Governing Warlpiri Subjects: Indigenous Employment and Training Programs in the Central Australian Mining Industry

In remote Australia there is an expanding emphasis on the employment and training of Indigenous people in the mining industry. Employment and training programs are presented as an effective strategy for breaking welfare dependence and empowering individuals and communities to take responsibility for their future. Using the case of programs targeting Warlpiri people's participation in the gold mining industry in the Tanami Region of the Northern Territory of Australia, this paper explores some of the different ways in which Warlpiri people are being governed. It investigates the endeavours, through various practices and discourses, to constitute Warlpiri people as particular kinds of neoliberal and ‘job ready’ subjects. Whilst the employment and training programs claim to respect the culture and liberties of Warlpiri people, there are clearly outlined attempts to construct self‐reliant, autonomous and active individuals. Finally, the paper explores the potential links between rationalisations justifying the programs and the current concern, at the level of state and national governments, to direct various populations into work.     

Engaging with Young People's Conceptions of the Political

In many states, there are concerns about declining levels of political engagement and participation among young people. Our understanding of this decline, however, is limited because much of the research on youth politics is based on a narrow conception of 'the political', little attempt is made to explore how people themselves define politics, non-participation is not adequately problematised, and there are in sufficient youth-specific explanations for declining participation among young people. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in Britain, I argue there is a need to develop an approach and research methodology that engages with young people's conceptions of the political.     

The student is not the fisherman: temporal displacement of young people's identities in Tanzania

This paper examines how young Tanzanians have their identities as environmental actors displaced into the future by local adults, teachers, educational institutions and teaching materials which seek to educate them about environmental sustainability and conservation. Whilst there has been considerable attention to young people's agency in reproducing their own identities, I argue here that the temporal displacement of young identities operates through a network of interlinked structures which act on young people's lives, including the identity work of young people themselves. Educational material produced by non-governmental organisations and the discursive work of adults both seek to position young people as having agency to act in and make decisions about the environment at an undetermined time in the future. Young people themselves can perform different identities within the space of the school and in the community or family, yet they may also understand their own identities as only having agency at a temporally distant point. The displacement of young identities has important implications for pedagogy which relates to environmental education, and for how the reproduction of young people's identities is conceptualised.     

Urban research and child-friendly cities: a new Australian outline

Recent public debates about Australia's children and young people have begun to acknowledge the direct impact of urban development on their health and well-being. This paper reviews a broad range of trans-disciplinary literature addressing child-friendliness in contemporary Australian cities, drawing particular attention to the fact that even some of the most recognised texts on children and young people in Australia still make few references in their analysis to the issue of place and neighbourhood. More specifically, the paper points to two particular research challenges confronting the ongoing study of young people's well-being in urban areas, including (a) the need for a more thorough analysis, both conceptual and applied, about how children and young people's well-being is affected by different urban forms and by the social and ecological variations that occur throughout cities; and (b) the focus on younger children needs to be complemented by a focus on adolescents and young adults who in turn need to be actively involved in confronting these challenges.     

‘But They Just Don't Respect Us’: young people's experiences of (dis)respected citizenship and the New Labour Respect Agenda

The New Labour Respect Agenda fuses anti-social behaviour policies, Third Way active citizenship, and a theory of community-based support and regulation. The Respect Agenda itself has a specific focus on, and direct implications for, children and young people, as well as for children living in vulnerable families. This paper argues that the theoretical basis for New Labour's ‘Respect’ is limited and ultimately flawed. Whilst New Labour policy demands respect from young people, young people's lived citizenship is too often experienced in terms of disrespect and even shame of the self. Young people respond to these feelings of disrespect by seeking out other ways through which respect can be acted out and negotiated. Respect, as conceptualised through the New Labour lens will criminalise vulnerable young people, thereby further stripping them of self-respect, inter-personal respect and societal respect. The paper concludes that respect should be an outcome of policy and a philosophy of a social justice led politics, rather than a conditionally led policy.     

‘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.     

'Professionalising' Participation: From Rhetoric to Practice

Local government is increasingly seeking to encourage young people's participation in local government planning and decision-making. This paper examines the relationship between professionals in local government and the young people who are the focus of local government participatory initiatives. We argue that whilst the move towards developing participation initiatives is welcome, there is a need to adopt a process of critical reflection with regard to these initiatives. The case of one New Zealand city is examined where young people express their views on the effectiveness or otherwise of their council's participation initiatives. Our findings suggest that whilst well intentioned these initiatives have had limited success in facilitating meaningful participation and perhaps the participation process as currently practised is in urgent need of review.     

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.     

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.     

Young people's involvement in policy research

This article reviews the legacy of young people's involvement in policy research in the UK and proposes an approach of collaboration with young people that may be useful in other settings. It critiques the sociocultural and socioeconomic context relevant to young people's involvement in research, using the Young Researcher Network (YRN) as a case study. A key benefit of using the YRN has been the ability to identify and analyse potential barriers and facilitators influencing the relationships of young people and organisations whilst both groups worked together to improve policy. This allowed young people to connect to the policy environment in a meaningful way. The approach has been embedded into The Office for the Children's Commissioner in England, the National Institute for Health Research as well as other leading youth organisations in the UK, which is likely to increase the direct involvement of young people in policy research.     

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.     

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND HUMAN SPACE IN NORTH‐EASTERN IBERIA DURING THE THIRD CENTURY BC

By using GIS (Geographical Information System) visibility analysis, the visual surveillance of, and ways in which people engaged and experienced, an Iberian landscape north of Barcelona during the third century BC are explored. The study of visual surveillance from the hillforts that dominated the area is understood as a means to address issues of social structure and hierarchy. How Iberian people might have viewed and rationalized their world, which is an issue that has so far not been addressed within the theoretical approaches that currently characterize this area of Mediterranean archaeology, is explored here for the first time. Emphasis is placed on people's sense of place and on hillforts' prominence. Visibility analysis indicates a highly structured society, where each hillfort might have primarily controlled given zones of the landscape and might have informed others about events taking place there through an integrated visibility network. Whilst hillforts appear to have been sited according to the view that they offered, they do not seem to have been intended to maximize their own visual impact. Social and experiential approaches compellingly coincide to suggest a subdivision of this society between mountain and coastal communities in both practical and perceptual terms.     

Surviving through movement: the mobility of urban youth in Ghana

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South.     

The Politics of Emotion in Participatory Processes of Empowerment and Change

In this article I reflect on the role of critical analysis and emotions in participatory approaches to empowerment and change. I argue that, in participatory research and practice, certain cognitive and analytical knowledges are prioritized as principal catalysts of empowerment and transformation at the cost of recognizing, and making full use of, the empowering potential of emotional and embodied knowledges. This argument is developed based on 2 years of fieldwork in a local youth participation project in Mejicanos, a poor and violent neighborhood in El Salvador, aiming at empowering young people by involving them in participatory action research (PAR). ¹ As part of my research, I looked critically at the young people's PAR process, asking whether and how they felt empowered by it and whether and how social change came about. Originally, the research did not focus on emotions, yet, in an inductive fashion, emotions and embodied knowledges evolved from fieldwork as crucial elements in understanding participation, empowerment and social transformation.     

Daily,Immediate Conflicts: an Analysis of Villagers' Arguments about a Multinational Nickel Mining Project in New Caledonia1

Local communities are not the homogenous entities, unanimously opposed to industrial development, that academic and popular literature often portray them to be. In this paper, I discuss my research in New Caledonian villages near a potential mining project. I analyse the diversity of individuals' responses to industrial activities, the intra‐community conflicts that this development triggered or exacerbated, and the discourses that people implemented to support their positions. Specifically, people's statements — and, presumably, beliefs — about dangers from ecological damage and ancestral anger reflected their expectations of the project's consequences for their sub‐group's social status. I argue that, through their interactions with the mining company, what many if not most of these villagers primarily sought was respect of their social positions and control of their own destinies. They especially aspired to determine what happened to their land, the source of their identity and dignity.     

Declining Youth In‐migration in Rural Western Australia: the Role of Perceptions of Rural Employment and Lifestyle Opportunities

Over the last two decades there has been a steady decline in youth migration to Australian rural communities. Generally, inland agricultural communities are the most seriously impacted by this trend. Coupled with high rates of youth out‐migration, many rural communities face difficulties in attracting young people to fill skilled job vacancies and apprentice positions. Declining youth in‐migration also has social consequences, effectively reducing the capacity of rural communities to replenish their skill base and social networks. This research identifies how urban‐based youth perceive rural lifestyles and employment opportunities and how this is linked to their willingness to move to rural areas. The study reveals that young people attach undesirable aesthetic values to the physical environment of inland rural communities and perceive them as socially isolating and as having minimal opportunities for career advancement. However, the perceptions of those who live, or had lived, in rural areas are far more positive than those who have had little experience in rural communities. Accordingly, those who had previously lived in inland regions were far more likely to move to rural areas than those who had limited lived experience of rural communities. Overall, the research found that perceptions of lifestyle and employment opportunities were important influences on young people's willingness to move to rural communities.     

The right to be heard: Citizenship and language

In this paper we address the importance and contestation of language in terms of citizenship and the development of political communities by focusing on the example of a minority language – British Sign Language. Language is crucial to debates about citizenship and belonging because the State has to rely on language for its very functioning, indeed political practice itself is a form of communicative action. For individuals language is deeply implicated in their ability to claim and maintain their rights and in their affective connections with others and sense of identification. The paper therefore begins by identifying that Deaf people's legal entitlements (e.g. to vote) are an abstract form of citizenship because as sign language users they have difficulties understanding both political and wider civil institutions and practices, and so lack the cultural proficiencies necessary to exercise citizenship in a substantive sense. We then go onto consider citizenship in the broader sense of how groups are included or situated in the public sphere, and in doing so to consider the extent to which Deaf people might be understood to have a liveable place in an oral society. The final section examines how the sense of injustice which flows from Deaf people's experiences of marginalisation in the public realm means that they are developing alternative forms of political commitment predicated on non-state spaces of belonging – where they can live their language – at both local and transnational scales. The paper concludes by reflecting on the notion of differentiated citizenship and the implications of Deaf people's claims to language rights.     

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.     

Experiencing Climate: Finding Weather in Eighteenth Century Cumbria

This article examines whether Tim Ingold's concept of the ‘weather-world’ can be applied within discussions of climate in archaeology. Using a case study of eighteenth century Cumbria, the article first looks at the issues arising when environmental models are used to investigate landscape change. It then assesses the insights on landscape, weather and farming that can be gained from two historical diaries. It is recognised that advances in complex ecosystem and agent-based modelling have improved ‘climate change archaeology’, but that there are aspects of people's relationships with the weather and climate that are ill-suited to quantification. The article concludes by arguing that people's qualitative engagements with the weather are integral to how past people viewed and used the landscape.     

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.