Why have generational orderings been marginalised in the social sciences including childhood studies?

ABSTRACT

This paper considers why age and generation tend not to be recognised as social variables in the same way that gender, ethnicity and class are mainstreamed within Social Science disciplines. It questions why the concept of the generational order is not always integral to either Childhood Studies or the related sub-disciplines, such as Children’s Geographies. It begins from a starting point that Childhood Studies is generally a multi-disciplinary field but seems stuck from moving forward conceptually. The politics of Childhood Studies can result in sub-disciplinary silos rather than working in a more interdisciplinary way. The politics of childhood in society have progressed in terms of children’s rights and participation yet the theoretical development of children’s agency has been stuck. The paper discusses the lack of extensive empirical investigation of the generational order, suggesting that ‘generational orderings’ may be a more dynamic way to engage with processes of generationing.     

Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children's Literature

This paper argues for the uses of children's literature in the study of children's geographies. It focuses in particular on the nature of representations of urban space in children's literature, a genre more usually connected with the pastoral and explores the narrative strategies and approaches of children's literature which does venture into the city. I propose five modes in which the city is written for children and ask, from the position of literary criticism which distrusts children's stories' ability to speak for children, how far these modes can be said to coincide with children's lived experience of the city.     

Stories of fracture and claim for belonging: young migrants' narratives of arrival in Britain

This article brings an anthropological approach to bear on the question of ‘children's voices’ and, particularly, on the stories told by some young migrants about their recent arrival as asylum-seekers in Britain. Young migrants' narratives are examined as situated and self-conscious claims to a certain identity as child refugee. The question of why a particular narrative of ‘arrival in Britain’ was offered by a diverse group of young migrants and asylum seekers is discussed. These stories present a view of their tellers as alone and irreconcilably detached from past lives and relationships. These narrative repertoires as well as their telling draw from and elaborate certain views of the ‘proper refugee child’ that circulate through various regimes of immigration, welfare and emancipatory community work that all involved these young people. An approach to the stories as accomplished as well as situated performances that collapse the ordinary division between stories as ‘facts’ or ‘fictions’ is introduced. In this sense, the ‘children's voices’ heard in this study are recognised as situated and interested products of a research relationship.     

Introduction: space,place and the geographies of women's caregiving work

The vast majority of caregivers, whether formal or informal, paid or unpaid, are women. Health care restructuring across the West, inspired by a shift from the welfare to neoliberal state, has greatly impacted caregiving. The idea for this collection arose as a result of a special paper session on the geographies of caregiving, held as part of the Association of American Geographers Meeting (Chicago, 2006). In hearing the papers presented, it became clear that geographers are engaged in interesting and innovative research in this area, much of which involves women's caregiving work in particular. As both unpaid informal family caregiving and paid formal practitioner-provided care are mainly addressed in this collection, they are briefly discussed in this editorial. This is followed by a discussion of the geographical contributions to the growing caregiving literature, which provides the foundation for an overview of ongoing and new research directions. The four articles that make up this special issue are then reviewed in brief. Finally, we identify issues that cut across all four articles, leading to a discussion of future research directions.     

‘It's for the best’: child movement in search of health in Njabini,Kenya

Previous studies produced on the movement of individuals with HIV/AIDS for the obtainment of medical services have rarely been conducted in the Global South and have neglected the experiences of child patients. This article presents a new type of travel for medical care, where HIV+ children in Kenya are being placed or choose to be placed in orphanages in order to obtain constant access to antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, proper nutrition, and education. Through participant observation and photo-elicitation interviews with children in orphanages and their immediate family members in the surrounding Njabini community, this study focused on documenting children's agency in influencing movement decisions to orphanages for better health outcomes. Photo-elicitation interviews in particular allowed for greater insight into children's lives, their motivations for moving to an orphanage, and as a tool to facilitate discussion. Qualitative methods utilized with family members similarly privileged their interpretations of how child movement out of the house would help achieve the ‘best’ possible future for their children, particularly those living with HIV. Study findings shed light on the active role played by children in decisions to move to orphanages, the visualization of these facilities as the best place to secure access to ARV therapy and ensure proper child health, and the interaction that continues to take place between children and their family members once they enter these spaces.     

‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people's everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young people's friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on children's independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.     

Complex spaces of orphan care – a Russian therapeutic children's community

Institutions of orphan care are immensely complex spaces imbued with social and cultural norms, and can exhibit intricate power relations and particularly severe examples of surveillance. While there have been numerous excellent quantitative studies of these institutions, they reveal little of the complexity and heterogeneity of the spaces, and there remains a need for more qualitative and particularly ethnographic studies of spaces of orphan care to reveal their nuances. Drawing upon the author's reflections on a highly unusual space of orphan care, this article makes two major contributions to Children's Geographies: (1) it employs a sorely neglected aspect of Foucault's work in Children's Geographies, Mettray, in analysing surveillance and discipline in an institution providing care to orphaned children and (2) It highlights the heterogeneity of these spaces and provides an example of best practice in spaces of orphan care.     

On children's independent mobility: the interplay of demographic,environmental, and psychosocial factors

In the past 50 years, a marked reduction has occurred in European and North American children's freedom of movement and outdoor play. Using a structural equation model, the present study investigates the interaction between personal, environmental, and psychosocial factors that affect children's independent mobility. The study involved 313 mothers of 8–10-year-old Italian children. The results supported the hypothesized model: the age of the child, the maternal perception of social danger, and positive potentiality of outdoor autonomy were the most influential variables on children's independent mobility, measured as an index. Further, the maternal perceptions mediated the influence of the other demographic, psychosocial, and environmental variables on independent mobility.     

Experiments with moving children and digital cameras

Discussing an ethnography engaging 7–12-year-olds in digital filming and photography during school journeys in Helsinki, Finland, this article argues for an experimental attitude to participatory visual research with children. Such an attitude is inspired by science and technology studies, and seeks to open space for more situated styles of children's expression and participation by stressing the performative aspects of visual methods and media. Tracing out the unexpected ways in which children embodied digital cameras and shared them with friends, the article claims that experimentation invites researchers and participants alike to explore new modes of relating to one another and everyday practices, thereby drawing out the creative potential of methods and adjusting them better to empirical settings.     

A Review of: “Michael Hagner,Geniale Gehirne. Zur Geschichte der Elitegehirnforschung”

Charcot and Pasteur were scientific contemporaries, but their relationship has not been extensively studied. We analyzed available source documents from the Charcot Library, Bibliothèque Nationale, Institute Pasteur, and Pasteur Library. These documents demonstrate that in spite of geographical proximity, international and local recognition, Charcot and Pasteur largely pursued their careers independent of one another. Although the Paris scientific climate was one of active debate, Pasteur's and Charcot's interactions remained distanced but mutually respectful and did not descend into rivalry or contention. With different primary interests and different etiological views, side by side, they exemplified two models of French medicine at the close of the nineteenth century: medical scientist and scientific physician.     

Conversational Modernism: Talking Czech Men into Being Gentlemen by Way of The Gentleman, 1924–30

The article provides a profile of the Czech life-style magazine Gentleman (The Gentleman), published in Prague from 1924 to 1930. The gendered nature of the magazine is stressed and discursive mechanisms effective in the formation of modern masculinity are discussed. Issues of ‘democratic aristocratism’, male fashion, gender identity, but also traces of a local inflection (T. G. Masaryk as a modern man) are among the select points of attention. While some aspects of the magazine may appear instructional, the analysis draws attention to the fact that The Gentleman actually moves between the instructional and the represented, thus leaving ample space for the reader to negotiate his position on the map of masculine modernity. Other instances of media (e.g., the nineteenth-century Konversationslexikon) and authors (Karel ?apek, Milena Jesenská) are adduced to broaden the context and to explicate the meaning of ‘conversational modernity’, that is, a negotiated representation of modernity.     

A Spatial-Temporal Analysis of Health Care and Mortality Inequalities in China

Two geographers specializing in China TYalyze that country's health care inequality from 1990 to 2008, for the purpose of: (1) examining spatial-temporal variations of health care inequality at multiple scales (the regional, provincial, and county levels); (2) exploring whether economic growth and transition to a market economy have exacerbated the unevenness of health care; and (3) analyzing the impact of health care inequality on health outcomes, especially mortality. The authors apply GIS-based spatial statistical methods to detect spatial-temporal patterns of health care, and use multilevel regression to examine the linkages between health care, mortality, and regional economic inequality, and ultimately to assess the sensitivity of health care inequality to geographic scale and examine whether reforms implemented to date have resulted in more equitable access to health care. The paper also demonstrates how the concurrent transitions of decentralization, marketization, globalization, and urbanization in China have interactively contributed to health care inequality and mortality.