Digital technologies,children and young people's relationships and self-care

Children's and young people's access to and use of digital technologies have received increasing attention in recent years. While influential UK media commentators have often focused on associated risks, researchers have taken a less exclusively problem-focused approach. Children and young people's use of, for example, social media and computer games to extend the spaces available to them in which to maintain relationships, to experiment with social identities, and to engage in an ‘economy of dignity’, however fragile, have all been highlighted. This paper builds on this work to further consider the role of such resources, accessed primarily through computers and mobile phones, as means of caring for oneself or ‘self-care’. It draws on a qualitative study which employed visual and audial methods to explore the sense of belonging (or not) of young people who have been ‘looked after’ by others than their biological parents, often in less affluent circumstances.     

Theorizing a child–dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using post-humanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates

This paper theorizes children's interspecies relation with dogs in La Paz Bolivia utilizing post-humanism and new materialism as its approach. This approach allows for the deconstructing of human–nature binaries found in discourses central to the children in nature movement. Questioning the universalizing of children's experience in nature the paper considers three propositions. Firstly, what if children were viewed as nature rather than outside of it. Secondly, can the objects or ‘things’ of nature be viewed as animated. And finally, how sensitive is the contemporary imperative to reconnect children to a romanticized more natured life, to children's diverse worldly experiences. I explore these propositions drawing on a study where I have adopted a materialist ontology and theorized using the work of [Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] and her concept of intra-action as adopted by Rautio [2013a. “Children Who Carry Stones in Their Pockets: On Autotelic Material Practices in Everyday Life.” Children's Geographies 11 (4): 394–408]. Based on my child–dog interspecies exploration, I will conclude by re-addressing the three propositions.     

The complexity of aspiration: the role of hope and habitus in shaping working-class young people’s aspirations to higher education

In this paper, I explore how working-class young people in Leicester hope and plan for their futures as they consider the possibility of attending university. I respond to Pimlott-Wilson’s [2011. “The Role of Familial Habitus in Shaping Children’s Views of Their Future Employment.” Children’s Geographies 9 (1): 111–118] call for further research to investigate how individual dispositions and habitus affect how young people hope and aspire towards the future. I do this in three ways. First, I empirically test Webb’s [2007. “Modes of Hoping.” History of the Human Sciences 20 (3): 65–83] hope theory to understand how aspirations are formed on an individual and societal level. In doing so, I critically question what is understood by the term ‘aspiration’. This allows me to question what it means for young people to ‘raise aspirations’ towards university. Second, I explore how a spatial analysis can contribute towards an understanding of how habitus, hope and aspirations interlock to shape young people’s futures. Third, I argue that hope can be regarded as a form of capital which in turn influences habitus.     

Constructions of cosmopolitanism in teenage citizenship in Singapore

This study aims to uncover the geographies of places informing teenagers' understanding of cosmopolitanism and citizenship. Children and young people (CYP) in Singapore are becoming more internationally mobile and growing up in highly globalised Singapore. There are three overall arguments in this paper. First, the local is the actual place to situate studies on cosmopolitanism and that cosmopolitanism should be considered as a dimension of deterritorialised citizenship amongst CYP growing up in highly globalised nation-states. There are ‘roots and routes’ approaches to citizenship and my second argument is that the ‘routes approach’ to citizenship has ingrained cosmopolitan experiences into young people's life-worlds and is arguably the stronger approach of the two for young Singaporeans. Finally, this study demonstrates that the experiences of CYP in geographies of education [Holloway, S. L., P. Hubbard, H. Jöns, H. Pimlott-Wilson. 2010. “Geographies of Education and the Significance of Children, Youth and Families.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (5)] are credible yet neglected life-worlds that can help reconstitute frameworks for understanding cosmopolitanism and citizenship [Harvey, D. 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12 (2)].     

‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

Foucault,space and primary school dining rooms

This paper takes up recent debates within Children's Geographies as to the ‘usefulness’ of theory and its application to school dining rooms. The paper argues that in particular, Foucault's notions of governmentality have the potential to advance theoretical understandings of the spatiality of school dining rooms, the social relationships that occur within them and that in addition this can have relevant practical and policy implications that could impact upon the everyday lives of children that are both constituted by and constitutive of this space.     

Children's agency and Islam: unexpected paths to solidarity

This ethnographic study analyzes the experiences of Palestinian children's agency of religion and its manifestation in religion as resistance while it is fighting the globalized hegemony. Children's agency of religion as resistance is cultivated within the debate of Islamist movements and the evolution of Palestinian national identity while it serves as a call for global solidarity. It is this creative construct of agency of religion that transcends borders and distinguishes itself from the old generation method of resistance. The differences between generations on this construct, as described by children's agency and their ability to transform, is constructed by particular meanings of Islamist symbols and rejects the assumption that children's roles are defined. The agency of religion as resistance evolves as the role of religion in national discourse is deliberated in secularism and sectarianism. In 2005/2006, I was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in the Anthropology Department of Johns Hopkins University. The award was for my work on children's political socialization in the Middle East. I also have been active with international studies: in 2009, I collaborated with the Children's Rights Unit, Institut Universitaire Kurt Bösch, Switzerland on the research project, Living Rights: Theorizing Children's Rights in International Development. I am serving as research member on the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and Ethnic Diversity (JLICED), Division of Children's Rights. My work has been published in the Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, Childhood, Children's Geographies, Journal of Mix Method Research and others. View all notes     

Cronies,economic crime and capitalism in Putin's sistema

The books included in this review article are essential for the understanding of what I call Putin's sistema—the governance model that originated in the Soviet system but has transformed and adapted to global change. Each book tackles, from a different angle, the issues of Russia's transition and suggests ways to describe its political consequences. The books all attempt to identify some underlying logic or organizing force in a Russian society that has emerged through weak institutions. Although I join the authors in their criticisms of the ‘transition paradigm’ and its ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of democracy’ formula, transformations of the Soviet sistema seem to resonate with the ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of capitalism’. Perestroika can be seen as an ‘opening’ in shaking the foundations of sistema; Yeltsin's era as a ‘breakthrough’; and Putin's regime as the ‘consolidation’ of capitalism but with its distinct characteristics.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

Professionals’ and amateurs’ pasts: a decolonizing reading of post-war Romanian histories of gendered interwar activism

This article provides an illustration of a decolonial and gendered approach that can shape ‘new global labour histories’ by re-reading histories of Communist women’s interwar activism produced in state-socialist Romania with attention to the power context in which they were created and the clues about the work of social reproduction during the interwar that these histories provide. After discussing the main concepts and rationale in the first section, in the second section the author shows that women’s history and women historians were marginalized in Romania after 1958 despite promising post-war beginnings. She shows that this evolution was made possible by the symbiosis between nationalist historians and autochthonist politicians in search of a break with Stalinist policies. She then hones in, in the third part of the paper, on the content of the Revue des Etudés Sud-Est Européenes (RESEE) and two women’s history volumes, as publications issuing from the conditions described in the second part. With regard to the standalone volumes, the author shows that in this body of work, the interwar period is described as one of women’s increased activism within the social-democratic or Communist movements. On the other hand, the period is also described as one of worsening living conditions for proletarians. The intersection of these two narratives creates in this rather limited historiographical body the surprising effect of granting high visibility to reproductive labour.     

The Imperial War Relief Fund and the All British Appeal: Commonwealth,Conflict and Conservatism within the British Humanitarian Movement, 1920–25

This article explores the intersection of internationalist and imperial humanitarian ideals in the aftermath of the First World War via a case study of a hitherto overlooked humanitarian organisation—the Imperial War Relief Fund. In an era of increased international collaboration between humanitarian organisations, the Imperial War Relief Fund instead promoted an imperial approach, seeking to unite the ‘efforts of the dominions and mother country’ for the relief of Europeans suffering the effects of the First World War. The Fund was enthusiastically supported in Britain by a number of leading conservative public figures, who hoped that an empire-wide humanitarian campaign might guard against imperial disintegration and reverse Britain's perceived loss of prestige in the postwar order. Despite its initial successes, the Imperial Fund was subsequently usurped by British humanitarian organisations which were more internationalist in their outlook and rhetoric, most significantly the Save the Children Fund. This did not represent, however, a straightforward displacement of imperial co-ordination in favour of more internationally focused humanitarian action. Rather, the Save the Children Fund was able to draw support away from the Imperial Fund only by echoing its imperial rhetoric. This article argues, therefore, that, while the Imperial Fund was a relatively short-lived venture, its lasting legacy was to ensure that the British humanitarian movement was a space in which notions of Britain's imperial status, and its concomitant duties, would survive within an humanitarian landscape in which internationalist ideals were increasingly prevalent.     

‘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.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Travelling ‘Under Concern’: Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker Tour the Antipodean Colonies, 1832–41

In 1832, British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ on a trans-imperial journey that took nine years and spanned the Australian colonies of Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales and Swan River in Western Australia, Mauritius and South Africa's Cape Colony. Backhouse and Walker were fundamental to the creation and expansion of humanitarian networks in the antipodes, where they made major humanitarian interventions in matters concerning Aboriginal peoples, penal reform, slavery and education. This paper first traces the genesis and historical dimensions of their journey to contextualise it within a long transnational tradition of Quakers travelling ‘under concern’. The paper considers the tour through diverse interpretative approaches such as transnationalism and new work on transnational social movements, humanitarian travel writing and textuality, and argues that Backhouse and Walker were not imperial agents, nor were they agitators operating outside empire, but rather occupied a complex position as ‘institutional opponents’ working within imperial political circuits to broker various humanitarian reforms at multiple levels in the furtherance of their particular moral empire.     

‘Concrete bodies’: young Latina women transgressing the boundaries of race and class in white inner-city Stockholm

This article examines young Latina women's interactions in the urban landscape of Stockholm, with a particular focus on white, middle-class areas, and how social difference and racial positioning are produced in and through the processes of urban segregation. Although Stockholm consists of different multiethnic and middle-class white suburbs, a discourse of sharp division between ‘the suburb’ and the inner-city is prevalent in the daily press. Here ‘the suburb’ is either portrayed as dangerous or exotic. This article is based on qualitative research with 29 young Latina women living and attending schools in both the suburban and inner-city areas. This approach facilitates an understanding of how gendered, racialized and classed aspects of segregation are embodied in multiple directions and how mechanisms of spatial exclusion prevail in predominantly white areas – often seen as ‘neutral’ or non-racialized areas. In conclusion, in order to capture the realities of young people's lives within materialized discourses of race and space, I argue that it is crucial to include white settings in the analysis, and experiences of exclusion.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

Children's interdependent mobility: compositions,collaborations and compromises

This paper discusses findings from Australian research that used a qualitative and participatory methods approach to understand how children develop and negotiate their everyday mobility. Children's mobility negotiations are discussed in reference to interactions with parents, peers and places; journeys in relation to their multi-modality, compositionality and temporality; and mobility formations in terms of ‘companionship’ – travel companions, companion devices and ambient companions. Children's mobility is characterised by interdependencies that both enable and configure this mobility. Three themes – compositions, collaborations and compromises – are used to detail and describe some of the ways these interdependencies take shape and unfold.     

Geography and Global Change Science: Relationships Necessary,Absent, and Possible

Initiated by geoscientists, the growing debate about the Anthropocene, ‘planetary boundaries’ and global ‘tipping points’ is a significant opportunity for geographers to reconfigure two things: one is the internal relationships among their discipline's many and varied perspectives (topical, philosophical, and methodological) on the real; the other the discipline's actual and perceived contributions to important issues in the wider society. Yet, without concerted effort and struggle, the opportunity is likely to be used in a ‘safe’ and rather predictable way by only a sub‐set of human‐environment geographers. The socio‐environmental challenges of a post‐Holocene world invite old narratives about Geography's holistic intellectual contributions to be reprised in the present. These narratives speak well to many geoscientists, social scientists, and decision‐makers outside Geography. However, they risk perpetuating an emaciated conception of reality wherein Earth systems and social systems are seen as knowable and manageable if the ‘right’ ensemble of expertise is achieved. I argue that we need to get out from under the shadow of these long‐standing narratives. Using suggestive examples, I make the case for forms of inquiry across the human‐physical ‘divide’ that eschew ontological monism and that serve to reveal the many legitimate cognitive, moral, and aesthetic framings of Earth present and future. Geography is unusual in that the potential for these forms of inquiry to become normalised is high compared with other subjects. This potential will only be taken advantage of if certain human‐environment geographers unaccustomed to engaging the world of geoscience and environmental policy change their modus operandi.     

Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas

This article provides an introductory overview of themes raised in this special edition of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. We suggest that, while recent work such as Michael Barnett's Empire of Humanity has begun to explore the history of western humanitarianism, academic researchers can do more to address the intricate framework of relations between humanitarianism and empire, and that the history of humanitarianism can usefully be viewed as a fundamental component of imperial relations, a way of bridging trans-imperial, international and transnational approaches. We set the papers in this collection within the wider historiography of nineteenth and twentieth century humanitarianism, and outline how the humanitarian ‘impulse’ intersected with debates around anti-slavery, colonial administration and the protection of indigenous peoples. We also outline the ways in which twentieth-century international ‘networks of concern’ engaged with, and built upon, the discourses of imperial humanitarianism. Finally, we briefly consider the benefits of a ‘transnational’ approach in sketching the history of empire and humanitarianism.     

What else? some more ways of thinking and doing ‘Children's Geographies’

‘Children's Geographies’ could do more. In this paper we present a succession of key ideas currently arising in and of new and emergent theoretical, philosophical and conceptual work in the Social Sciences. We invite reflection upon each of these ideas in turn, with a mind, specifically, to ‘Children's Geographies’. In so doing, we make two broad claims. First, that greater engagement with some or all of these ideas might prove useful, enabling, thought-provoking, profound, constructive, challenging, telling, or interesting to ‘Children's Geographers’. Second, that—particularly given the nature of its extant concerns and efforts— ‘Children's Geographies’ could do much more to speak back to (these) wider contemporary lines of thought.