Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Cartographies of encounters: Understanding conflict transformation through a collaborative exploration of youth spaces in Beirut

This paper explores practices and imaginations of space among young people in postwar Beirut. Relying on an innovative collaborative-mapping methodology, it shifts the focus from the traditional analysis of the city at war, centred on anxious urbanism, toward spatial dynamics of conflict transformation. It deploys an ethnographic approach to shed light on everyday perceptions of the urban landscape among a group of students. Their visions of space are composed along conventional tropes, comparable to Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes: images that connect temporal and spatial relationships to describe their ways of inhabiting the city. These images reveal that their experiences of space are not produced exclusively in relation to the memory of wartime topographies and politico-religious territories. Rather, they are also the result of their personal trajectories and agency. For these young people, ordinary encounters inspire a reframing of the political geography of the everyday, including renewed narratives on coexistence and strategies of circumventing the sense of spatial confinement they inherited from the war. The analysis shows that the experiences of these students stand in sharp contrast with the dominant image of unbending intergroup boundaries in postwar Lebanon. Young people's abilities to navigate, negotiate and rediscover social encounters in a complex, changing environment call attention to the transformative power of micro-situations in postwar contexts. Through highlighting their original lifestyles and ways of thinking, this paper argues that the city, far from only symbolising and reproducing conflicts, is also the place where mundane practices and imaginations reinvent the social fabric.     

Block politics

This paper explores how young people have experienced everyday life on ‘the block’ in a racially diverse lower to working class community in New York City over time, a concept that I refer to as block politics. Broadly defined, block politics refers to the process in which young people's territories are socially conceived, performed, maintained and challenged in everyday life. Gendered and racialized norms and practices play an important role in determining how young people construct their identities and that of their block. Block politics represents one of the many ways in which young people express and articulate their sense of social and spatial inclusion/exclusion, something that has transcended both time and space in urban communities in the United States.     

Picturing the city: young people's representations of urban environments

Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores visual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The findings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students' drawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities between drawings from the four countries, the majority showing a ‘big, busy city’ representation with skylines, traffic and shopping areas. There are also distinctive characteristics for each set, for example Finnish students tended to emphasise environmental and social issues more than in the other countries. In relation to methodology, we conclude that drawings, supported by contextual information, are a useful source to understand young people's representations of cities. Further, this research supports thinking about how to merge young people's experiences and imaginaries with the teaching of urban geography.     

Young people's outdoor refuges: movements and (dis)entanglements

ABSTRACT

Young people's outdoor refuges have been identified as places that provide respite from everyday pressures. Inspired by four concepts of lines, knots, meshwork and wayfaring, as defined by Tim Ingold, this paper aims to contribute with a dynamic understanding of the practices of outdoor refuging in an increasingly demanding and structured everyday life. The paper reports on photo-elicited interviews with twenty-one young people from a countryside town in Denmark. The findings suggest that outdoor refuges simultaneously serve to disentangle young people from distressing knots in their everyday lives, while fostering positive emotional and sensory entanglements with the human and non-human environment. Further, the findings highlight the significance of mobile phones in the young people's refuging practices. The findings resonate with discourses on the changing conditions for young people's spatial autonomy, and raise questions about acknowledging, protecting and promoting their opportunities for outdoor refuging.     

‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people's everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young people's friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on children's independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.     

Overcoming obstacles on the peri‐urban fringe: young people making new geographies

Understanding contemporary youth lifestyles is a challenge for urban planners and geographers. Young people's everyday needs are complex, and urban spaces in new outer city developments offer unique spaces for shaping their identities. Juxtaposed with affordances of digital technologies, the physical location of home exists in a fluid landscape. Overcoming obstacles, such as access to public transport, places to socialise, and meet their peers, is characteristic of the everyday young person's experience. Knowing how young people decide where to go for personal space, as well as who to ask for personal advice, was the aim of this study. The study was conducted with samples of young people growing up in the rapidly growing peri‐urban northern suburbs of the Australian city of Melbourne. A survey questionnaire was administered to a gender‐balanced sample aged 12–15 years (n = 523) with follow‐up interviews to better inform the results. Logistic regression and factorial analyses of variance reveal their favourite places to be ‘my’ bedroom, being with friends, the park, and the café. Although not the focus of this study, some gender differences were noted. In addition to innovative use of space, the results show the positive influences on their well‐being of trusted family and friends. Young people's geographies offer transdisciplinary insights that highlight their creative usage of these new urban spaces. They offer a new imaginary for geographical education and research.     

Virtual youth: non-heterosexual young people's use of the internet to negotiate their identities and socio-sexual relations

This article explores the ways that non-heterosexual young people are negotiating their identities and socio-sexual relations on the internet in the UK. Drawing on the key concepts of embodiment and performativity, and based on in-depth qualitative research with non-heterosexual youth and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth workers, this article investigates the use of social networking websites which have been specifically designed for LGBT users, and the connections between virtual and material spaces in young people's everyday lives. This research reveals that although the internet is an important medium through which new and existing socio-sexual trajectories are being negotiated, there is also a more complex and multi-dimensional relationship between young people's online and offline realities.     

World Making,Critical Pedagogies,and the Geographical Imagination: Where Youth Work Meets Participatory Research

Renewed interest in the critical geographies of education has raised productive yet under‐examined synergies with reflections taking place among radical youth work and participatory research practitioners. In particular, such intersections point to important ways that the geographical imagination might advance a critical yet creative means of learning through the living material forces of everyday worlds. This paper examines this common ground through a collaborative, London‐based case study exploring young people's sense of home and belonging in the inner‐city. It argues that cross‐overs between the praxis of participatory research and youth work offer generative potential to act alongside young people in the production of autonomous geographical knowledges. Specifically, the case is made for prioritising an imaginative, experiential and intersubjective pedagogical process of “world making”, as an alternative to practices that intervene in, act upon and ultimately “other” the everyday lives of young people.     

Grieving home

Drawing on the growing areas of research on emotional embodiment, this paper develops an understanding of the spatiality of grief as central to the discussion of young people's experiences of homelessness. In the context of my engagement with young homeless people in inner-city Sydney, I explore grief as central in shaping young people's everyday body–place relations. I argue that grief over often brutal past homes continues to haunt young people and impact on the ways in which they relate to place, including the place of their own body. I explore young people's displacement and grief-stricken forms of inhabitation as well and their discovery of ‘therapeutic’ places which allow the re-formation of more positive relations to place and self. I argue that while it is understood that grief and trauma are key causes of homelessness amongst young people, grief is rarely explored as an embodied practice, or as a key factor which continues to underpin trajectories of homelessness after initial exits from home.     

Estate youth and complicated migration in Malaysia's oil palm plantations: the emotions of leaving and connecting back

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the emotional relationship young Tamil Indians have with oil palm plantations they are leaving behind or have left behind. Working in a small town in Malaysia, as well as in a large estate, we show how communal and individual aspirations of migration shape young people's mobility. While young people recognize the poverty and marginalization of plantation life, they continue to be emotionally and affectually connected to plantations through socio-cultural and spiritual practices. Post-migration we show how youth maintain estate connections, and argue that the pull back towards plantations is contrary to state-sponsored ideologies of modernization. Not all young people feel the same pull; many try to distance themselves from their estate roots through consumption and other social practices. Responding to calls for researchers emotions to be present in youth research, the paper also briefly reflects how adult emotions shape our understanding of young people's emotions of migration.     

Living with everyday environmental risks: giving a voice to young people in the design of community-based risk communication programs in the city of San Luis Potosí, México

Risk communication programs (RCPs) can contribute to the improvement of community health in marginalized settlements by improving health-related information and practices. Yet, there is a need to include young people's concerns in the design and implementation of RCPs. This study analyses young peoples’ risk perceptions in the city of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, using visual methods such as drawings and photography. Research was conducted with 74 students from two deprived urban neighborhoods. Results indicate that the use of visual techniques enabled them to identify environmental health risks such as unhealthy sedentary habits and the exposure to hazardous items. We conclude that visual methods may help young people to critically reflect on everyday elements in their environment that affect their well-being. By giving them a voice in a reflexive way, visual methods may engage young people as key multipliers in the awareness raising process, and promote their sense of everyday agency.     

Young People's Narratives of Rural-Urban Difference

Although recent research by geographers interested in children and young people has examined young people's experiences in a range of both 'rural' and 'urban' environments, the significance of narratives of rural-urban difference for young people's identities has received comparatively little attention. This paper draws on theories of narrative identity to explore how narratives of rural-urban difference (and, in particular, the cultural hierarchies created and reinforced by these narratives) are significant for the construction of young people's identities. Using empirical material drawn from two separate studies in the USA, one from a mid-sized Sunbelt city and one from rural northern Vermont, the paper examines ways in which narratives of rural-urban difference are significant for young people's senses of self, processes of 'othering', and the constitution of local youth cultures.     

‘Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity,Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground

This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces for the imagination and can enhance agency and, potentially, resistance. However, virtuality is no ‘liberated space’ and it incorporates norms and practices that often mirror those of the material world.     

Home as a Pocket of Local Order: Everyday Activities and The Friction of Distance

Discourse on the information society currently highlights issues of networks, flows and mobilities as prime organizers and re‐organisers of time—space relationships. Such discourse promotes notions of the flexible use of time and space, of people's decoupling from place and even of the end of geography — the belief that distance does not matter. Yet, in this article we argue that the roles of geographical stationarity and proximity in everyday life — understood as the creation and maintaining of pockets of local order — indicate the continuing and often neglected importance of the friction of distance. We demonstrate this empirically by focusing on the home as a pocket of local order, investigating the intensity and spatial extension of people's everyday activities, projects and contacts — their corporeal, virtual and medial (media‐related) mobilities — with the world outside. We support our thesis with data from the population, household and individual levels.     

Young people's perspectives on conflict,reconciliation and reunification in Cyprus

The purpose of this paper is to explore the views of young people on conflict, reconciliation and reunification in Cyprus. The paper is based on focus group discussions with 20 Turkish Cypriot and 20 Greek Cypriot young people, aged between 14 and 16, drawn from two schools located in the divided capital city of Nicosia. While young people's discourses revealed underlying deep-seated hostilities in attitudes between the two groups, there was some evidence of cautious optimism. The paper explores what lessons can be learned from ascertaining young people's viewpoints and how these opinions need to be taken seriously in order to further our understanding of young people's experiences of divided societies.     

Where dogs,ghosts and lions roam: learning from mobile ethnographies on the journey from school

This paper draws on mobility research conducted with children in three countries: Ghana, Malawi and South Africa. It has two interlinked aims: to highlight the potential that mobile interviews can offer in research with young people, especially in research contexts where the main focus is on mobility and its impacts, and to contribute empirical evidence regarding the significance of everyday mobility to young people's lives and future life chances in sub-Saharan Africa. During the pilot phase of our research project on children, transport and mobility, the authors undertook walks home from school with teenage children1 We use the terms children and ‘young people’ interchangeably in this paper. When we asked young people aged ca. 12–18 years from the three countries at our Malawi inception workshop about terminology, they expressed no concern about the use of the term ‘child’ for people in their teens. View all notes in four different research sites: three remote rural, one peri-urban. As the children walked (usually over a distance of around 5 km) their stories of home, of school and of the environment in-between, gradually unfolded. The lived experiences narrated during these journeys offer considerable insights into the daily lives, fears and hopes of the young people concerned, and present a range of issues for further research as our study extends into its main phase.     

Feelings of belonging? young people's views of their surroundings in Kingston,Jamaica

The feelings of young people towards their surroundings have often been neglected in studies of Third World cities. In this paper, I examine these views in Kingston, Jamaica: a large, poor city with high socio‐economic inequality. The young people surveyed have generally positive feelings towards their surroundings, yet are frequently excluded from making decisions about the ways in which these are managed. Their responses shed light on some of the main problems facing the city, and provide a strong case for young people's inclusion in local sustainable development planning.     

PATHS IN TRANSNATIONAL TIME-SPACE: REPRESENTING MOBILITY BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUNG SWEDES

This article sets out to capture and describe individual transnational mobility from a long‐term, biographical perspective. The purpose is to discuss the use of a time‐geographical form of notation to represent people's transnational mobility as paths in time and space, and to demonstrate how such representations can contribute to explaining some of the dynamics of longdistance mobility. An advantage of using time‐space paths is that several aspects of an individual's travel biography can be represented in a single image: intensity and extensity are immediately evident, and the temporal and spatial relationships between the various mobility actions are made visible. Using data describing all transnational trips taken during childhood and adolescence by sixty‐two Swedish youth with different backgrounds, three aspects of how trajectories develop over time are discussed in more detail. The first concerns overall change in travel pattern with time. A dominant pattern of increase in travel with increasing age is observed, indicating the importance of further investigating how travel behaviour is related to experience and life‐course transitions. Second, sequential relationships between migration and temporary mobility are examined. In spite of the relatively small number of respondents, a wide range of such relationships are disclosed in the material. Third, regularity and repetition in long‐distance travel patterns is discussed as an increasingly important aspect of contemporary transnational mobility. Among these young people, highly regular travel is often motivated by enduring long‐distance social relationships, but is also generated by leisure or holiday travel alone.     

Everyday Politics of Fat

Abstract: This paper explores the everyday politics and lived experiences of young people who identify as fat, obese or overweight. Situated within the emerging interdisciplinary fields of fat studies, critical weight studies and critical geographies of body size, this paper gives voice to young people who are often marginalised and frequently stigmatised. I draw attention to the embodied relationalities and intersectionalities evident with the young people's narratives of body size as well as the structures of constraint that operate to reinforce the marginalisation they feel. I conclude by outlining the challenges that exist in transforming the everyday politics of fat.