Engaging with youth and families in collaborative and respectful ways; taking practical actions to create the conditions for young people to experience meaning, worth and connection; supporting them to imagine hopeful futures for themselves; and bringing oneself fully to the therapeutic relationship are all hallmark characteristics of child and youth care (CYC) practice. Those who do this work and those who prepare practitioners for the field recognize the need for conceptual frameworks that can adequately represent the complexities of everyday CYC practice. By taking up the notion of praxis as knowing, doing and being in context, I hope to plant some fresh seeds to animate and extend current conceptualizations of everyday CYC practice.Keywords Child and youth care Á Praxis Á Conceptualiztions of practice Á Professional development Like many of the other human caring professions, everyday child and youth care (CYC) practice is complex, unpredictable, and value-laden. It is also highly relational work that is deeply embedded within very specific local contexts. Engaging with children, youth, families and communities in collaborative and respectful ways; taking practical actions to create the conditions for young people to experience meaning, worth and connection; supporting them to imagine hopeful futures for themselves; and bringing oneself fully to the therapeutic relationship are all hallmark characteristics of CYC practice. Those who do this work and those who prepare practitioners for the field recognize the need for dynamic conceptual frameworks that can adequately represent the complexities of everyday CYC practice, while also offering a practical tool for critical reflection and analysis.Building on the work of others who have highlighted the thoroughly interpretive and ethical dimensions of CYC practice (

Critical suicidology is an emerging area of scholarship and praxis that brings together academics, community activists, service users, practitioners, policy makers, family members, and persons with lived experience, to rethink what it means to study suicide and enact practices of suicide prevention in more diverse and creative, less psychocentric and less depoliticized, ways. In this article, I begin to articulate what it might mean to "think like a critical suicidologist," the questions that might get asked from this position, the academic and activist allies who might get recruited to the cause, and the potential cracks we might open up in pursuit of a more hopeful, life-affirming, and just future.

The need for effective youth suicide prevention is uncontested, and is particularly urgent for Indigenous populations. The Indigenous youth suicide rates in some North American communities can be 18 times greater than for other young people. Despite the clear need, evidence in support of Indigenous youth suicide prevention strategies remain mixed. The most common approach to youth suicide prevention -gatekeeper training -may have limited effects in Indigenous communities. Based on recent work undertaken with Indigenous leaders in rural Alaska, we describe culturally grounded, practical alternatives that may be more effective for Indigenous communities. We highlight the ways in which research informed, grassroots interventions can address cultural, practical and systemic issues that are relevant when addressing risks for suicide on a community level. Built on a transactional-ecological framework that gives consideration to local contexts, culture-centric narratives and the multiple, interacting conditions of suicide, the innovative approach described here emphasizes community and cultural protective factors in Indigenous communities, and extends typical suicide prevention initiatives in ways that have important implications for other ethnically diverse communities.

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The purpose of this paper is to explore the conviviality between practices of narrative therapy and the emerging field of critical suicide studies. Bringing together ideas from narrative therapy and critical suicide studies allows us to analyze current suicide prevention practices from a new vantage point and offers us the chance to consider how narrative therapy might be applied in new and different contexts, thus extending narrative therapy’s potential and possibilities. We expose some of the thin, singular, biomedical descriptions of the problem of suicide that are currently in circulation and attend to the potential effects on distressed persons, communities, and therapists/practitioners who are all operating under the influence of these dominant understandings. We identify some cracks in the dominant storyline to enable alternative descriptions and subjugated knowledges to emerge in order to bring our suicide prevention practices more into alignment with a de-colonizing, social justice orientation.