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.     

Art That Makes Itself and other generative beginnings: Paul Brown interviewed by Bronaċ Ferran

ABSTRACT

In an interview with Brona? Ferran, Paul Brown recalls his involvement with people and places formative in shaping important countercultures of the 1960s and his long-term interest in generative art processes. He describes his interests since childhood in art and technological thinking which was further inspired by the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in 1968. Shortly before seeing this, he had left art school, discouraged by a tutor who, on seeing a system-based drawing he had made, told him he would never become an artist. This exit proved liberating as Brown swiftly went on to forge an autonomous route working on light-shows and other multimedia events particularly at The Blackie in Liverpool, which had links to Drury Lane Arts Lab and other centres of radical experimentation. He returned to college in the early 1970s to study art and computing which became the basis of his successful art career.     

‘Favourite places in school’ for lower-set ‘ability’ pupils: school groupings practices and children’s spatial orientations

This paper contributes to the recent turn within Children’s Geographies concerned with understanding and illuminating educational inequalities. The focus is upon pupils assigned to lower ‘ability’ groupings, in a school under pressure to raise attainment. The objective of the paper is twofold, firstly to consider how school grouping practices affect children’s sense of belonging in lessons, and secondly, to contextualise these findings against children’s spatial orientations within the broader school environment. It is argued that a spatial focus may shed light upon the educational policy drivers that contribute to the exclusion of disadvantaged children. Neo-liberal imperatives of accountability and performance can be seen to shape hierarchies of belonging, where pupils’ positioning in ‘ability’ groupings enables/limits the spatial agency that they can exert. Macro policy concerns are mapped onto micro school processes concerning the construction and governance of school spaces, using theoretical insights from Michel Foucault and R.D Sack.     

Book Reviews

Roman Sexualities. Edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) x + 348 pp. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 19: History of Political Ideas—Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity. Edited with an introduction by Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997) 281 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Managing Knowledge: Experts, Agencies and Organizations. By Steven Albert and Keith Bradley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xi + 215 pp. £40.00 cloth, £14.95 paper.

Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. By Richard Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). x + 176 pp. $54.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender. By S. H. Rigby. Manchester Medieval Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) xii + 205 pp. £35.00 cloth, £12.99 paper.

Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra. By C.G. Jung, ed. James L. Jarrett, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) xxviii + 393 pp. $17.95, £10.95 paper.

Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. By Bernadette J. Brooten (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) xxii + 412pp. £34.95, $27.95 cloth.

Political Communication Today. By Duncan Watts (Manchester: Manchester University Press) x + 228 pp. £40.00 cloth, £10.99 paper.

A Primer on German Enlightenment. By Sabine Roehr (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995) xi + 282 pp. £36.95 cloth.

Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. By André Vauchez. Trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) xxvii + 645 pp. £65.00, $95.00 cloth.     

Book reviews

Pieter van de Velde (ed.). Prehistoric Indonesia: a reader. vii, 404 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1984. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde, 104.)

B.J. Boland and I. Farjon. Islam in Indonesia: a bibliographical survey 1600–1942, with post‐1945 addenda. xxii, 173 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983. (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volken‐kunde. Bibliographical Series, 14.) Guilders 40.

Anthony J. Whitten and others. The ecology of Sumatra. [By] Anthony J. Whitten, Sengli J. Damanik, Jazanul Anwar, Nazaruddin Hisyam. xvii, 583pp., 64 plates. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1984. $20.

Jan Breman. Control of land and labour in colonial Java: a case study of agrarian crisis and reform in the region of Cirebon during the first decades of the 20th century. xii, 159 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde, 101.)