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.     

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.     

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.     

Competition or cooperation? Jewish day schools,synagogues and the (re)construction of young people’s Jewish identities in England

Diasporic synagogues have historically provided a number of educational and social functions. However, the growing popularity of state-funded Jewish schools in England necessitates analysis of these institutions’ changing roles and their implications for performances of Jewishness. Drawing upon interviews with rabbis, and interviews and focus groups with parents and students at a Jewish school, this article demonstrates three challenges for synagogues associated with the recent growth in Jewish day schooling: the instigation of instrumental attendance at services in order to secure a school place; and the co-option of synagogues’ traditional functions as both education and social centres. In the process, it illustrates how conceptualisations of Jewish identity are contested, resulting in discrepant attitudes towards Jewish education. Consequently, the article contributes to understandings of the spaces in which young people practise their Jewishness, and highlights the challenges for community leaders in ensuring that Jewish schools and synagogues cooperate rather than compete.     

‘That street is taking us to home’: young children’s photographs of public spaces

ABSTRACT

Children’s identities constitute and are constituted by the everyday spaces they inhabit. Though there are innumerable accounts of what adults think public spaces like subways and city streets mean to children, fewer recorded accounts exist from young children themselves (Faulkner and Zolkos 2016, “Introduction.” In Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity, ix–xvii. Lexington: Lanham.). In this work I explored 2- – 5-year-old children’s conceptions of public space through the photographs they took and the narratives they told in and around those images. I focused on how children imaged their spaces, how their narrative fragments added layers of story to the images’ contents, and how their photographic performances acted as ‘visual voice’ (Burke 2005, “‘Play in Focus’: Children Researching Their Own Spaces and Places for Play.” Children Youth and Environments 15 (1): 27–53.), highlighting for us how they see themselves and their positions within the larger urban environment. The young children’s photographs depicted their growing autonomy and mobility within an urban context, attunements to non-human forms of the city, and knowledge of what it means to live in their communities.     

A ‘sense of failure’? Everydayness and research ethics

A key legacy of much recent theorising in Anglo-American Human Geography has been the realisation that the ‘excess’ and ‘messiness’ of (too-easily and too-often overlooked) everyday events, geographies and experiences ought to have far-reaching conceptual and methodological implications. The aim of this paper is to elaborate some (as yet relatively implicit) ethical dimensions of this challenge, via a consideration of one particular notion and domain of ethics (research ethics in Human Geography) and, then, via one specific case study (re-presenting moments from my experiences of – and small ‘failures’ in – conducting qualitative research with children, as an adult male, in the UK, in 2000–2002).     

Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/turn: poetics and practices for new disciplinary spaces

We are two feminist geographers working as practitioners and researchers in creative geographies and the discipline’s creative re/turn. Human geographers interested in new representational and non-representational methods and methodologies are, as we explore in this article, increasingly turning to artistic and creative modes of expression, including (amongst others) literary and visual arts, in which we are both involved. For some time now, we have been curious about what we experience as a lack of expressly politicized critical interrogations of the discipline’s creative re/turn and a shortage of expressly critical and politicized creative outputs. In this article, then, we explore geography’s embrace of creative practices as research methods and as means of developing outputs but, more specifically, we ask about where and how decolonizing, feminist, anti-racist, and/or queer voices, practices, and theorizations might fit within the creative re/turn. Using two different creative geographic works (one a book of poetry, the other a curation project), we trouble what we conclude may be ongoing (perhaps unconsciously) masculinist, often White and colonial, perhaps overly heteronormative, modes of geographic inquiry and practice within geography’s creative re/turn. In this context, we reflexively consider our own creative practices as ones that may offer examples to open new critical spaces and modes of representation for creative geographers.     

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.     

‘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.     

博物馆教育性格的养成——从《美国博物馆:创新者和先驱》一书谈起

与欧洲博物馆强调皇家收藏与民众教化的传统不同,美国的博物馆性格立足于社会教育与公众服务。自初创之日起,"教育至上"的性格一直贯穿美国博物馆发展的始终,由此养成的有关博物馆教育议题的思考成为国际博物学界的典范。爱德华·亚历山大在《美国博物馆:创新者和先驱》一书中系统考察了13位美国博物馆领军人物的超前理念和伟大事迹,他们无一例外地都在强调博物馆教育和公众娱乐的重要性,并在"教育至上"的博物馆性格上达成共识。这些先驱们在博物馆平台上发挥才智、创造典范的经验材料对于理解美国博物馆教育性格生成与演变的具体过程与整体图式具有举足轻重的作用。     

Amid the snows of Baltistan

Scottish carrier trade declined rapidly in the period 1820–60, but the pattern is complex and growth co‐exists with contraction. Total volume of traffic is halved, but in areas peripheral to the thin rail net there are increases. Glasgow was the main carrier centre, and saw not only contraction but a change from regional to local functions.     

晚清民国博物馆理论补述

鸦片战争之后国门洞开,中西文化在不断碰撞中时时交流融汇,国人逐渐认识到陈列、展览、博物馆的实质内涵与功用所在,并有诸多实践.同时经过中外纵横考察与对比,学者开启了博物馆理论研究的先河,建构了博物馆学科及专业领域研究的理论框架,对博物馆的功能与作用、建设与管理、发展历史等作了见仁见智的研究.这其中除了张謇、蔡元培、陈端志...     

Unpacking children in migration research

In the light of calls for children's geographers to attend to happenings beyond the localised perception of children themselves, this piece considers the state of migration studies when it comes to the experiences of children and young people. It provides an overview of existing research and suggests that in the context of migration, more could be done to foreground the perspectives of children in their own right. Given that attending to everyday experience is an endeavour of concern to adult-centric migration research, the paper concludes by suggesting that this might be an area in which children's geographers could contribute to another sub-discipline.     

博物馆女性题材展览的类型与意义

女性题材的展览主要分为女性博物馆的基本陈列和专题展览、综合类博物馆的常设展览和临时展览,旨在以"物"为媒介来展示女性的生存状态和精神追求,与公众一起讨论有关女性的话题,甚至包括一些敏感的、有争议的现象或问题。博物馆以女性为题材,组织展览和教育活动,关注、探讨并传播女性文化,一方面反映出博物馆关注并回应女性广泛参与社会生活并贡献于社会变革与发展的现实,发挥博物馆作为时代潮流倡导者和引领者的作用;另一方面,女性观众数量增多,参观需求多元化且女性广泛参与博物馆事务,对博物馆展览理念也产生一定的影响。然而,博物馆的女性主题展览也存在数量少、展览和诠释活动中对女性价值和意义挖掘不够等问题,需要在理念和实践上进一步改变。