‘Chilling’ and ‘hopping’ in the ‘teenage space network’: explorations in teenagers’ geographies in the city of Mechelen

Within the field of children's geographies several calls have been made to develop ‘teenagers’ geographies’ as a complementary field of research and practice. It has been stated that teenagers remain ‘invisible’ or ‘marginalised’ in public debates as well as in research and practice, even within childhood studies and children's geographies. Further explorations in teenagers’ geographies could contribute to the research on ‘diverse childhoods’. This article explores the spatial worlds of teenagers (approximately 12–16 years) in Flanders (Belgium), a region characterised by a dense network of smaller cities and ‘urban sprawl’. Based on street interviews and observations in a small city several mental maps and patterns of teenagers’ use of public space were identified. Starting from a case study in the city of Mechelen, this article suggests how these perspectives can be integrated into urban planning by identifying and tying together relevant planning layers, thus creating a more closely knit ‘teenage space network’. Wouter Vanderstede is an urban planner, anthropologist and historian. He is a researcher and staff member at Childhood & Society Research Centre–Onderzoekscentrum Kind & Samenleving vzw. Child friendly and teenager friendly planning and design of public space is one of the main research themes of the institute. View all notes     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

Milton’s ‘Radicalism’ in the Tyrannicide Tracts

In the major political prose works which he published from 1649 to 1654, Milton argues that it was not the parliamentarians but Charles Stuart and his supporters who were the real rebels during the wars of the 1640s. He claims that during this period, the parliamentarians did not fight to overturn law, church, and government, but to preserve peace, to maintain the old, orthodox form of Christianity which had only partially been re-established in England, and to defend English law and the civil liberties it safeguarded. He disavows any hostility to true monarchy and asserts the right of all peoples to choose for themselves whatever form of government they wish. He argues that, since by 1649 Charles Stuart had long been deposed, there was no regicide but merely a legal execution, one which was also consistent with the ancient constitution of England and the political thought of the champion of ancient Roman laws and customs, Cicero. All of this supports several recent accounts of Interregnum political thought and rhetoric and challenges much of the work, from Christopher Hill on, which makes Milton out to be a radical.     

Rethinking ‘safe spaces’ in children’s geographies

ABSTRACT

In this editorial, we provide a preliminary definition of ‘safe spaces’ before exploring how the collected authors have taken a fresh approach to understanding ‘safe spaces’ though a geographical lens. Until now, the material ‘location’ of safe spaces have remained under theorised, but by turning attention to how children and young people co-produce and bring safe spaces into being through their situated practices, this Special Issue provides rich ground for re-evaluating why places ‘matter’ in children’s lives. This editorial maps out those common threads that are uncovered across a diverse collection that spans playful protest in Johannesburg, family food struggles in Warsaw, to the theatrical parodies of second generation Somali youth in London.     

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India

This article interrogates the politics of safety that underpin rehabilitative practices in a state-funded shelter run by an anti-trafficking NGO in Eastern India. It focuses on the experiences of a group of female adolescents, categorised as ‘child marriage victims’, residing at the shelter. The analysis of in-depth life history interviews collected over a two-week period in October 2014 reveals that the adolescents contest the legislative victimhood imposed on them. For them, their marriages and pre-marital relationships are an expression of romantic and sexual agency, in contravention of familial norms. In this context, the adolescents perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret their enforced stay for ‘protection’ and ‘rehabilitation’ as an extension of familial control and regulation of their lives. The protectionism-as-safety discourse rewrites their agency as victimhood and transforms the shelter into a site where everyday forms of gendered power inequalities within social relations in the household are authorised and reproduced by the state and NGO. The adolescents perceive themselves as ‘bad girls’ and adopt various strategies to insist on their rehabilitation into ‘good girls’ to secure release from the shelter often by enacting the ‘victimhood’ expected of them. This allows for unique expressions of agency in an otherwise constrained context but hinders relationships of solidarity with other residents. Overall, the article highlights the need to challenge the ways in which patriarchal norms continue to spatially govern and discipline the expression of female sexuality and agency through 'safe spaces' in India.     

Two Pagan Studies: Pater's ‘Denys L'Auxerrois’ and ‘Apollo in Picardy’

AMAPA STORYTELLERS. By STANLEY L. ROBE. — THE KLABAUTERMANN OF THE NORTHERN SEAS. An Analysis of the protective Spirit of Ships and Sailors in the Context of popular Belief, Christian Legend and Indo-European Mythology. By R. J. Buss, Folklore Studies, Vols. 24 and 25. University of California Press, Berkeley. 1972, 1973. Pp. xiv, 108, 1 plate; pp. x, 138. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

FOLKLORE AND THE SEA. By HORACE BECK. Published for the Marine Historical Association, Incorporated, by Western University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1973. Pp. 463, 21 plates. Reviewed by J. D. A. WIDDOWSON.

BALTIC LITERATURE AND LINGUISTICS. Edited by A. ZIEDONIS, J. PUHVEL, R. SILBAJORIS and M. VALGEMÄE. Publications of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, 4. The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. 1973. Pp. 252. Reviewed by H. R. Ellis Davidson.

HAMLET'S MILL. By GIORGIO DE SANTILLANA and HERTHA VON DECHEND. Gambit Inc., Boston, 1969. Pp. 506, 1 plate and 40 illustrations and diagrams. $10.00. Reviewed by H. R. ELLIS DAVIDSON.

BÄUERLICHE DENKWEISE IN WIRTSCHAFT UND HAUSHALT. Eine ethnographische Untersuchung über das ungarische Dorf Atány. By E. FÉL and T. HOFER. Verlag Otto Schwartz &; Co, Göttingen, 1972. Pp. xviii, 551. Plates 139, 63 text ill. and II statistical tabulations. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

DIE JENSEITSBRÜCKE IM MITTELALTER. By PETER DINZELBACHER. Disserationen der Universität Wien vol. 104. Verband der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, Vienna, 1973. Pp. 258. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

DIE GABEN DER BRAUT BEI DEN FINNEN UND ESTEN. Vol. I–II. By MAIJA-LIISA HEIKINMÄKI. Kansatieteellinen Arkisto, Nr. 21, 22. Helsinki, 1970, 1971. Pp. 268, 163. Reviewed by BÉLA GUNDA.     

New regionalism in Turkey: questioning the ‘new’ and the ‘regional’

Turkey’s regional policies are inspired by the new regionalism theory. During past two decades, key concepts of new regionalism, including knowledge economies, specialization, networked cities and innovation, have been incorporated in policy documents. At the same time, Turkey comes from a strong central state tradition that controls local and regional development. At first insight, new regionalism and strong central state control do not fit in the same frame. This research analyses the trajectory of regional policies in Turkey with the aim of explaining how these seemingly incompatible policies can coexist. It argues that regional policies developed at the central state level utilized new regionalism as a part of the strategy to maintain power in the course of transformation of the nation state.     

New life in Japan's ‘endingness’ business

The Japanese deathcare and Buddhist goods industry is a growing field, emerging out of radical shifts in the socio-economic conditions of everyday life: smaller households, an ageing population and more irregular employment/lifestyle patterns. Based on fieldwork, this article reports tectonic ruptures within Japan’s household-based mortuary system and Buddhist practice. It takes readers to ENDEX, the premier convention for Japan’s ‘ending industry’, where new ‘life’ emerges from the falling away of older death rites that get remixed and remade into newer experimental practices, businesses and business subjectivities. Examples range from high-tech gravestones and drones to competitions for the ‘Hottest Priest’ and best encoffiner. This article engages with these new necro-technologies and asks why the old deathcare system is falling apart. What are the socio-material effects of its unravelling? And what does the futurity of necro-praxis look like in Japan (and elsewhere) when the existential fabric of mortality may be torn apart?     

‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

The ‘French’ mill in medieval Tuscany

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the territory of Florence possessed three types of grain mill: the floating mill, found particularly on the River Arno in the immediate vicinity of the city of Florence itself; the suspension mill, located on the Arno as well as the free-flowing Elsa to the southwest; and the horizontal mill situated primarily along the streams throughout the Florentine countryside. The floating mill and suspension mill were run predominantly by the Vitruvian gearing system while the horizontal mill was operated by the apparently less efficient ritrecine or horizontal walerwheel. An examination of the notarial chartularies lodged in the Archivio di Stato of Florence shows that after 1250 the Florentines, while incorporating northern- European methods for the manufacture of woolen cloth, began to use overshot and undershot mills, the former being designated as French and the latter as orbital. The orbital mill was constructed along the banks of navigable rivers like the Arno and the Elsa and soon was partly responsible for the disappearance of the floating mill. The French mill, on the other hand, was located by the erratic torrents of the hills and mountains of the countryside. It did not by any means replace the horizontal mill. In many cases, it simply became part of a pre-existing complex housing a ritrecine. In others, particularly in the latter half of the fourteenth century, there was a successful symbiosis of the principal mechanisms of the overshot and horizontal types, creating the French horizontal mill. By the end of the fourteenth century the territory of Florence thus had five types of grain mill and thereby anticipated the basic milling technology of the High Italian Renaissance as illustrated in Agostino Ramelli's compendium of machines completed in 1588.     

The UK and ‘genocide’ in Biafra

In late August 1968, following a British proposal, Nigeria announced that it would allow an international observer team into the country to show that it was not pursuing a campaign of genocide in Biafra. This article analyses why the United Kingdom pushed for the creation of the observer team, and shows how the team's work was incorporated into the British government's justifications for its support of the Nigerian government. The experience of the observer team illustrates the difficulties of providing an ‘objective’ view regarding whether or not genocide is taking place.