‘It’s good but it’s not enough’: the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions

Developing a critical analysis of the relational and situated practices of social policy, this paper draws on an evaluation of an early intervention project in Scotland (UK) where volunteer adult mentors supported young people ‘at risk’ of offending or antisocial behaviour. Contributing to ‘enlivened’ accounts of social practice, we explore how practices of mentoring developed through the co-presence of mentor and young person in the often transitory spaces of care which characterized the ‘diversionary activities’ approach in the project. We expand the notion of the relational in social practice beyond the care-recipient dyad to include wider networks of care (families, programme workers, social institutions). The paper explores how such social interventions might both be ‘good’ for the young people involved, and yet recognize critiques that more individualized models of intervention inevitably have limitations which make them ‘not enough’ to deal with structural inequalities and disadvantages. Acknowledging the impacts of neoliberalism, we argue critical attention to diverse situated relational practices points to the excessive nature of engagement in social policy and provides scope for transformative practice where young people’s geographies can be ‘upscaled’ to connect to the realms of social policy and practice.     

Strangers and estrangement: young people’s renegotiations of birth and foster family relationships as they transition out of care and the implications for the state as parent*

ABSTRACT

Many young people ageing out of state care continue to experience very poor life outcomes. Based on research following 21 care leavers aged 15–18 over three years, this article charts how children’s experiences in troubled birth families are often compounded in care by multiple placement moves, the gradual disintegration of sibling units over time and troubling relationships with the adults charged with their care. It considers the effects of living with strangers and of transient relationships with carers and professionals, and explores young people’s feelings of rejection by, and responsibility for, their birth families. The capacity of the ‘corporate parent’ model to ensure adequate attention is paid to relationships in young people’s lives is questioned. Hollingsworth’s theory of foundational rights, incorporating considerations of relational autonomy, is utilised to reconsider the state’s obligations towards children for whom it has taken on the parental role, both during and beyond their legal minority.     

The comfort of the river: understanding the affective geographies of angling waterscapes in young people’s coping practices

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic research with angling intervention programmes working with ‘disaffected’ young people in the UK to demonstrate how young people use the affective geographies of waterscapes to regulate their feelings and escape stressful lives. But rather than interpret the restorative or therapeutic quality of waterscapes as the consequence of (passive) immersion into green/blue spaces, we argue that ‘comfort’ is derived from an ongoing, active engagement with(in) the world. Drawing on works influenced by phenomenological theories and relational understandings of the more-than-human world, we illustrate how the affectual qualities of waterscapes are continually ‘woven’ into being through the material and embodied practices of young anglers. However, understanding why waterscapes ‘matter’ to young people also requires accounting for those assemblages originating in the past that shape these co-experienced worlds.     

‘The largest volunteer life saving corps in the world’: centering child caregiving in histories of U.S. human security through the Little Mothers’ League

Abstract

In this article, I explore the relationship between youth, security, and caregiving through a study of the U.S. Little Mothers’ Leagues, an initiative which began in New York City in 1910 with the aim of reducing infant mortality by training young girls to properly care for their infant siblings. Critical approaches to caregiving view security and insecurity as relational, drawing attention to contemporary power arrangements in the global caregiving industry and the contemporary crisis of care. However, in treating children as perpetual care recipients, it fails to provide a robust framework for understanding youth and children in historical and contemporary concerns related to human security. The history of the Little Mothers, largely children of European ‘non-native white’ immigrant families, illustrates the importance of children in securing population-wide well-being and the nation’s status in the global competition to reduce infant mortality. When set in contrast to the eugenics-inspired Mothercraft movement, the case reveals how children and youth become enlisted into projects of national human security, and how their ambiguity as caregivers – too young according to modern childhood, yet effective lifesavers – intersects with race and gender to further obscure their status as caregiving agents     

Troubling meanings of family and competing moral imperatives in the family lives of young people with a parent who is at the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a narrative study of young people with a parent who is at the end of life to examine how family lives are troubled by life-limiting parental illness. Young people struggled to reconcile the physical and emotional absence of family members with meanings of ‘family’; the extent to which young people could rely on family to ‘be there’ in these troubling circumstances was of practical, emotional and moral significance. Our discussion is situated in the context of an English end of life care policy predicated on the ideal of a good death as one that takes place at home accompanied by family members. We explore how the shift away from family as a site for nurturing children towards family as a space to care for the dying is experienced by young people, and consider how these competing moral imperatives are negotiated through relational practices of care.     

Children and young people as co-researchers – researching subjective well-being in residential area with visual and verbal methods

In this article, we focus on child perspective methodology when co-researching well-being with children and young people. The paper explores how to produce and analyse data produced with children and young people, and how to further develop the method of co-researching with them? We combined visual and verbal methods by using photo elicitation interviews (N?=?16) and drawing group discussions (N?=?49) to study the subjective well-being of 2–16-year-olds in their residential areas. We found out that by combining two methods it is possible to achieve a wider view of children’s subjective well-being. However, we must be aware that well-being is a complex entity and that there are barriers to use child perspective methods. Co-researching requires situationality, reciprocity and the researcher’s willingness to hear the perspectives of children.     

Troubled kids? Locational disadvantage,opportunity structures and social exclusion

ABSTRACT

Young people growing up in poverty often have restricted access to out-of-school enrichment activities that are important for generating the soft skills that support post-school transitions. This paper compares young Australians’ accounts of their opportunity structures – their engagement with enrichment activities, their post-school aspirations, and their knowledge of routes to achieve them – in two suburb types – improver suburbs (close to the median on many indicators) and isolate suburbs (severely disadvantaged on most indicators). While young people in improver suburbs felt able to access facilities and networks in equally or more affluent neighbouring suburbs, young people in isolate suburbs felt excluded from neighbouring suburbs, and experienced more restricted opportunity structures than young people living in improver suburbs, even those who were themselves economically disadvantaged. The paper argues that this geographical experience of exclusion prevents many economically disadvantaged young people from accumulating knowledge and skills valued in post-school settings.     

The impacts of parental migration on children’s subjective well-being in rural china: a double-edged sword

ABSTRACT

The emerging problem of left-behind children has attracted mounting academic and policy attention. Prior studies primarily cast light on left-behind children’s education, health, and behavior, while their subjective well-being is much less understood yet. Based on a nationally representative sample of rural children aged 10–15 in 2014, we examine the impacts of different types of parental migration on children’s subjective well-being and how these affects vary between boys and girls. The results show that parental migration is a double-edged sword: children from both-parent migrant families report compromised life satisfaction and relationship quality compared with those in integral families, and mother-only migration significantly lowers children’s subjective health. On the flip side, father-only migration enhances children’s aspiration for attaining college, an encouraging effect that is even stronger than that of parental education and family income. These effects are heterogeneous by children’s gender: boys seem to be more susceptible to the disruptive effects of both-parent migration; mother-only migration effectively promotes girls’ educational aspiration while father-only migration promotes boys’. This study portrays a comprehensive image of left-behind children. Relaxation of hukou restriction, equal access to education, and revitalization of rural economies are imperative to improve the well-being of left-behind children.

Abbreviations: LBC: Left-behing children; SWB: subjective well-being     

A generational attitude: young adults facing the economic crisis in Milan

Abstract

For almost 10 years there has been talk of the economic crisis affecting the European area, with more evident effects in the Mediterranean countries. Yet the expression ‘economic crisis’ has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in different ways. Precariousness and reduced job opportunities, with their consequences for social mobility, constitute only the more explicit and raw evidence of the lived experience of the crisis among young people. Although families remain the all-solving institution, the consequences of the crisis are diversified according to the economic, cultural and social capital of each individual, to gender and generation position, and to subjective and contextualized perceptions. This article presents research conducted to investigate how young people living in the urban area of Milan locate, react, readapt and reinvent themselves in the present economic context by analysing their aspirations, expectations and practices. We develop a comparative analysis of the main structural bias (gender, education, social class position) in order to shed light on the effects and perceptions of the crisis among young people in the city of Milan.     

‘Nature makes people happy,that’s what it sort of means:’ children’s definitions and perceptions of nature in rural Northwestern Ontario

ABSTRACT

Nature exposure positively impacts children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive health and development. We know less about how children perceive their connection with nature and what nature means to them. This study uses focus groups to understand how rural Canadian children define, experience, and perceive benefits of nature. Using thematic analysis, we identified three primary themes. First, while children associate nature with specific activities, natural elements, and locations, they also conceptualize nature as ‘a whole community.’ Second, children experienced nature through doing, highlighting how activities connected them with nature while recognizing constraints on those engagements. Finally, children demonstrated agency in accessing nature to improve their emotional states. These findings indicate that from children’s views, nature is more than just space with natural elements. Children are also knowledgeable about the health benefits of nature, and capitalize on this knowledge. These findings can inform interventions to increase children’s interactions with outdoor environments.     

Youthful geographies: from Cool Places to hyper-dynamic Asia

ABSTRACT

Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures published in 1998 effectively launched young people's geographies and provided interesting examples of the ‘cultural’ and ‘feminist turns’ through its engagement with cultural studies. It placed young people as central and showcased young arts students through their printmaking self-portraits. This article looks back to 1998 and forward beyond 2018 to explore the concept of ‘youthful geographies’. It reflects on the starting points for this edited collection and explores the ways in which scholarship focusing on young people worked to establish the space to pursue a challenge to the youthful ‘present absence’ in Geography. It poses the question: ‘Where are young people in the sub-disciplines of Geography’? and acknowledges the value and innovation that youthful scholars bring to geographies of young people. In the final section I reflect on a decade of the nascent growth of scholarship located in, and focused on, Asian youthful geographies.     

Youth aspirations and employment in provincial Indonesia: a view from the lower middle classes

ABSTRACT

Demographically and geographically, lower middle class youth occupy an ambiguous position in Indonesian society, embodying elements of both privilege and marginality. Drawing on interviews and 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2013, this article considers how an emerging provincial middle class seeks to make good on the promises of an expanding higher education system and proliferation of globalised youth cultures. I examine the capacity and limits of higher education in facilitating young people’s aspirations for youth lifestyles, jobs and the future in a regional labour market with high levels of youth underemployment and informality. Young people’s aspirations for employment and middle class standards of living are mitigated by their responsibilities towards their families and difficulties to establish the social connections needed to access jobs and opportunities. Faced with limited upward mobility, class as an aspirational category rather than everyday reality underpins young people’s claims about the good life.     

Children, ‘healthy’ food,school and family: the ‘[n]ot really’ outcome of school food messages

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about healthy eating and food practices at home and the framework of school messages. Families focused on children’s eating in a pragmatic way, infused with nurturance as well as concern. We argue their practices can be viewed as a form of relational consumption (Lindsay and Maher 2013. Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.) where food is part of the everyday exchange of love and care. A disjunction exists between familial relational approaches and the regulatory framework of school food messages that impacts how messages move between these spaces. Attention to relational aspects of food consumption at school might allow for a more valuable exchange between family and schools that supports family endeavours to feed children well.     

The Gift We Bring

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s A Public Faith invites religious traditions, especially Christianity, to bring their best elements into the public square in a spirit of hospitality and engagement for the common good. With regard to Christianity, he claims that one of the best elements we can offer the public square is a complexly relational vision of the human person made to love self, others, God. In this essay Dávila proposes that the preferential option for the poor is a particular expression of this anthropological vision of Christianity that is well poised for public engagement based on humility and care for the most vulnerable members of society. Following Volf’s proposal, the option for the poor functions as a paradigm for imaginative and creative engagement in the public square that might help people of faith navigate seemingly intractable political and cultural disagreements in the public square.     

Left-behind and Vulnerable? Conceptualising Development and Older Women’s Agency in Rural China

Abstract:

Concern has been growing recently in China about the well-being of children, women and the elderly “left behind” on the farm when family members leave the village in search of waged work. Increasingly, the left-behind are portrayed in academic and policy discourse as a “vulnerable group” of passive dependants, sidelined by modernisation and abandoned by their families. This paper challenges this discourse, arguing that while attention to the well-being of the left-behind is vital, there is an urgent need for a shift in focus from their vulnerability to their agency. The paper focuses on the agency of left-behind women between the ages of 50 and 80. It aims, first of all, to point the way toward an empirically richer understanding of the social construction of older women’s agency and well-being. The second aim of the paper is to suggest how different conceptualisations of “agency” and “older women” might contribute to more ethical and politically effective strategies for development and the improvement of women’s well-being. To further these two aims, the paper draws on fieldwork conducted in rural Ningxia, north-western China, and on critiques of the “capability approach” to development expounded by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.     

Learning to belong? ‘Culture’ and ‘place making’ among children and young people in Hull,UK City of Culture 2017

ABSTRACT

Despite the rise of ‘child-friendly cities’ internationally, and a growing interest in youth engagement in urban planning, the role of children and young people in culture-led regeneration and ‘place making’ schemes, remains under-researched. Notwithstanding the wealth of research into childhood and youth cultures, little is known about the ways in which the abstract (and perhaps predominantly ‘adult’) notions of ‘culture’ and ‘place’ are negotiated by younger citizens. Drawing on participative research with schools across Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017, this contribution explores children’s and young people’s understandings of culture and place within this cultural regeneration event. Although our findings suggest that the City of Culture designation has brought benefits to children and young people in a marginalised city, there is still much to be learned from their often personal and informal interpretations of ‘place’ and ‘culture’, as well as the role played by schools in this context.     

‘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.     

Childhood collecting in nature: quality experience in important places*

ABSTRACT

A need for a more specific understanding of childhood geographies has motivated an investigation of one activity, childhood collecting in nature. This study examined collecting behavior, places of collecting, and the relationship of these places to environmental connectedness in adulthood. Topophilia is presented as a guide to help consider why children collect in nature and to expand upon a limited understanding of collecting behavior. These ideas are explored with a mixed-method design strategy involving surveys and semi-structured interviews with a sample of Swedish university students. Results show collecting in nature to be a widespread, meaningful, and memorable experience in the formative years of participants. Results also demonstrate potential support for topophilia as a way to understand the childhood collecting nature phenomenon. Implications include recognition of the importance of family to support children’s engagement in the natural world and proximate access to nature as a critical aspect of childhood experience.     

Rights,participatory spaces and the daily fabric of children and young people’s voices in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

The past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in public policies aimed at hearing children and young people’s voices, which typically entail creating supportive participatory spaces. While this political project is usually presented as a radical move towards a more inclusive society, it raises critical questions about whose voices are being represented, how, why, by whom and for whom. Drawing upon recent ethnographic research on childhood and youth policies in Switzerland, this article explores how children and young people’s voices are produced in concrete situations. It studies how the institutional and material characteristics of participatory spaces and situated interactions shape which voices will actually be heard. The research highlights that, despite their inclusive ambitions, participatory spaces paradoxically exclude young persons who fail to articulate, orally or in written, linguistically, morally or politically legitimate voices.     

It's safe: food as a way of expression for children in Warsaw

ABSTRACT

The role of food in family relations is often discussed with a focus on discipline and control. This paper shows how food can also be used to create children’s safe spaces, defined as the social conditions that allow relatively independent expression of opinions, emotions and practices. Based on ethnographic research conducted with families in Warsaw in 2012–2013, I discuss different ways in which food is used to create and express such safe spaces. Firstly, I look at how children use food to create their own, personal and hidden safe space, in opposition to parental rule. Secondly, I analyse how food is used to build a safe space between adults and children. I argue that within often antagonistic family food relations there is in fact a space for children’s expression. Thirdly, I discuss the role of food in creating safe spaces for children during the research process. This paper takes a relational approach to the concept of safe space, and considers what kind of social relations and processes enable children’s autonomous expression with the means of food.