Children caring for their worlds: The politics of care and childhood

This paper builds on political geographies of children and youth by looking at the ways children express their political agency through acts of caring. Ethnographic research was conducted with a group of 19 children aged 9–11 years old in a rural town in New Zealand. This paper discusses the results of a photojournal project in which the children were given disposable cameras to use as a way to explain their cares and concerns in their daily lives and in the larger world around them. Drawing on Tronto's care ethic framework in which subjects are active in maintaining, continuing and repairing their worlds, the children's photojournals illuminated their abilities and efforts to care for their worlds. As a political concept, care brings attention to interdependences, connections and relationships that are essential to our individual and collective survival and often overlooked in liberal political theory. This paper demonstrates that the framework of care and exploring children's everyday caring practices help us better understand the often unacknowledged political agency of children.     

Freedom Isn't Free: Free Will in La vida es sueño Revisited

This article analyzes the structural composition of the chicana/o novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra, by Tomás Rivera, a book that has become a collective point of reference for chicana/o culture and community. Its structure will be explained, including the importance of personal and collective memory as elements that evolve every chapter as a fragmentary part of a whole. The classical concept of "art of memory" joined to the rhetoric of discourse opens a new perspective to analyze this fragmentation and helps the reader to understand the connection of its elements. Finally, the idea of "theater of memory" may be applied to the novel's chicana/o universe as a dramatic device for structuring the narrator's personal memories, achieving a final literary composition similar to a memorable, collective altarpiece full of impressive images from this community's daily struggle in the 1960s.     

Constructions of rural childhood: challenging dominant perspectives

This article reviews research on the lives and experiences of children and young people living in rural Minority world environments. The literature reviewed has focused on constructions of rurality in relation to children's experiences, most notably the rural idyll. Alternative constructions of rural childhood, characterised by dullness, horror and deprivation, are also apparent, and associated with insufficient rural activities, resources and transport, marginalisation and social exclusion. The more recent inclusion of children's perspectives on rural living provides a deeper understanding of rural childhood and challenges the dominant perspectives.     

Biological values of the Nordic cultural landscape: Different perspectives

Intensified land use practices in the Nordic countries are increasing the need for more determined strategies in both natural and cultural conservation. The development of such management strategies requires an inter‐disciplinary approach to overcome the existing boundaries between research disciplines. The paper focuses on certain biological elements which should be taken into account in landscape management. These elements are discussed in different perspectives: temporal, spatial Nordic and European, and the close relationship between biological and historical landscape values is emphasised. Examples of changing evaluations over time and among different groups of people are given. In conclusion the paper stresses the need for a holistic approach to preserve the natural and cultural heritage and secure a long‐term utilisation of the landscape.