Suburban Identity in Paul Maitland's Paintings of Cheyne Walk

The aim of this article is to consider the extent to which Paul Maitland's paintings of Cheyne Walk addressed the problem of establishing suburban identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the modern suburb during this period presented a particular problem with regard to how this form of urban living might be defined, understood and experienced. As part of a group of artists that could loosely by described as British Impressionists, Maitland was among the first to engage in a close study of this subject. This article situates Maitland's visual project within its wider cultural context, comparing his work with that of associated artists also interested in the suburban subject and in Cheyne Walk in particular and with a range of contemporary texts that addressed the complex problem of Chelsea's place identity, including guidebooks, letters, novels and the work of local historians. Drawing on the methodology of cultural and historical geography, this article highlights the extent to which place identity changes through time and how its formulation is based upon the economic and social structures of those who ‘live’ the place. Adopting and elaborating a range of visual signifiers associated with the modern suburb, including both its rural and working aspect, Maitland's paintings of Cheyne Walk provide a valuable and subtle insight into how this new urban space was being conceptualized at the end of the nineteenth century.     

Foucault,space and primary school dining rooms

This paper takes up recent debates within Children's Geographies as to the ‘usefulness’ of theory and its application to school dining rooms. The paper argues that in particular, Foucault's notions of governmentality have the potential to advance theoretical understandings of the spatiality of school dining rooms, the social relationships that occur within them and that in addition this can have relevant practical and policy implications that could impact upon the everyday lives of children that are both constituted by and constitutive of this space.     

The relationship between school ground design and intensity of physical activity

In this study, we investigated the relationship between school ground design and children's physical activity levels. In particular, we were interested in understanding the contribution of ‘green’ school ground design to physical activity levels. Data for this study were collected at an elementary school in Australia and in Canada. At each school, scans of Target Areas were completed to record the students' location and intensity of physical activity, based on the System for Observing Play and Leisure Activity in Youth (SOPLAY) (Australia: 23 scans, 6 Target Areas; Canada: 18 scans, 7 Target Areas). At both schools, the highest percentage of children present was engaged in vigorous physical activity on the manufactured equipment (42% of children/scan). Similarly, at both schools, the green area encouraged the highest percentage of children present to be engaged in moderate physical activity (47% of Australian children/scan, 51% of Canadian children/scan). The patterns of sedentary behavior differed slightly between countries. At the Australian school, the paved sporting courts (57%) and the paved canteen courtyard (50.5%) promoted the highest degree of sedentary play. At the Canadian school, the treed grassy berm (42%) and the treed concrete steps (43%) encouraged the highest percentage of sedentary behavior, followed by the open asphalt (34%). These results are also discussed in light of gender distribution. We conclude with a discussion of the design and cultural factors that influence children's physical activity on school grounds. We argue that if school grounds are to realize their potential to promote physical activity, they should include a greater diversity of design features and ‘green’ elements that engage children of varying interests and abilities in active play.     

Contestation and negotiation: regionalism and the politics of school textbooks in Ukraine's eastern borderlands

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to explore the (re)construction of identities in three regions adjacent to the Russian–Ukrainian border. The article analyses the areas' historical and political development and argues that placing such areas within a mega‐region term such as ‘eastern Ukraine’ fails to recognise important differences between them. Content analysis of regional history textbooks reveals that the ‘official’ state historical narrative found in school history textbooks is heavily negotiated, with regional elites in each area ‘picking and choosing’ which parts of the ‘official’ state narrative to accept and which parts to reject. In this way, the article demonstrates how the notions of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ are highly debated topics in the Ukrainian classroom as the central and local state elites are both part of the dynamic process of (re)definition of national identities.     

Care-less spaces and identity construction: transition to secondary school for disabled children

There is a growing body of literature which marks out a feminist ethics of care and it is within this framework we understand transitions from primary to secondary school education can be challenging and care-less, especially for disabled children. By exploring the narratives of parents and professionals, we investigate transitions and self-identity, as a meaningful transition depends on the care-full spaces pupils inhabit. These education narratives are all in the context of privileging academic attainment and a culture of testing and examinations. Parents and professionals, as well as children are also surveyed. Until there are care-full education processes, marginalisation will remain, impacting on disabled children’s transition to secondary school and healthy identity construction. Moreover, if educational challenges are not addressed, their life chances are increasingly limited. Interdependent caring work enables engagement in a meaningful education and positive identity formation. In school and at home, care-full spaces are key in this process.     

Italian cultural geography,or the history of a prolific absence

This article focuses on a group of buildings that form the site for a Steiner school in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. It examines the ways in which an environmentally friendly, ‘ecological’ structure was (and is) constructed such that the building and its accompanying practices might be seen as ‘performed art’. By more critically examining the school's geographies through ethnographic material, the paper moves away from the buildings' symbolic meanings to demonstrate how art and nature intersect in various ways, in the school's life. Art and nature were crucial to the type of education there, the physical process of building the school, and daily uses of the buildings. The paper also explores how the art-nature intersection is involved in the construction of ethical discourses and practices constitutive of ‘childhood’ and ‘education’.     

The impact of the school space on research methodology,child participation and safety: views from children in Zanzibar

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the impact of school environments as research spaces on participatory research methods, children’s agency and safety. The article draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork on children’s perceptions of protection programmes in state and Qur’anic schools in Zanzibar Town. Working with ‘draw & write’ and photovoice approaches disclosed issues with children’s safety in schools and highlighted limitations of participatory research in educational spaces. Drawing on Zanzibari children’s perspectives, I suggest that to improve fragile theoretical ideals about children’s participation in participatory approaches in educational settings, research processes need cultural sensitization and conceptualization in relation to the intersecting notions of place and personhood. This, as the paper shows, needs to guide and can help develop a respectful understanding of children’s lives. This paper contributes to discussions on childhood research ethics and constructions of ‘safe research spaces’.     

Celebrating British multiculturalism,lamenting England/Britain's past

Drawing upon Littler and Naidoo's ‘white past, multicultural present’ alignment, this article examines English newspaper coverage of two ‘British’ events held in 2012 (the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympic Games). In light of recent work on English nationalism, national identity and multiculturalism, this article argues that representations of Britain oscillated between lamentations for an English/British past – marred by decline – and a present that, while being portrayed as both confident and progressive, was beset by latent anxieties. In doing so, ‘past’ reflections of England/Britain were presented as a ‘safe’ and legitimate source of belonging that had subsequently been lost and undermined amidst the diversity of the ‘present’. As a result, feelings of discontent, anxiety and nostalgia were dialectically constructed alongside ‘traditional’ understandings of England/Britain. Indeed, this draws attention to the ways in which particular ‘versions’ of the past are engaged with and the impact that this can have on discussions related to multiculturalism and the multiethnic history of England/Britain.     

A visual ethnographic pilot study of school travel for families living with childhood disability

ABSTRACT

Children’s school transport has become a major research focus over the past 20 years, particularly within the fields of planning, transport geography, and children’s geographies. However, this work has rarely considered children living with disability. This article presents the pilot component of a visual ethnographic study about school transport within families living with childhood disability. It explains why we piloted the study, details the pilot process, and presents lessons learned from piloting the study with two families of children living with different mobility needs. The lessons largely concern the design of interview guides and the interviewing process, as well as the development of an adaptive photo kit to enable children’s independent participation. The article shows how piloting qualitative studies, particularly those involving disabled children, can be invaluable in terms of improving data collection technologies and logistics, as well as enabling inclusive participation.     

A link in ‘the great chain of Empire friendship’: the Victoria League in New Zealand

With the objective of exploring New Zealand women's part in imperialism, this article focuses on the history of the Victoria League. Through its activities during war and peace, the League promoted New Zealand's place as a loyal part of the British Empire. The League in New Zealand was part of a ‘female imperialism’ whereby elite women in the ‘white’ settler societies performed gendered work to promote the strength and unity of the Empire. Women's work considered suitable for empire friendliness and unity ranged from hospitality and socialising in the ‘private’ female world, to the support of immigration and education. Wartime saw patriotic ‘mothers of empire’ in full force. The article covers the League's work into the second half of the twentieth century when, despite the ‘end of empire’, imperial loyalty endured, entwined with emerging national identities. Maternal imperial identity slowly waned, the legacy of Queen Victoria lasting until local challenges to the process of colonisation became vocal.     

Children's daily travel to school in Johannesburg-Soweto,South Africa: geography and school choice in the Birth to Twenty cohort study

This paper has two aims: to explore approaches to the measurement of children's daily travel to school in a context of limited geospatial data availability and to provide data regarding school choice and distance travelled to school in Soweto-Johannesburg, South Africa. The paper makes use of data from the Birth to Twenty cohort study (n?=?1428) to explore three different approaches to estimating school choice and travel to school. First, straight-line distance between home and school is calculated. Second, census geography is used to determine whether a child's home and school fall in the same area. Third, distance data are used to determine whether a child attends the nearest school. Each of these approaches highlights a different aspect of mobility, and all provide valuable data. Overall, primary-school-aged children in Soweto-Johannesburg are shown to be travelling substantial distances to school on a daily basis. Over a third travel more than 3 km one way to school, 60% attend schools outside of the suburb in which they live, and only 18% attend their nearest school. These data provide evidence for high levels of school choice in Johannesburg-Soweto, and that families and children are making substantial investments in pursuit of high-quality educational opportunities. Additionally, these data suggest that two patterns of school choice are evident: one pattern involving travel of substantial distances and requiring a higher level of financial investment and a second pattern involving choice between more local schools, requiring less travel and a more limited financial investment.     

Nationality and children's drawings — pictures ‘about Scotland’ by primary school children in Edinburgh,Scotland and Syracuse,New York State

The way that children perceive and understand places and locations is an area of geographical research that had an intermittent history until the 1990s saw a sustained interest in ‘children's geographies’. Here I build upon these studies and those of spatial cognition, developmental psychology, constructions of nation and nationality, by asking children to draw pictures about a nation. I review this methodology and analyse drawings collected from work with children in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Syracuse, New York State. I obtained 127 pictures ‘about Scotland’ drawn by six to nine year olds. These drawings reveal a range of stereotypical images of Scotland that are learned, both nationally and internationally, by this early age. They also suggest that knowledge and experience of Scotland varies by school district in each location and that these children often intertwine personal and national narratives when representing Scotland.     

Geographies of migration and relatedness: transmigrancy in open transnational adoptive parenting

Current transnational adoptive parenting is characterized by ambiguous practices of (1) discursively distancing adoptive children from immigrants, while (2) symbolically or actually reconnecting newly constituted families to children's birth countries through charity and culture work. This ambiguity reveals the ubiquity of contradictory and essentialist understandings of categories of familial and national belonging. However, adoptive parents’ strategies for accommodating their children's sense of belonging may also open up space for rethinking care and family building in transnational contexts. Using the case of a Belgian family who adopted a 12-year-old girl from Ethiopia, decided to maintain strong connections with the child's biological family, engage in charity work in Ethiopia and forge strong ties with immigrant communities in Belgium, the article explores how the concept of ‘transmigration’ may further our understanding of identity configurations within adoptive families. Furthermore, this particular case of ‘open’ transnational adoptive parenting testifies to adoptive parents’ efforts to escape from essentialist and exclusionary frameworks and create counter-spaces of multiplicity and transmigrancy in a context of severe social and economic inequality.     

National identity: banal,personal and embedded

ABSTRACT. This article examines the theoretical problem of understanding the relationship between personal and social dimensions of national identity. It does this by relating ethnographic data collected during a study of a merger between a Scottish and an English bank to three conceptual frameworks. First, it considers Michael Billig's thesis of ‘banal nationalism’. Then it addresses Anthony P. Cohen's concept of ‘personal nationalism’. Finally, it adapts a conception of the relationship between personal and social identity found in the recent work of Derek Layder. Based on this it argues that national identities, like all identities, are rendered salient for persons when they seem to address personal issues of power over one's life, and that the various social organisational settings through which people realise control over their lives (in this case, the bank) are thus crucial contexts for understanding people's attachments to identities, national and otherwise.     

Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration,digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.     

Crafting masculinities: gender,culture and emotion at work in the surfboard industry

This article examines the masculinities of male workers in the context of an emotionally rich form of labour: surfboard-making. Contributing to emerging research around the emotional and embodied dimensions of men's working lives, the article maps the cultural, emotional and embodied dimensions of work onto masculine identity construction. Combining cultural economy theory, emotional geographies and in-depth ethnographic methods, I reveal how surfboard-making has become a gendered form of work; how jobs rely on (and impact) the body and what surfboard-making means to workers outside of financial returns. Following a manual labour process, and informed by Western surfing subculture, commercial surfboard-making has layered onto male bodies. Men perform ‘blokey’ masculinities in relation with one another. However, doing manual craftwork evokes close, personal interaction; among co-workers but also through engagements with place and local customers. Felt, embodied craft skills help workers personalise boards for individual customers and local breaks. Beneath masculine work cultures and pretensions, surfboard-making is a deeply emotional and embodied work. Labour is dependent on haptic knowledge: sense of touch, bodily movement and eye for detail. Contrasting their blokey masculinity, surfboard-makers rely on intimate links between their bodies, tools, materials, customers and surfing places. These ‘strong bodied’ men articulate a ‘passion’ and ‘love’ for ‘soulful’ jobs, demonstrating how waged work comprises alternative masculinities, shaped by working culture, relations and labour processes. A cultural economy framework and emotionally engaged research approach are valuable for challenging hegemonic masculinity, important for achieving more inclusive, tolerant and equitable workplaces.     

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.     

After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home: Re-defining Finnish Childhood Space

School children's use of their home during the after-school hours has become a controversial question in Finnish society. The article discusses cultural conceptions and uses of home as a specific space for children by comparing two different sets of empirical data: children's accounts of their after-school spaces and media debate on the same topic. Activated public concern in media accounts is analysed as a process of re-defining the properties of ‘proper places’ for children, whereas children's accounts are interpreted as expressions of local cultures. For the children, home is an ideal place for spending after-school time, while the public debate portrays the home as empty and children as lonely and unsafe. Definitions of home in after-school time are considered as part of a broader cultural process of re-defining contemporary Finnish childhood in which control turns out to be a crucial dimension of children's ‘proper places’.     

Is Britain European?

To ask ‘Is Britain European?’ is to engage in a particularly difficult area of the always elusive business of Identity Studies. The very nature and future viability of Britain have recently been subject to extensive questioning. Meanwhile, one can distinguish at least six politically relevant senses of the term ‘European’. Britain was never as exceptional as was suggested by the traditional story of British exceptionalism told by the ‘Island Story’ school of historians. Moreover, it has become much less insular over the past sixty years. The question is whether the process has been Europeanization, Americanization or simply globalization. There is considerable evidence that the country's ties to what Churchill called 'the English‐speaking peoples' are still as strong as those to continental Europe. In fact, both sets of ties have become stronger. But these identities are not exclusive. Britain has always been a place of multiple over‐lapping identities: English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, as well as British, European and transoceanic. That Britain's European identity is bound to remain only a partial identity does not mean it has to be a shallow one. If Britain is to be a full and effective participant in Europe it has to deepen its European identity, to develop something of the normative, idealistic sense of being European which is second nature to most continental Europeans engaged in these debates.     

Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity: an investigation of the conversion of national‐identity in Taiwan

National‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. ‘Converts’ usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the ‘awakening’ plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous ‘wrong’ self and a current ‘correct’ self is mentioned, and the ‘awakening’ is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have ‘a self in the making’ which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that ‘awakeners’ usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the ‘grand’ awakening (‘Awakening’). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015