Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: reconceptualising rural childhood roaming

This paper argues for reconceptualising how children use technology ‘outdoors’ as a technology-nonhuman-child assemblage, or roaming pathway. Founded in contemporary fears about children’s reduced opportunities to access nature and roam in rural environments, in part due to the ubiquitous presence of technology in their lives, we instead illustrate how the agencies of technologies and plants are folded into children’s outdoor roaming. Combining visual methods, video analysis and qualitative geovisualisation, and in collaboration with the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, this paper exposes how assemblages are contingently brought into being through the actions of what technologies, plants and children do together. We demonstrate how the agentic capacities of non-humans and technologies are assembled through children’s imaginative interaction with them, and how these imaginative interactions make such agencies visible.     

‘Like it,don’t like it,you have to like it’: children’s emotional responses to the absence of transnational migrant parents in Lombok,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences and emotions of children in rural East Lombok, Indonesia, who stay behind with relatives or neighbours while their parents leave the country for work. The article contributes to recent scholarship of children’s experiences of transnational migration in Southeast Asia by drawing out the complex emotions of children who stay behind. Based on research conducted in four ‘sending’ villages, the article describes children’s lived experiences of their parent’s transnational migration, and their intense feelings that whether they ‘like it or don’t like it’, they have no choice but to acquiesce to their parents’ long, often indeterminate absences. The research suggests that stay-behind children are entangled in community anxieties pervading the emotional economy of transnational migration, including the embodied emotion of shame (malu) which shapes children’s responses to parental absence. By focusing on children’s own views and experiences, we contribute to growing debates about the implications of migration for children’s rights and well-being in Southeast Asia.     

Towards transnational gender identity. A case study of Polish children growing up in Norway

This article focuses on migration experiences of Polish children living in one of the most gender-equal countries in the world – in Norway. Empirically, the article is based on 30 semi-structured interviews with children aged 6–13 who were born in Poland and migrated with their parents to Norway after Poland’s accession to the European Union. Observation of their rooms during the interview also contributed to the study. We discuss ways in which gender roles, practices and identities are shaped by mobility in the Polish-Norwegian context and how ideas about girls/women and boys/men are affected by the migration experience. The article seeks to explore children’s experiences in the two highly contrasting and differentiated contexts: one where the children were socialized and the other where they then moved, the former being highly traditional in terms of gender, the latter emphasizing gender equality. We argue that the Polish home is the most important site for the formation of the traditional gender identity, while the Norwegian school and peer group are the most important sites for the formation of the modern gender identity. This situation causes tension and ambivalence with regard to children’s gender identities across a number of different spaces and spheres of their lives.     

'It's only as stupid as you are': Children's and adults' negotiation of ICT competence at home and at school

Contemporary discourses about children's use of information and communication technologies (ICT)—which both celebrate children's command of a technology which is seen to be our future, and raise fears that this technology is putting children's emotional well-being at risk—are problematic, resting as they do on essentialist ideas about children, and overt technological determinism. Drawing instead on work within the new social studies of childhood, and the sociology of science and technology, we identify a need for research which examines how children and technology come together in diverse communities of practice. The communities of practice we study are the home- and school-based ICT usage of British school children in the late 1990s. Our research identifies the different ways in which children and adults negotiate children's technical and emotional competence in relation to ICT, and uncovers the varied meanings of childhood and technology which emerge for adults and children in these two socio-spatial environments. These findings not only highlight the spatiality of children's and adults' performances and understandings of ICT competence, but also how these are constituted through the socio-spatial relations which shape the off-line spaces of home and school.     

Mothers,communities and the scale of difference

Only recently did geographic concern turn to why and how, and when and where political identities are reproduced but, as yet, our understanding of the political relations between families and communities remains understudied. This lack of attention is attributable, in part, to the complexities of families and communities but, this aside, all societies regulate reproduction and there are always claims for legitimization of particular views of family values and community relations. With this paper, I argue that highlighting the social construction of scale suggests ways that the social imaginary of a domestic myth is spatially embedded within a nurturing local community. I outline some recent feminist discussion of local childcare cultures and critique of 'the public sphere' prior to raising scale as a way to open up static versions of justice and difference. Arguments in the paper that relate to the social construction of scale are illustrated by examples from a study of the impact of a new child and a residential move on mothers in San Diego. I argue that although the birth of a child highlights important questions that relate to responsibility, self-identity and notions of family, community and society, it is from within a politically structured notion of scale that many of the constraints and contexts of childcare arise. This paper focuses specifically on negotiating childcare as a basis of resistance through day-to-day contestations at multiple scales.     

History in Two Dimensions or Three? Working Class Responses to History

Research carried out by the author in North Carolina (2007) aimed to assess how museums might help rebuild identity in communities devastated by economic decline. Interviews, compared with examples from ‘Time and Tide’, Yarmouth, UK, suggested that working class people feel a strong need for history, intense emotional ties to the industrial landscape, and believe that museums can radically change their lives. The evidence suggested that the importance of history to people’s sense of self has been underestimated, particularly in the case of the industrial poor. This paper considers reasons for this underestimation, and suggests that these groups may also have higher and more wide‐ranging expectations of history than intellectuals do. It suggests these ‘emotional’ uses of history, rather than being inferior to academic history, may be richer, and that this ‘three‐dimensional’ experience of history exhibited by the urban poor can enrich the two‐dimensional historical experience of the researcher or museums professional.     

Children’s agency in accessing for spaces of play in an urban high-rise community in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This research explores children’s agency in negotiating for play spaces in Malaysia within the context of an urban high-rise community. Fieldwork was conducted with 31 children between the ages of four to 12 years old. A qualitative, child-centered approach to data collection was employed using participatory research methods. The study reveals how children gain access to play spaces and details their innovative strategies in maximizing play opportunities in a community with limited infrastructural and social support. It highlights how children claim the use of communal spaces within the housing compound, reinvent designated play spaces, resist adult rules around restricted spaces and embrace elements of global culture for meaningful play opportunities. The paper argues that children exercise agency in accessing play spaces, and by so doing, extend and expand their lived geographies which are not just spatial, temporal and social but also invented and imagined.     

Renegotiating the Primary School: Children's Emotional Geographies of Sport,Exercise and Active Play

The current UK policy concern with children's health has led to primary school practices of sport, exercise and active play aimed, in particular, at constructing children's bodies as ‘healthy’. Qualitative explorations of children's own values and experiences however, reveal that their understandings of sport in school differ considerably from its potential to be healthy, instead emphasising emotional geographies of pleasure and enjoyment. This article aims to develop a better understanding of children's ability to modify and reconstitute discursive corporeal regimes through their own agency, thus highlighting the fluid nature of the primary school as an institution. Adult discourses and children's bodily challenges to these mingle and intersect, creating spaces of competing values and discourses that work to transform and renegotiate the primary school. Although this article focuses particularly on the UK context, the findings will be relevant for any country in which child obesity is of current concern for social and education policy.     

The production of tyrannical space

Bullying is an internationally pervasive problem that impacts significantly on the behaviour, health and wellbeing of children. Drawing on ideas developed in both the abundant psychology literature, and the landmark study by Percy-Smith and Matthews Tyrannical Spaces (2001) Percy-Smith, B. and Matthews, H. 2001. Tyrannical spaces: Young people, bullying and urban neighbourhoods. Local Environment, 6(1): 49–63. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar], this paper examines the psychosocial dynamics of bullying as they interrelate with various environments. The key groups involved in bullying are considered particularly with respect to their spatial rituals, actions and interactions. In the absence of sustained geographical research in this field, some broad directions for future geographies of bullying are suggested as the basis for future inquiry. Some initial indications are provided as to how these might involve, and connect to, existing disciplinary interests in geographies of exclusion, moral and emotional geographies.     

Everyday travel for families with children using wheelchairs: parents’ perceptions of constraints and adaptation strategies

ABSTRACT

There is a norm assuming high mobility in the Western world today, which can increase the social and geographical exclusion of those who have limited possibilities to travel, such as people with disabilities. When it is a child who has the disability, travel-related constraints are likely to affect the whole family’s travel patterns. This study explores travel constraints among Swedish families with children with cerebral palsy who use wheelchairs. A time-geographical framework is employed. Interviews with parents show that these families’ everyday mobility is affected by authority, capacity and coupling constraints, and that it is often a combination of these constraints that makes travelling difficult. The families use different strategies to negotiate these constraints. In addition to strategies controlled by the families, the findings suggest that there is also a need for governmental support and a barrier-free transport system to enhance their mobility.