A Sixteenth-Century Draft Plan of Lisbon’s Western Suburb

The National Library of Brazil has in its cartographic collection a little-known late sixteenth-century ichnographic plan of Lisbon, Portugal, showing the city’s western extramural suburb. In this article the unfinished draft plan is analysed for what it reveals of the mapmakers’ surveying methods. Comparison of the plan with other historical sources suggests that it was produced by Giovanni Vincenzo Casale and Alexandre Massai for military purposes between 1590 and 1597. This makes it the oldest ichnographic plan of Lisbon known to date, replacing the better known ichnographic plan of Lisbon signed by João Nunes Tinoco in 1650.     

Theatre Elicitation: developing a potentially child-friendly method with children aged 8–12

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the growing body of literature published in Children Geographies on the importance of involving children in research processes. Inspired by participatory creative methods such as photo elicitation and popular/forum theatre, we have developed a potentially child-friendly tool referred to as Theatre Elicitation (TE). The objective of TE is to use theatre forms as a means of data collection in the context of a negotiated research process. In a pilot project in which we explore TE, children shared their perceptions of happiness. This was inspired by a UNICEF Report [2007. Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries. Innocenti Report Card 7. Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre] that listed ‘Dutch children’ as the happiest of the world. The focus of this article is the development of TE as an interactive research tool. Insights were gained into the meaning of ‘child-friendly’ research, shifting power relations between children, peers and adults, and how children’s own positioning in lived experiences contextualized concepts such as ‘Dutch children’.     

Is Francesco Patrizi’s L’Amorosa Filosofia a heterodox reading of the Symposium?

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on L’Amorosa Filosofia, perhaps the most compelling response to Ficino’s De Amore produced in the sixteenth century, as it is centered on the notion of love as philautia, based upon a naturalistic and psychological interpretation. The learned lady Tarquinia Molza, the most important interlocutor of Francesco Patrizi, affirms that love, from its beginnings in the inner self to its end, when reaching the divine, cannot but be a phenomenon that engages the sense of touch, showing a naturalistic attitude toward the body and an interest in the mediation between matter and spirit. Contrary to popular notions of self-love as selfish and callous, an honest man must necessarily love himself first in order to love others. In The Praise of Folly, Erasmus also tackles the concept, making Folly praise Philautia as a fundamental means for happiness. More relevant to Patrizi’s work, in Mario Equicola’s De Natura de Amore, there is a long digression on the virtues of self-love.     

‘You said “home” but we don’t have a house’ – children’s lived rights and politics in an asylum centre in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This study explores children’s lived rights and articulated politics in the context of housing underpinned by their lived experiences in an asylum centre in Sweden. The findings reveal a discrepancy between the children’s articulated standpoints, where well-being is connected to having a home, and their lived experiences of lacking conditions for both house and home at the asylum centre. This discrepancy enables demonstration of the children’s articulated politics, as they criticize conditions, practices and relational aspects they experience as constraining their well-being at the asylum centre. Thereby, the children themselves identify the structural denial of their right to conditions for well-being and adequate housing. They also express what conditions for well-being should be accessible to them, which is interpreted here as their making rights claims when their formal rights are not fulfilled.