Young people’s everyday landscapes of security and insecurity

Abstract

Debates about ‘security’ rarely feature children or younger people, whilst research with children and young people seldom focuses upon issues traditionally found within security studies. Building upon long-standing debates about political geographies of youth and political participation as well as feminist geopolitics and emerging discussions about children’s and young people’s geopolitics, we chart young people’s everyday landscapes of security and insecurity. Key themes explored here include: secure pasts and insecure futures; ontological security and insecure selves; online security and digital insecurities; home(land) securities and insecure households and families; and global securities and insecure worlds.     

Cultivating an ethos: collegial co-discovery in a Children and Youth University

ABSTRACT

Since 2011, the McMaster Children and Youth University has offered free monthly lectures on the campus of McMaster University. Though aimed at children and youth aged seven to fourteen, there are no formal age restrictions and events regularly see attendance by young people beyond both thresholds of this age range. A central aim and guiding principle of the program has been to promote and support participants’ discovery of themselves as acting subjects in knowledge practices, including the production of new knowledge. Placing our model of the children’s university in comparative perspective with programs in Europe and Hawaii that share important aspects of this vision, we elaborate the bases of an ethos of collegial co-discovery urging young participants to question, discover, and create. The university setting presents particular challenges that call for careful attention to conventional practices and commitments and the sorts of relationships they variously enable or foreclose. Taking young people seriously as bona fide bearers and producers of knowledge relies to a significant extent on our ability to embrace a strengths-based view of childhood and to confront relations of power predisposed toward authorizing some voices to the exclusion of others.     

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.     

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.     

‘Knowledge that moves’: emotions and affect in policy and research with young migrants

ABSTRACT

Migration is an emotional experience, and so is the policy and research work associated with it. Yet, discussions on emotions and affect remain largely absent from the literature on children and youth migration. Writing auto-ethnographically, I revisit my research with/about young Lao migrants with the aim of teasing out how emotions, of young migrants, of my own and in policy making emerged in relation to various dimensions of young people’s migration. On this basis I make the case for appreciating emotions as knowledge. While emotions are ‘moving’ in an affective sense, I proceed by arguing the productive dimension of emotions through the idea of the emotive as ‘knowledge that moves’. I substantiate this point by discussing instances in which emotions as a particular form of knowledge ‘move’ research decisions, policy making processes, theorizing the youthful dimension of migration as well as the interpersonal relations through which ethnographic research is realized.     

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.     

Youth transitions: mobility and the travel intentions of 12–20 year olds,Reading, UK

ABSTRACT

Whilst Western societies may have reached ‘peak car’, young people are arguably the most significant group whose levels of car ownership, use and driving licence acquisition have declined. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses qualitative research conducted in Reading, UK, considering young people’s (aged 12–20) views about bus travel. Whilst current pricing structures (both in Reading and across the UK) often offer under 18s discounted travel, the paper explores young people’s intentions about future travel as young adults. Drawing upon theorisations around youth transitions, we discuss how young people expect their mobility patterns to change as young adults in complex, shifting, fluid ways, and to involve multi-modal travel. Young people construct complex choice biographies through which they plan pathways to navigate these mobility transitions. Although a small-scale study, this paper also offers some insights into the challenges, complexities and limitations of researching mobility intention.     

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.     

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.     

Engaging with nature: nature affords well-being for families and young people in Finland

ABSTRACT

Contact with nature is increasingly being recognized as contributing to humans’ mental and physical health. This study explores how Finnish children, young people and families engage with nature during outdoor recreation. We apply a relational approach with the concept of affordance to understand better how engagement with nature affects their well-being. The study is based on thematic writings of 15- to 21-year-olds and on an ethnographic study of camping. Findings indicate that engagement with nature enables young people to calm down and to get away from the pressures of everyday life and affords close interaction for families. The relational approach makes visible that the more young people and families spend time in nature, the more they are able to perceive affordances that enhance their well-being. In future research and policy, the focus should be on how to support families’ engagement with nature by securing time and places for encountering nature.     

A systematic review of climate change education: giving children and young people a ‘voice’ and a ‘hand’ in redressing climate change

ABSTRACT

The reality of anthropogenic climate change has been established ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ by leading scientists worldwide. Applying a systematic literature review process, we analysed existing literature from 1993 to 2014 regarding climate change education for children and young people, with the aim of identifying key areas for further research. While a number of studies have indicated that young people’s understandings of climate change are generally limited, erroneous and highly influenced by mass media, other studies suggest that didactic approaches to climate change education have been largely ineffectual in affecting students’ attitudes and behaviour. The review identifies the need for participatory, interdisciplinary, creative, and affect-driven approaches to climate change education, which to date have been largely missing from the literature. In conclusion, we call for the development of new forms of climate change education that directly involve young people in responding to the scientific, social, ethical, and political complexities of climate change.     

The performance of youth voice on the airwaves

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the case study of a youth-led community radio station, KCC Live, to argue that community radio is not a cure-all solution for disenfranchised and silenced young people. Drawing on 18 months of participant observation at KCC Live and data from in-depth interviews with volunteers, I argue that, owing to institutional constraints by station management; college management; and the regulatory body Ofcom, young people consider the airwaves to be a supervised, as opposed to emancipatory, arena. However, in attempting to combat the restricting nature of the airwaves, young people find new, performative ways to communicate. This paper provides empirical evidence which goes beyond previous simplistic conceptualisations of voice in youth media production and argues that romanticised notions of youth voice preclude performance and creativity. This paper offers an important contribution to children’s geographies in finding that pretend play, characterised by performance, can be considered a ‘life-span activity’.     

Young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in Scotland

Abstract

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.     

Latinos in the USA: Changing socio-economic patterns

This paper aims to provide an overview of socio-economic inequality experienced by Latinas and Latinos, suggesting that the increase in numbers and their dispersal throughout the country disrupts the traditional black–white paradigm used in race relations theory. Instead, I argue that the particular historical and geographical experiences of Latinas/os portend complex changes within labour markets and neighbourhoods and across families, ultimately challenging how we think about race relations in the USA.     

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.     

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.     

Participatory work with young children: the trouble and transformation of age-based hierarchies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ways that participatory work with young children was actually lived in practice, in one early childhood setting. Drawing on an ethnographic study, the paper argues that disruption of age-based hierarchy was key for making space and time for young children’s meaningful participation. Practitioners held a strong, nuanced view of young children’s ‘richness’, rather than defining young children in terms of what they lack. The finished state of adulthood was troubled, with adults seen as fellow ‘emergent becomings’, in the process of learning alongside children. However, despite conscious efforts to deconstruct age-based hierarchy, age and life experience remained troublesome concepts at the nursery. The paper examines tensions and limitations in how far adults were willing to cede control to young children, focusing on the example of care routines. The paper contends that participatory work with children must itself be maintained as a space for inquiry and reflection.     

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.     

Digital diaries: new uses of PhotoVoice in participatory research with young people

ABSTRACT

New technology offers extremely novel and useful ways of exploring ‘the everyday’ of young people’s lives and can include videos, live feeds filmed on social media, text messages, email communication, and messaging or headset communication on gaming consoles. The significance of mobile communication in the lives of young people means that digital diaries offers alternate ways of implementing PhotoVoice methods. This viewpoint proposes the ways in which digital diaries are a useful method of collecting data in research with young people and highlights the challenges and ethical concerns that must be considered when using this method.     

Young people's outdoor refuges: movements and (dis)entanglements

ABSTRACT

Young people's outdoor refuges have been identified as places that provide respite from everyday pressures. Inspired by four concepts of lines, knots, meshwork and wayfaring, as defined by Tim Ingold, this paper aims to contribute with a dynamic understanding of the practices of outdoor refuging in an increasingly demanding and structured everyday life. The paper reports on photo-elicited interviews with twenty-one young people from a countryside town in Denmark. The findings suggest that outdoor refuges simultaneously serve to disentangle young people from distressing knots in their everyday lives, while fostering positive emotional and sensory entanglements with the human and non-human environment. Further, the findings highlight the significance of mobile phones in the young people's refuging practices. The findings resonate with discourses on the changing conditions for young people's spatial autonomy, and raise questions about acknowledging, protecting and promoting their opportunities for outdoor refuging.