New materialisms and children’s outdoor environments: murmurative diffractions

ABSTRACT

This article draws on new materialisms to highlight children’s sensitivity to the agency of nonhuman materials. Working with data fragments from an ongoing project investigating children’s relationship with their outdoor environments, the article uses the figure of murmuration in a diffractive analysis approach to reveal materialdiscursive intra-actions. In doing so, the article highlights an ingrained tendency to focus on the human whilst overlooking the material. Attentiveness to the agency of all matter, human and nonhuman, has significant implications for early childhood geographies, research and pedagogy as it shines a light on the intra-active nature of the world. This offers new possibilities but also calls attention to the relations of responsibilities inherent in a world where all matter is vibrant and agential.     

BEYOND THE FOOD DESERT: FINDING WAYS TO SPEAK ABOUT URBAN FOOD SECURITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Urban food security is a significant development challenge in sub‐Saharan Africa. However, the field is currently under ‐researched and under‐theorized. Urban food insecurity, where it is considered, has been viewed through a development studies lens that views food insecurity as a household‐scale problem. There has been significant focus on food deserts in developed countries as one way of engaging with such insecurity. The food deserts research views food insecurity through a social exclusion and food justice lens. This article introduces the food desert concept to provide a conceptual tool to begin to understand the spatial determinants of urban food insecurity, which are not well captured by the existing framings of food security in the region. Using data from a 2008 household food security survey conducted in Cape Town, the paper highlights gaps in the food deserts approach, most significantly its neglect of non‐market sources of food and of household decision‐making processes. The paper therefore concludes by suggesting a new approach which takes the household's assets, abilities and decision‐making as the starting point and overlays this with the market and non‐market foodscapes accessed by these households.     

‘As the twig is bent ...’: children and their parents in an aristocratic society

The family, be it nuclear or extended, is integral to all historical societies. Usually, the primary bond is between older and younger males, most often between father and son. As an economic, political and social unit the family is supposed to provide solidity, stability and protection for all its members.As part of the kinship unit children from primary and secondary bonds with nuclear and extended relatives. Adverse demographic and economic forces, however, can break these alliances, disrupting and exacerbating the intimacies of daily life. Families in crisis turn upon weaker members, often expelling young and old from the hearth. As a limited numerical unit the family provides only a small arena for vented hostility. After wreaking inner devastation, the survivors loose a concentrated storm of repressed hatred upon a much larger, but equally vulnerable institution: the local Church. Overwhelming and seemingly irrational economic and social forces pit young against old; eventually, new, external bonds of allegiance are erected over the shards of the broken family.¹