How to engage children with nature: why not just let them play?

Children's nature experiences are to an increasing degree organized by adults and involve adult's presence. A qualitative study of the Norwegian nationwide Children's Trekking Club explores how children interact with nature through organized events with varying degrees of adult management and planning. The study shows that free and spontaneous play functions as a key to more bodily, emotional and sensuous interaction with nature in contrast to when children are engaged in numerous planned activities. Spontaneous play arises at events where there are fewer participants, in which children are able to stay in one place, when adults take a more relaxed and less intrusive approach, and where there are fewer formally organized activities. To engage children with nature, and raise awareness of play as a spontaneous and child-initiated action would be a positive progression in further developing organized nature events, educational programs, as well as in parenting.     

‘Part of Our Own Story’1: Representations of Indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans within Australia Remembers 1945–1995 — the Continuing Desire for a Homogeneous National Identity

Throughout 1995 the Australia Remembers 1945–1995 programme sought to commemorate and celebrate Australia's involvement in the Second World War in ways which included all Australians and reflected the continuing potency of the Anzac legend. Indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans were included in what became, essentially, an exercise in imagining a national past. Their inclusion in the national memory fostered by Australia Remembers 1945–1995 revealed ways in which Indigenous Australians' presence within the nation remains contested. Within Australia Remembers‘ commemorations of Pacific Islanders, Papua New Guineans remained constructed as ‘the other’, in ways which remained in essence colonialist.     

‘They'd only call you a scally if you are poor’: the impact of socio-economic status on children's identities

This article highlights the importance of socio-economic status to children's understandings of their own identity and belonging. It draws on a participatory research project with two groups of children, aged 8–13 years, from different socio-economic backgrounds, in two different geographic locations. It explores how children perceive and understand their own social and economic situations in relation to others. Whilst the children, from both backgrounds, did not regard themselves as rich or poor, they acknowledged social difference through their discussions of ‘chavs’ and ‘posh’ children. The article highlights the importance of place to those children with fewer socio-economic resources. The article confirms the nature and extent of the stigma associated with being relatively poorer, and increases our understanding of a socially divided society through children's eyes. It demonstrates how even young children perceive and experience social divisions, and contributes to a fuller picture of inequality from a child's perspective.     

Picturing the city: young people's representations of urban environments

Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores visual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The findings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students' drawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities between drawings from the four countries, the majority showing a ‘big, busy city’ representation with skylines, traffic and shopping areas. There are also distinctive characteristics for each set, for example Finnish students tended to emphasise environmental and social issues more than in the other countries. In relation to methodology, we conclude that drawings, supported by contextual information, are a useful source to understand young people's representations of cities. Further, this research supports thinking about how to merge young people's experiences and imaginaries with the teaching of urban geography.     

Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy

The current upsurge of interest in emotions within geography has the potential to contribute to critical perspectives that question conventional limits to scholarship. Three precursors of emotional geographies are discussed in this context (humanistic, feminist and non-representational geographies). Connections between emotional geographies and psychotherapy are explored with a view to resisting the equation of emotion with individualized subjective experience, and developing situated, relational perspectives. Psychotherapy is approached as a theory of practice that accords central importance to affective qualities of relationships, which is shown to be directly relevant to geographical engagements with emotion. The distinction between feelings and representations of feelings is revisited through a discussion of psychotherapeutic meaning-making.     

Feeling insecure: a personal account in a psychoanalytic voice

The concept of ontological security has been taken up in human geography primarily through Giddens' (1990 Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar], 1991 Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]) formulation, but the idea has its origins in the writings of the existential psychoanalyst R.D. Laing. Returning to the psychoanalytic underpinnings of the concept, I use autobiographical vignettes to evoke and explore what it means to feel insecure. Using psychoanalytically informed illustrations of melancholia, ordinary acute anxiety and unconscious splitting, I develop a personal, subjective emotional geography of insecurity, and I caution against confusing certainty with ontological security.     

Microstructures of Building Materials from Huaca De La Luna,Peru

ABSTRACT

The microstructures of building materials from the archaeological complex of Huaca de la Luna on the northern coast of Peru is assessed for the first time by a multiscale approach. The multiscale microstructural characterization used laboratory techniques including optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray microtomography, and both gas and powder pycnometry. Optical microscopy revealed the presence of organic matter and shell fragments and X-ray microtomography showed differences in the sizes and connectivity of pores. The BET (N₂ gas adsorption) specific surface areas showed greater presence of clayey matrix in the mortars. No significant differences among mortars and brick fragments mineralogy were detected by X-ray diffraction, so the larger amount of fine binding matrix in the mortars suggests that they were produced blending raw material with different grain sizes. The aim of this study is to provide data that can be used for a better understanding of the Moche culture, its construction techniques, and to support conservation strategies of the archaeological heritage.