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.     

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.     

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.     

Securing disunion: Young people's nationalism,identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009, Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.     

Fears for the future: the incommensurability of securitisation and in/securities among southern African youth

Abstract

Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalence and recurrent food shortages. International institutions have responded to these challenges by framing them as security concerns that demand urgent intervention. Young people are implicated in both crises and drawn into the securitisation discourse as agents (of risk and protection) and as (potential) victims. However, the concepts of security deployed by global institutions and translated into national policy do not reflect the ways in/security is experienced ‘on the ground’ as a subjective and embodied orientation to the future. This paper brings work on youth temporalities to bear on social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation. It reports on research that explored insecurities among young people in Lesotho and Malawi. It concludes that, by focusing on ‘threats’ in isolation, and seeking to protect ‘society’ as an abstract aggregate of people, global securitisation discourses fail either to engage with the complex contextualised ways in which marginalised people experience insecurity or to proffer the political responses that are needed if those felt insecurities are to be addressed. However, while securitisation is problematic, in/security is nonetheless an important element in young people’s orientation to the future.     

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.     

The educational work of a National Museum: creating knowledgeable young citizens in Ottawa,Canada

ABSTRACT

This article explores the geographies of education at the National Museum of Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of the spatialization of children’s museum education, we highlight how the museum sought to inculcate in young Canadians knowledges about their country, its people, and natural resources. We situate children’s museum education within the broader context of Canadian nationalism, other museum activities, and public education in the capital. Focusing on the design and material organization of the museum, we highlight how the space of the museum, from the objects on display to the imposing grandeur of the building, sought to impress upon students the importance of the knowledge it conveyed. Finally, we illustrate how the museum’s programming aimed to provide children with knowledge of their national heritage, building citizenship through claims of development as destiny.     

Critical geopolitics and school textbooks: The case of environment-conflict links in Germany

This study explores the conceptual and empirical utility of studying school textbooks from a critical geopolitics perspective. School textbooks bind together various discourses, modalities and genres and can reflect the dominant knowledge in a given society. They therefore have a high potential to reveal the citational practices resonating between the domains of formal, practical and popular geopolitics. Studying school textbooks can also enrich the literature on children's and young people's (political) geographies by analyzing how the political worldviews and agency of young people are shaped by teaching materials. Empirically, the study draws on a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to study how environment-conflict links are textually and visually portrayed in German geography and civics textbooks. The results suggest that German school textbooks significantly reflect the depictions of environment-conflict links in political, media and (popular) science discourses and thus reveal crucial citational practices. Drawing on the environmental security literature, it is further argued that these textbooks convey problematic geographical imaginations: they overemphasize the risk of environmental conflicts, reflect ideas of spill-over effects threatening the global north, and portray people from the global south as irresponsible and threatening.