peer, reviwed Radical youth work: Love and community Hans A Skott-Myhre and Kathy SG Skott-Myhre Our problem is to reconquer the communitarian spaces of liberty, dialogue and desire. To promote the alternative ontology ofthe minority it is necessary to open "communitarian spaces of liberty, dialogue and desire" — Negri and Guattari (Negri and Guattail, (1990 p. 141) We can be together Ah you and me We should be together We are all outlaws in the eyes ofAmerica In order to sur\nve we steal cheat lie forge fuck hide and deal We are obscene lawless hideous dangerotis dirty violent and young But we should be together Come on all you people standing around Our life's too fine to let it die and We should be together All your privaie property is Target for your cnet7iy And your enemy is We We are forces of chaos and anarchy Everything they say we are we are And we are very Proud of ourselves {Jefferson Airplane, 1969) I n the opening sentences of A Thousand Plateatis Deleuze and Guattari (1987) state, "We wrote this book together. Since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd" (p. 1). In writing this article together, based on a workshop we gave at the Child and Youth Care Work Conference at the University of Victoria in 2006, we bring to the writing a "crowd" as well. Who is our crowd? Pul simply — everyone; but for our purposes here, we refer to ail of those young people and adults we have had the good fortune to get to work, live, and love together with over the years. This crowd, although separated by geography, time, and all sorts of difference, operates as a kind of community that brings together many bodies working together towards a common purpose. That purpose, we would argue, is to express the force of life itself through what we are going to call love. Indeed, it is this combination of bodies expressing the force of life that constitutes what we have called elsewhere "radical youth work" (Skott-Myhre 2004, 2005, 2006). Radical youth work, as we have defined ii, is youth and adults working together for common political purpose. We define political here as the creation of new forms of community that serve the common desires, needs, and aspirations of those humans airrently mis-categorized into the separate distinctions of youth and adults. In writing this piece as a crowd, our goal is to re-think this mis-categorization. We want to examine youth-adult relations in regards to two terms that are both quite traditional and potentially transfonnative of the ways young people and adults live and work together. Those terms are love and community. Visions of imagined community Words have meanings: some words, however, also have a 'feel'. The word 'community is one of them. It feels good: whatever the word community may mean it is good to 'iiave a comniimity', 'to be in a community' . .. Company or society may be bad; but not the community. Community we feel is always a good thing (Baumann, 2001 p. I). It would be our considered opinion that any term that consistently holds a positive connotation ought to be inves- tigated very carefully. The reason for this is that our ideas of what is positive are satu- rated with logic and rationality of our current historical moment, with all of its regimes of domination and power. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987 pp. 75-110) point out, we are born into and inherit the language structures of our age. We do not produce the meaning of the language we use so much as we recycle it for different ends and purposes. To the 48/ ISSN [7l)5625X Relational Childattd Youlh Care Practice Volume 20 Numher 3