Pre-flight experiences and migration stories: the accounts of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children

Much work about transnational migration and mobility overlooks the active role of children in such processes and experiences. This paper counters the omission from the literature by exploring the pre-flight experiences and migration stories of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Scotland. In doing so, we demonstrate that unaccompanied minors experience a range of traumatic situations in their countries of origin including, the death or persecution of family members, war, forced recruitment and personal persecution. In their experiences of transnational migration processes, the majority are brought by an agent, with accounts of smuggling and trafficking being minimal.     

Quotidian geographies: placing feminism

We discuss Susan Hanson's contributions to geography during the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of quotidian geographies, geographies of the everyday. Beginning from our own experiences as graduate students and new faculty members, we describe the social and theoretical context in which Susan published her initial studies of men's and women's activity patterns that examined gender differences in travel behavior and their origins in men's and women's different household responsibilities. We also review her success peopling the discipline of geography. We conclude that human geography has benefited from the incorporation of feminist theory and methods as Susan predicted.     

Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

Parental migration and the educational enrolment of left-behind children: evidence from rural Ponorogo,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the effects of parental migration on children’s educational enrolment following the recent reforms in Indonesian educational policy. We find that, in general, parental migration has a positive impact on school enrolment, although this varies by the child’s age and the gender of the migrant parent. Parental migration has an adverse impact on the school enrolment of younger children who are eligible for free education, but a positive impact on older children who are no longer able to access state educational support. The gender of the migrant parent matters, as paternal migration appears to have a more positive impact on children’s educational enrolment than maternal migration. Maternal migration is associated with a reduction of younger children’s likelihood of a being in school, while paternal migration makes no difference to their school enrolment. For older children, maternal migration has a lower positive impact compared to paternal migration. Our qualitative interviews also show mixed findings: some children appreciate their migrant mothers’ migration efforts and are motivated to persevere in continuing education, while others are weighed down by their migrant mothers’ sacrifice and develop a sense of obligation to reduce their financial burdens by leaving education early to enter paid employment.     

西方平台城市主义研究进展与启示

数字平台与城市运转日益加深的嵌合推动着城市的平台化转型。在此背景下,平台城市主义这一新兴概念应运而生,相关话题受到“数字转向”的西方人文地理学和城市研究的关注。本文对平台城市主义的内涵和主要内容进行了归纳总结,并提出了对未来国内研究的展望。总体而言,平台城市主义强调平台与城市构成了相互紧密联系的嵌合共生体关系,并主要包括两大方面的内容:①政治经济学视角的平台城市主义研究。这些研究既关注技术资本主导下城市社会空间活动的平台化及其问题,又强调多元行动者可以结合平台的运作特性加以应对;②日常生活空间视角的平台城市主义研究。这些研究重点探讨居民在城市日常生活空间中的平台化社交联系和流动性,揭示其具有的复杂动态以及人们从中获得的多元体验和价值。可见,西方平台城市主义研究的关键,在于把握平台中介作用下的城市社会空间活动的过程、意义及影响。中国城市的平台化进程正处于快速推进的阶段,然而,国内已有的相关研究侧重于共性总结和规律探索,忽视了平台与城市运转之间关系的复杂性以及平台的非经济价值。因此,通过借鉴西方平台城市主义研究的成果,国内人文地理学可以更好地探索有中国特色的平台城市现象及议题。     

‘God was with me everywhere’: women’s embodied practices and everyday experiences of sacred space in Czechia

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the rise. We deploy auto-photography as a method that invites participants’ own visual representations and interpretative narrations of their quotidian experiences. Thirty-eight Christian, Buddhist, and non-religious women participated in this study in 2016. Our analysis of photographs and interviews shows that our participants turn places that are not primarily associated with religion or spirituality (such as a kitchen sink or a bus stop) into sacred or spiritual places while at the same time integrate officially sacred spaces (such as churches and meditation centers) into their daily lives through social activities. Thus, we argue that a mutually transformative process is taking place in contemporary Czechia. In this process, religiously affiliated and non-affiliated women alike transform everyday spaces into sacred sites through their embodied and emotional practices that seek calmness, peace, and transcendence. At the same time, women who participate in organized religions remake the sacrality of officially sacred sites through their emphasis on social connections and feelings of communal belonging and shared identity. Our findings underscore that sacred space is not fixed in any one location and its production involves the continual emotional and material investment by ordinary women.     

Disabilities,urban natures and children’s outdoor play

Normative, widely circulated discourses about the value of outdoor, natural play for children overwhelmingly marginalize the experiences of families with disabled children, who can often experience outdoor/natural play as a site of hard work, heartache, dread, resignation and inadequacy. This paper presents findings from research with 60 North London families with children aged 5–16 who have a statutory ‘Statement of Special Needs’. Focusing on these families’ experiences of visiting designated, newly refurbished accessible natural play-spaces in two local country parks, the paper highlights: (i) the multiple, compound social-material ‘barriers to fun’ encountered in these spaces; (ii) the profound emotional-affective impacts of such barriers, most notably in terms of feelings of ‘resignation’ and ‘dread’; (iii) parents’/carers’ sadness occasioned by perceived ‘failures’ to ‘live up to’ normative ideals of parenting and family engagement with outdoor play and urban natures; (iv) nevertheless, the possibility of moments of family joy, love and ‘special’ time, afforded via families’ ‘hard work’ and ‘keeping going through hard times’. Through an engagement with recent conceptualizations of everyday geographies of disabilities, the paper suggests that these qualitative experiences complicate some chief, normative ways of knowing outdoor play, urban natures and barriers to accessibility.     

Geographies of youth – a generational perspective

ABSTRACT

Twenty years ago the publication of Cool Places created visibility for emerging research on geographies of youth. Yet in comparison with Children’s Geographies geographical work on youth has failed to mature as a sub-disciplinary field. In this contribution I explore the reasons why this may be so highlighting the way youth geographies has struggled to define its own identity, and its lack of a strong founding, globally relevant, theoretical approach. Instead, I argue that the development of intergenerational geographies has led thinking about youth to be absorbed into wider framings of geographies of age, or geographies of family life.     

跨国移民的日常饮食实践及地理相遇分析：广州案例

本研究采用质性研究方法,探究了广州跨国移民的日常饮食实践如何促成多元的地理相遇,以及这种相遇的内在机制。研究发现,跨国移民在不同的饮食空间与东道国社会产生互动,促进了多元的地理相遇,既带来不同民族身份之间社会融合的结果,也由于个体与东道国的社会文化差异加深了隔阂。跨国移民的日常饮食实践及地理相遇受到主体性因素的驱动、社会性因素的强化与地方性因素的支持,这三类因素之间相互作用,使跨国移民在东道国的日常饮食呈现出矛盾的行为表征。本文揭示了跨国移民与在地社会文化的微观互动过程,以饮食为线索的地理相遇分析对于理解移民与迁入地的社会文化互动提供了深入理解,对于促进在华移民的社会融入具有启发意义。