Book excerpt: In this book academics, practitioners and scholars from all over the planet present relatively heterogeneous perspectives to produce something of the homogenous whole that youth work might be understood to be. This promotes the understanding that to lock down youth work in notional stasis (bolt it into a ‘carceral archipelago’) would be the antithesis of practice, which would effectively destroy it as youth work. Other writers have effectively tried to achieve just this, or perhaps identified (put a flag in) what they see (or want to be) the ‘core’ of youth work practice. But youth work is not an apple. A global and historical perspective of youth work shows it to be a relentlessly developing range of responses to a persistently growing and shifting range of phenomena, issues and directions presented by and to societies and the young people in those societies. Here the authors offer a set of responses from within the incessantly metamorphosing field that can generically be called ‘youth work; they do this in this time, from many places and a diversity of identities, but they all identify what they present professionally and/or academically with what they agree to be the glorious rainbow palette that youth work is.