Children’s right to the city: the emergence of youth councils in the United States

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) spells out many rights, including the right to participate in decision-making. Within an urban context, a child’s ‘right to the city’ includes the opportunity to participate in local governance. Youth councils (YCs) provide such opportunities. Using a nationwide survey in the United States, this paper describes YC characteristics and accomplishments. Findings show that YCs generally operate with little funding and are commonly administered within parks and recreation departments or city council offices. In addition, YCs created prior to the 1990s primarily addressed youth-related problems, whereas those created after 2000, focused more on leadership skills. Significant accomplishments reported by YCs include the development of leadership skills and knowledge of government, and community-based service projects. The conclusion considers the impact of YCs on furthering the goals of the CRC and giving youth access to decision-making.     

‘You said “home” but we don’t have a house’ – children’s lived rights and politics in an asylum centre in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This study explores children’s lived rights and articulated politics in the context of housing underpinned by their lived experiences in an asylum centre in Sweden. The findings reveal a discrepancy between the children’s articulated standpoints, where well-being is connected to having a home, and their lived experiences of lacking conditions for both house and home at the asylum centre. This discrepancy enables demonstration of the children’s articulated politics, as they criticize conditions, practices and relational aspects they experience as constraining their well-being at the asylum centre. Thereby, the children themselves identify the structural denial of their right to conditions for well-being and adequate housing. They also express what conditions for well-being should be accessible to them, which is interpreted here as their making rights claims when their formal rights are not fulfilled.     

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.     

Children’s museums as cultural development strategies for urban revitalization

Cities have increasingly invested in cultural institutions in hopes of revitalizing their urban centers. Critical of the value of these expenditures, scholars have called for an examination of the various types of cultural institutions in which cities have invested, to determine whether they are capable of simultaneously serving the economic, physical, and social goals of urban revitalization. In response to that call, I examine whether the children’s museum, a distinct type of cultural investment, is able to provide this range of public benefit. To do so, I draw on secondary sources to examine the origins, development, and current practices of children’s museum and present an illustrative example of a children’s museum that is intended to serve as a catalyst for urban revitalization in a small city in the USA. I contend that children’s museums are worthy recipients of public funding because they are simultaneously able to address these diverse agendas.     

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.     

Education for what? Shaping the field of climate change education with children and young people as co-researchers

ABSTRACT

Children and young people are often positioned as the next generation of leaders in whom the public imagines or expects to overcome the legacies of climate and environmental inaction. Increasingly analyses of progress in environmental education independently identify the need for researchers and teachers to ‘listen to children’s voices’. In this paper we argue that climate change education presents a significant platform not only for youth voices, but also for a genuine activation of children’s political agency in schools, universities, and the public domain. In so doing, we draw upon the government funded project Climate Change?+?Me, which has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers investigating young people’s voices in climate change. We conclude that climate change education can open up an entirely new field of educational experience and inquiry when it is inclusive of and led by young people.     

Participating together: dialogic space for children and architects in the design process

Typically enmeshed in the ‘voice’ perspective within children’s participation debates, there are currently sporadic insights into designer–child creative dialogue. Drawing on the findings of a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project, this paper articulates moments of dialogue between architects and children in spatial design processes, whose spatial and symbolic qualities help to understand the interactions and meeting of cultures. Several authors have discussed the transformational potential for adults and children to ‘co-author’ identities in dialogical contexts. The paper builds on this body of research to suggest that design dialogue offers the space, literally and metaphorically, for children and architects to participate together. Identifying the qualities of the dialogic design space as potentially present in children’s and adults’ everyday cultures and interdependent relations, it is proposed that this dialogical framework might diversify architects’ and children’s roles in the design process and enrich practices and perceptions of design participation.     

Grasslands as transitional spaces of play: Mongol children’s reimagination of the world in cinematic representation

ABSTRACT

This article examines children’s geographies in cinematic representation. It argues that cinematic landscape that intimates what D. W. Winnicott conceives as ‘transitional space’ contributes to a cinematic rendering of the otherness of childhood. Taking the Chinese movie Mongolian Ping-Pong (2005, dir. Ning Hao) as a case study, this article illustrates how the cinematic space of the grasslands is transformed into multiple transitional spaces of play for the Mongol child protagonists owing to the filmmaker’s employment of cinematic landscape, while a ping-pong ball discovered by one of the children becomes their ‘transitional object’. In transitional spaces, the children safely and creatively manipulate cultural resources of diverse scales to understand the social-cultural identity of the ball. Consequently, their unique vision of the world unfolds. The filmmaker’s cinematic treatment reveals his celebration of the children’s creativity. He sympathises that they cannot escape from acculturation once they start formal schooling in a Han-dominated society.     

Effects of mothers’ deaths on children’s schooling in Matlab subdistrict,Bangladesh

This quantitative analysis examines evidence for the impacts of mothers’ death on the schooling of their left-behind children (ages 6–17 years) in the Matlab Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) area of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. The analysis compared the completed levels of primary and junior secondary schooling in 2005 (respectively Class 1 among ages 6–17, Class 5 among ages 12–17 and Class 7 among ages 15–17) of children whose mothers had died during 1982–2005 (from maternal and/or nonmaternal causes, and any cause) with the completed schooling of children of surviving mothers in 2005. The results, after controlling for selected socioeconomic variables, indicate that children whose mothers had died had lower completion of schooling levels, and that those children from poorer households fared worst.     

Whose space is it anyway? Learning about space to make space to learn

The significance of the environment in which children learn has long been recognised as one of the key elements that can have an influence on the experience and success of education. Usually understood from an adult perspective, here children’s views are interpreted on the educational space that was designed for them. These perspectives are illustrated through using Lefebvre’s Triad model. This includes the perceived, conceived and lived spaces, including the added dimension of time interpreted through an educational lens. The data demonstrates the value of children’s renegotiation of functional space through visual narratives. Deeper understanding of the uniqueness of individual children’s experiences offers opportunities to re-examine the space in alternate ways, which Lefebvre’s model has facilitated. Whilst recognising that the school space needs to be functional, the negotiation of space with children can be approached creatively and still support unique yet diverse pathways to learning.     

‘REAL REVOLUTION’ IN KANA COMMUNE

Embarking from a case study of the Danish commune Kana, this article focuses on an overlooked aspect of the youth rebellion that was an intrinsic part of the self‐articulation of the commune movement: namely, the re‐addressing of the relationship between the private and the public, the personal and the political, spare time and work.     

‘England Failed to do her Duty towards Them’: The India Office and Pauper Indians in the Metropole, 1857–1914

This article examines how the India Office handled cases of destitute Indians, such as sailors and servants, who were stranded in Britain. The empire provided opportunities for work and travel, yet there were no securities for those who were taken advantage of by the system. This article highlights how the India Office was the institution expected to help distressed Indians and yet the secretary of state for India consistently refused to accept official responsibility for them. Nor did the British government try to prevent the problem from occurring in the first place. Instead, the official position taken by the secretary of state for India was to let social institutions intervene, arguing that, as British subjects, Indians could receive relief through the Poor Laws. Workhouses, however, were ill suited to Indians striving to return to their homes. This article addresses these issues through examining three key periods: the early to mid-nineteenth century; a shift in the 1880s when the India Office acknowledged a better policy was needed for the treatment of destitute Indians; and, the turn of the century when a Committee on Distressed Colonial and Indian Subjects was established in 1909. Through a focused study of India Office discourses, this article addresses the ambiguity of imperial policy and assesses how it contributed to competing understandings of British responsibility over imperial subjects.     

‘Like it,don’t like it,you have to like it’: children’s emotional responses to the absence of transnational migrant parents in Lombok,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences and emotions of children in rural East Lombok, Indonesia, who stay behind with relatives or neighbours while their parents leave the country for work. The article contributes to recent scholarship of children’s experiences of transnational migration in Southeast Asia by drawing out the complex emotions of children who stay behind. Based on research conducted in four ‘sending’ villages, the article describes children’s lived experiences of their parent’s transnational migration, and their intense feelings that whether they ‘like it or don’t like it’, they have no choice but to acquiesce to their parents’ long, often indeterminate absences. The research suggests that stay-behind children are entangled in community anxieties pervading the emotional economy of transnational migration, including the embodied emotion of shame (malu) which shapes children’s responses to parental absence. By focusing on children’s own views and experiences, we contribute to growing debates about the implications of migration for children’s rights and well-being in Southeast Asia.     

Situating (Young) teenagers in geographies of children and youth

The past decade has been an exciting and productive period in the study of children's and young people's geographies. The principal aim of this paper is to contribute to this field of research by presenting the arguments for a more substantive focus on teenagers' geographies. Firstly, the terms ‘children’ and ‘young people’ are constructed as synonymous and used interchangeably and the complex transitional positioning of young teenagers—situated between childhood, youth and adulthood—has been relatively neglected. Secondly, many researchers have been engaged in developing methods, which aim to challenge unequal power relations between adult researchers and young participants but little focus has been placed on utilizing participants' own constructions of themselves. The final argument for a more coherent focus on teenagers' geographies rests on the contribution that geographers can make to challenging negative stereotypes of teenagers within policy and the media. The paper concludes by outlining what form an emphasis on teenagers' geographies may take.