader to reflect on that 
contingency in order to harness the gains of the text. By implication, the narrative form, when used as 
prototypical, presents a version of theory that accentuates its dialogicality in a way that is very different 
from the authoritative argument, in which the final word is always the aim. Thus, for instance, reading this 



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text might make you wonder about other possible ways to think of power and collectivity, as relevant both 
to education and to post-communist Marxism, or think about the meaning of ‘performativity’ in relation to 
standards of youth work, etc. 

It is also important to note how a story like this assumes a spatial or geographical instantiation. 
Although ‘movement’ and ‘neutral ground’, like Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (and many 
other theoretical constructs), addresses space metaphorically, it is at the same time quite corporeal. The 
Ama’r Total Theater simply had no permanent residence. The Crew settled as a place of an open youth 
gathering, with locks only on rooms with expensive machines and important documents. With the festival 
that sent Senko’s development in a new direction, the city square was reclaimed for a redefined 
neighborhood in which The Crew was an important hub. The drug dealers’ park was later refurbished into 
a sports park that displayed The Crew’s and Senko’s achievement. And The Street Pulse youth club was 
the domicile, or home, of a boundary collective, precariously upheld as gang-neutral territory.  

This physical spatiality interacts in interesting ways with the standards they contain, house or 
embody. In the ceteris paribus approach, a location may or may not hold properties conducive to adapting 
a given standard, much as American soil, once cleared, leveled and plowed, could or could not uphold 
standard European colonies. With our prototypical approach, we do not only expand and complicate the 
range of relevant conditions on the ground to the point where adaptation exceeds standard, we also point 
to the ways that the standard is taken to shape and even create the location itself, and the ways that 
those who do it are indexed as collectives by those locations. The Street Pulse was created with an 
awareness of the ‘neutral ground’ of ATT and The Crew, as a place beyond the institutional home ground 
of professionals, yet also different from ‘street corner society’ youth venues. And it was constituted in a 
struggle for recognition that implied universalizing ideological claims. The awareness that The Crew was 
quite famous in Denmark, and that The Street Pulse contributed to its reputation, was a direct concern on 
the minds of Senko and his friends, a concrete shape of the ethics they cultivated. Precisely as such, it 
was ethically and politically accountable in a wide sense, as a ‘public space’ (Harvey, 2005).  

Of course, if we zoom out from there, much the same can be said of a place like Copenhagen, 
Denmark. In Danish debates over social youth work around 2000, my writings contributed to articulating 
what was called the ‘Copenhagen model’ as against approaches developed in other towns, and, as most 
Danes know, Copenhagen has a singular legacy as crown capital, as historical stronghold of both labor 
and the radical left, and, more specifically, as a site of social experiments. Further, the present text is 
written in English in the hope that an international readership might find something useful coming from 
such a place, mediated by the differences between places that are often hidden by the scientific lingua 
franca, but sometimes becomes visible, when the limits of a second language shows in strange 
formulations, or in the scarcity of accessible references. Can we still hope for the Danish polity to show 
concern for how the ‘society’ on its territory can be upheld internationally as a ‘Scandinavian model’? 

All in all, this prototypical narrative exemplifies the old anthropological lesson that really 
understanding such a model always requires a deep, complex, ‘thick’ historical description of its place 
and time – and that this investigation is at the same time a journey that will make us question and 
perhaps revise what we thought we knew about our own society, its spaces and its models. This is how 
people in The Amar Total Theater and The Crew would read Freire’s account of his Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed. They knew well that they were not working with the literacy of poor Brazilian land workers. 
But just for that reason, they could perhaps better approach the Freirian lessons, in a proper skeptical, 
respectful, and creative manner.   



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I can only hope for some of my texts to achieve, in small parts, the same kind of – as it were (with 
Derrida): endlessly postponed – meaning and relevance, for people to make sense of them in ways that I 
could not predict. 

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