The Authority of Age: Institutions for Childhood Development in China, 1895−1910

The structure of aged-based education and the science of childhood development were introduced to China in the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Drawing on period textbooks, journal articles, and school documents for women and children, this study argues that the theory of childhood development helped shape socialized play and citizenship training in new schools. These new institutions followed scientific insights about childhood development in terms of both physical and emotional growth. Educators hoped to found schools that would inculcate respect for political authority within the classroom, and administrators took unprecedented steps in documenting and regulating children. Schools not only became places for disseminating learning, but also centers for gathering information about children and their families, as well as about childhood itself. The production of knowledge and the institutionalization of schools for preschool children helped usher in new trends that denaturalized childrearing outside of the family domain.     

Balancing spirituality and secularism,globalism and nationalism: the geographies of identity,integration and citizenship in schools

Geographies of education have drawn more research attention in the last decade. The varied motivations for geographical attention to education have led to divergent approaches. First, a macro, political economy or “outward looking” approach has examined educational provision and what it tells us about wider social, economic and political processes. Second, a micro, social-cultural or “inward looking” approach has emphasised social difference within school spaces, and the links between home and educational spaces. This latter approach has also acknowledged the importance of the voices of children and young people in understanding educational experiences. In this paper, l take stock of existing research in the geographies of education and then make a case for the examination of two types of schools that have received little or no geographical attention thus far, namely international schools and faith-based schools. I propose a multi-scalar framework for analysing the former and a relational framework for understanding the latter.     

The impact of the school space on research methodology,child participation and safety: views from children in Zanzibar

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the impact of school environments as research spaces on participatory research methods, children’s agency and safety. The article draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork on children’s perceptions of protection programmes in state and Qur’anic schools in Zanzibar Town. Working with ‘draw & write’ and photovoice approaches disclosed issues with children’s safety in schools and highlighted limitations of participatory research in educational spaces. Drawing on Zanzibari children’s perspectives, I suggest that to improve fragile theoretical ideals about children’s participation in participatory approaches in educational settings, research processes need cultural sensitization and conceptualization in relation to the intersecting notions of place and personhood. This, as the paper shows, needs to guide and can help develop a respectful understanding of children’s lives. This paper contributes to discussions on childhood research ethics and constructions of ‘safe research spaces’.     

Facetiming common worlds: exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones

ABSTRACT

Children, educators, and researchers at a child care center in Victoria, Canada and Melbourne, Australia have been collaborating on an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry project that grapples with children’s relations with place and technologies. Resisting narratives of environmental stewardship and instrumental digital education that dominate in the settler colonial contexts of contemporary Canadian and Australian early childhood education, this article shares stories, practices, questions, and tensions generated within the inquiry. After outlining how we think with Facetime on iPhone within a common worlds pedagogies framework, we detail two practices generated in the inquiry: (1) exchanging digital place stories and (2) crafting pedagogical contact zones with place and technologies. These practices, we argue, make visible how our collaboration reconfigures children’s relationships with place and technologies in consequential ways, and risks generating uneasy, unfamiliar, and tentative pedagogies that respond to messy entanglements within digital, more-than-human common worlds.     

‘If anything is to be done with the Indian,we must catch him very young’: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia,Canada

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on children's geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors. This paper explores how Aboriginal peoples were doubly confined; firstly, by colonial constructions about children, childhood, and Othered (Aboriginal) peoples and then, secondly, within the material geographies of colonial residential schools.     

Children’s independent mobility: the role of school-based social capital

ABSTRACT

Research has documented the decline in children’s independent mobility (CIM) globally. CIM is a measure of the level of a child’s freedom to move about his or her local neighbourhood without direct adult supervision. This paper explores the effectiveness of three intervention programmes to change travel behaviours of children to and from school in 26 Catholic primary schools in a range of urban and regional settings in Victoria, Australia. Using pre and post intervention surveys with 1600 students and parents, and interviews with school principals, we measured the influence of a range of individual, social, and built environment factors on the effectiveness of these intervention programmes. The degree of social connectedness of the school and the individual was found to have the most impact on the effectiveness of the intervention programmes to change behaviours, while the interventions themselves were not greatly effective without being embedded in a supportive school culture.     

Poor,ill, and sometimes abandoned: tubercular children in Buenos Aires, 1880-1920

Ill children with chronic diseases, such as tuberculosis, have faced difficult lives. Poverty proved a factor in their susceptibility to disease, their abandonment, and their treatment. When public health policies in Buenos Aires shifted from ignoring children to viewing them as victims who needed protection, government agencies, charitable organizations, public schools, and hospitals developed special programs that emphasized both prevention and cure of childhood tuberculosis. Argentine physicians and hygienists supported programs that were similar to those in Europe and the United States. Despite efforts, from 1880 to 1920, diagnosis of tuberculosis remained problematic, health professionals failed to prevent tuberculosis in children, and physicians were unable to cure the disease.     

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.     

Notes on women in the global city: Chicago

As the organizers of an event on women in the global city, we wanted to create a forum exploring the intersections of class, gender and other forms of inequality that fracture ‘global Chicago’. In the panelists' discussion of the intersections of struggles relating to housing, education and environmental justice in Chicago's particular version of the global city, we found evidence of lives disrupted by neoliberal trends, as well as possible sites to contest these disruptions. These struggles reverberate to shape a new urban vision, as the academics and activists assembled for our panel aim not just to work on the local issues of specific women, but to create a city in which work is well compensated, housing is affordable for everyone, schools educate all children well, all neighborhoods are safe both from crime and environmental pollutants, and everyone has the time to fully engage as active citizens of the city.     

Putting two and two together? Early childhood education, mothers’ employment and care service expansion in Chile and Mexico

In recent years, several middle-income countries, including Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, have increased the availability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. These developments have received little scholarly attention so far, resulting in the (surely unintended) impression that Latin American social policy is tied to a familialist track, when in reality national and regional trends are more varied and complex. This article looks at recent efforts to expand ECEC services in Chile and Mexico. In spite of similar concerns over low female labour force participation and child welfare, the approaches of the two countries to service expansion have differed significantly. While the Mexican programme aims to kick-start and subsidize home- and community-based care provision, with a training component for childminders, the Chilean programme emphasizes the expansion of professional ECEC services provided in public institutions. By comparing the two programmes, this article shows that differences in policy design have important implications in terms of the opportunities the programmes are able to create for women and children from low-income families, and in terms of the programmes’ impacts on gender and class inequalities. It also ventures some hypotheses about why the two countries may have chosen such different routes.     

Governance with Empty Pockets: The Education Sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The education sector has virtually disappeared from the Congolese state budget since the mid‐1980s. Yet schools have both managed to survive on school fees and to reproduce the public education sector, even though complete privatization would have been a realistic option. In this article, the authors understand this engagement with the state whilst simultaneously bending its rules as a negotiation strategy for better terms of inclusion in the state system. Different state actors cultivate their ‘own’ practical versions of official rules. In this way, they create space to respond to parents’ demand for education, to increase the number of teachers and their salaries far beyond what would otherwise have been possible, and to reproduce the system over time. One may wonder, however, whether the resilience of the sector in the face of the implosion of the state budget does not come at the price of building a more inclusive and higher quality education system.     

Good sitting,looking and listening: the regulation of young children's emotions in the classroom

Increasing attention has been given in schools in recent years to emotions as part of children's development and as core to their learning. Yet limited attention has been paid to emotions in childhood research. Based on findings from an ethnographic study within a Scottish school with children aged 6–7 years, this article explores the construction and negotiation of emotions as a part of children's classroom experience. Children's bodies and emotions are highly controlled in the classroom but despite this control, children actively construct emotions in their everyday lives.     

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.     

Start-up factories,transnational entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ecosystems: unpacking the lure of start-up accelerator programmes

This paper examines the role of accelerator programmes in promoting transnational entrepreneurship. Designed to assist the growth of start-ups by providing seed finance and structured entrepreneurship support, these programmes are now a prominent feature in many entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. Drawing on in-depth qualitative evidence focused on one particular programme, the paper shows accelerators play an important intermediary or ‘brokerage mechanism’ providing start-ups with enhanced relational connections and networks. Transnational entrepreneurs attracted to these programmes are highly focused on exploiting these networks whilst maintaining multiple levels of embeddedness in various contexts to maximize the opportunities afforded by accelerators. While many governments are attempting to replicate accelerators programmes within the public sector, the paper concludes that such attempts may prove problematic within weaker entrepreneurial ecosystems.     

Punishing wars of aggression: conceptualising Nazi State criminality and the US policy behind shaping the crime against peace, 1943-1945

This paper refocuses attention on what has been seen as one of the most important limbs of the Nuremberg Charter – the crime against peace, or aggressive war. It looks at the legal and political dimensions that motivated such a characterisation by figures behind the debate, and the various, at times uncertain steps, in bringing forth the designation based on breaches of the Kellogg–Briand Pact within the milieu of other traditional offences. Particular attention is given to the philosophical underpinnings of the crime against peace regarding individual German guilt, notably members of the Nazi leadership, with an examination of influences that proved critical in creating a punishable crime at international law. This paper argues that, despite being of continuing interest to civic groups, such an offence continues to trouble legislators and lawyers, rooted as it is in the focus on war as itself criminal.     

Mittlere technische Bildung im deutschen Kaiserreich

Intermeriate organisations between two extremes tend to have a stressed life because of their adjusting character. Intermediate technical education in Prussia existed from 1821 to 1876 enabling graduates either to go to the Berlin Gewerbeakademie or to start a business on their own. This fell a victim when the bourgoisie striving for emancipation by education (and the association of the German mechanical engineers, VDI) insisted on the highest possible school-degree as entry for students of technology. Reports on the positive experience in Switzerland, political considerations to integrate the able workers into the middle classes, local and regional economic interests as well as competition between the ministries of education and commerce from 1890 on resulted in a slow and then rapid extension of intermediate technical education, all this against the massive protests of the engineering professions. Establishing the Landesgewerbeamt and the DATSCH, who embraced all German (and even more German speaking representatives of) technical high schools, who both strongly influenced the shape of technical education in 20th century, mark the successful end of this process of differentiation.     

Evaluating the governance of structural funds programmes: The case of community economic development in South Yorkshire

Methods for evaluating regional and urban policies have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. However, this paper argues that the evaluation of Structural Funds programmes has systematically underplayed the effect of governance on both programme design and implementation. This paper uses the role of voluntary and community sector organizations in promoting community economic development initiatives within the European Union's Structural Funds programmes in South Yorkshire as a case study. An argument is made for extending evaluation methods, especially theory-based evaluation, through using multi-level governance as a “theory of change”. A key finding is that to explain how programmes work, evaluators need to consider formal partnership and management arrangements, their traditional focus, but also wider governance structures and the importance of informal policy networks. Such a focus allows for a consideration of issues such as resource mobilization and power.     

Law enforcement activities in Italy

This article examines the organization and function of Italy’s police forces. In contrast with other countries there have been very few recent studies on policing in Italy. This article starts from the origins of the modern police in Italy and tracks changes over time. Police activities that relate specifically to surveillance of territory and individuals, maintaining public order, controlling immigration and the coordination of police operations are reconstructed and documented, with a specific focus on crime prevention. The article attempts to assess to what extent this has been achieved in recent decades, and to what extent the efficiency of crime prevention has increased or decreased over the last thirty years. The article also examines the relations between the size of the police force and crime statistics to discover whether the increase in the former is directly linked to a decline in the latter.     

The Re-emergence of a Media Industry Cluster in Leipzig

This paper begins with the proposition that an analysis of the potentialities of industrial networks has to consider the wider context of the social organization of production. Recent work on industrial clustering has shown that successful clusters are embedded in tight networks of social relations between suppliers, producers, customers and institutions. Localized capabilities, such as specialized resources and skills, conventions and other local institutional structures, provide the basis for inter-firm cooperation. Based on Malmberg and Maskell's (2001) conceptualization of localized industrial clusters, I discuss the horizontal, vertical and institutional cluster dimensions as a basis for empirical analysis. In addition, attention will be drawn to the external dimension and power relations of a cluster which have a strong impact on its growth trajectory. This conceptualization is used as a basis for studying the new Leipzig media industry cluster. Leipzig, which is located in the Neue Länder (States of the former German Democratic Republic), has traditionally been a major centre of industrial production in Germany. After the German unification, a significant proportion of Leipzig's manufacturing activities were terminated or downsized. Interestingly, a new media cluster has developed during the 1990s, driven by the activities of the MDR (Middle German Television and Broadcasting Service). This has stimulated substantial start-up activities in branches of the media industry, such as film/TV production, new electronic services/interactive media, graphics/design, PR/marketing and media-related hardware/software. Being virtually the only sector which has grown in recent years, the media sector has stabilized the local economy. In this paper, I investigate those forces which have supported start-up and location decisions of media firms and the role of local institutions and policy programmes in the clustering process.     

中国拐卖儿童犯罪时空格局演变及其影响因素

中国的拐卖儿童问题给家庭和社会带来了深重灾难。本文基于公益平台获取的1960-2015年被拐儿童数据记录,综合运用数理统计、探索性空间数据分析和宏观环境分析等方法,针对拐出侧从宏观视角,探讨中国拐卖儿童犯罪的时空格局演变及其影响因素。主要结论为：①1960年以来,拐卖儿童犯罪经历了极低发期、快速增长期、高发稳定期和低发稳定期四个阶段。被拐男童多于女童,犯罪量夏半年高于冬半年。②1960-2015年以来犯罪高发地区主要是以四川为核心的西南地区,拐卖犯罪由“数地高发”向“全国频发”的格局演进。拐卖犯罪存在明显的区域集聚特征,热点省份随时间的推移,呈现由“华东”→“西南”→“东南”的演变轨迹。③地理条件、法律政策、经济发展、文化观念等方面的时空不均衡是犯罪时空格局演变的主要影响因素。