‘Staying active’ in confined living conditions: participation assessments of young asylum seekers (aged 12–23) in the Netherlands†

This article contributes to the critical literature on child participation discussing the positionings of young asylum seekers (aged 12–23) residing in a Dutch asylum centre. It queries participation as an institutional measure, outlining the informants’ perspectives on the creation of a youth council within the confines of an asylum centre. Contradictions and tensions in the wider societal context, in the asylum centre, and in the functioning of the youth council are identified. They demonstrate the gulf between theory and practice in the fulfilment of children's participation rights. The authors scrutinize concepts such as ‘methodological immaturity’, ‘voice’, and ‘recognition’ and argue for the integration of the perceptions and practices of young asylum seekers through dialogue. This can assist in creating an atmosphere conducive to an ethically responsible and meaningful collaboration with young asylum seekers and adapted policy interventions to enhance participation against an on-going backdrop of insecurity, exclusion, and forced inactivity.     

Overcoming obstacles on the peri‐urban fringe: young people making new geographies

Understanding contemporary youth lifestyles is a challenge for urban planners and geographers. Young people's everyday needs are complex, and urban spaces in new outer city developments offer unique spaces for shaping their identities. Juxtaposed with affordances of digital technologies, the physical location of home exists in a fluid landscape. Overcoming obstacles, such as access to public transport, places to socialise, and meet their peers, is characteristic of the everyday young person's experience. Knowing how young people decide where to go for personal space, as well as who to ask for personal advice, was the aim of this study. The study was conducted with samples of young people growing up in the rapidly growing peri‐urban northern suburbs of the Australian city of Melbourne. A survey questionnaire was administered to a gender‐balanced sample aged 12–15 years (n = 523) with follow‐up interviews to better inform the results. Logistic regression and factorial analyses of variance reveal their favourite places to be ‘my’ bedroom, being with friends, the park, and the café. Although not the focus of this study, some gender differences were noted. In addition to innovative use of space, the results show the positive influences on their well‐being of trusted family and friends. Young people's geographies offer transdisciplinary insights that highlight their creative usage of these new urban spaces. They offer a new imaginary for geographical education and research.     

Adriano Celentano and the origins of rock and roll in Italy

Abstract

This article examines the way in which American rock and roll was translated into Italian culture. It argues that Italian versions of rock and roll were not just ‘watered down’ or ‘domesticated’ versions of the original. Rather, Italian rock emerged from a context that was different in musical, ethnic, political, linguistic and religious terms. By focussing on Adriano Celentano (the most prominent ‘Italian Elvis’ of the 1950s), it is shown that Italian rock singers evolved from mere imitation to cultural forms that were more related to the Italian environment. Musically, this meant a relationship with the domestic melodic tradition, jazz and American rock and roll rather than the blues. The rebellious attitude of early singers was a function of the hostility demonstrated towards them by political and religious authorities. Once this attitude was replaced by one of co-optation, opposition was replaced by modernizing integration. A figure like Celentano managed to be simultaneously defiant and conservative, pagan and religious, conformist and non-conformist. The resulting contradictions were concealed beneath a personal magnetism partly based on an established ‘cool’ style that appealed to the new categories thrown up by social and economic changes. Celentano's fame was confined to Italy not because he merely imitated American rock but because he developed an original synthesis that was specifically adapted to Italian tastes.     

Modifying sense of place in a federal company town: Sunflower Village,Kansas, 1942 to 1959

The federal government built Sunflower Village, Kansas, to house employees of the Sunflower Ordnance Plant and their families during World War II. The community existed in this fashion until 1959 when a private real-estate developer bought the land and buildings. The Village evolved out of many perspectives in urban planning including those of federal ownership, ‘Garden City’ communities, and private company towns. This study examines a modified, or unique, development of sense of place that evolved here due to these varied urban forms and despite evidence of mobility and a short residence. Landscape analysis, archival searches and personal interviews also reveal a distinct difference in the experiences of youth and adults that resulted in varying processes of attachment within the community.     

Producing Vancouver's (hetero)normative nightscape

The article argues, through an examination of Vancouver's entertainment district as an actively produced ‘civilizing’ space dominated by private enterprise, that it is important to understand the ‘mainstream’ as a grounded site which produces, maintains and reiterates the moral contours of heterosexuality (among other things) within the city. Nightclubs in particular, experienced as spaces of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity, offer a prime example of how the union of governmentality, surveillance and private enterprise work together in the maintenance and regulation of social conformity. Drawing upon an ethnographic study from 2005 to 2006, I explore the entertainment district and highlight young adults' perceptions of its nightlife economy and how space, hegemonic sexuality and nightlife collide.     

Trans youth,science and art: creating (trans) gendered space

This article is based on empirical research which was undertaken as part of the Sci:dentity project funded by the Wellcome Trust. Sci:dentity was a year-long participatory arts project which ran between March 2006 and March 2007. The project offered 18 young transgendered and transsexual people, aged between 14 and 22, an opportunity to come together to explore the science of sex and gender through art. This article focuses on four creative workshops which ran over two months, being the ‘creative engagement’ phase of the project. It offers an analysis of the transgendered space created which was constituted through the logics of recognition, creativity and pedagogy. Following this, the article explores the ways in which these transgendered and transsexual young people navigate gendered practices, and the gendered spaces these practices constitute, in their everyday lives shaped by gendered and sexual normativities. It goes on to consider the significance of trans virtual and physical cultural spaces for the development of trans young peoples' ontological security and their navigations and negotiations of a gendered social world.     

我国青少年旅游网络建构的初步探讨

青少年目标市场不仅是目前旅游市场的重要组成部分,而且随着年纪的增长,他们将成为未来旅游市场的中坚。本文在这一思想的指导下,提出了建构青少年旅游网络的设想。笔者先分析了建构青少年旅游网络的可能性与必要性,在此基础上指出了现阶段青少年旅游市场存在的一系列问题,伴随着对这些问题的思考,笔者建构了青少年旅游网络的基本框架,并界定了青年旅游网络的内涵,对具体的建构工作提出了思路。     

Situating (Young) teenagers in geographies of children and youth

The past decade has been an exciting and productive period in the study of children's and young people's geographies. The principal aim of this paper is to contribute to this field of research by presenting the arguments for a more substantive focus on teenagers' geographies. Firstly, the terms ‘children’ and ‘young people’ are constructed as synonymous and used interchangeably and the complex transitional positioning of young teenagers—situated between childhood, youth and adulthood—has been relatively neglected. Secondly, many researchers have been engaged in developing methods, which aim to challenge unequal power relations between adult researchers and young participants but little focus has been placed on utilizing participants' own constructions of themselves. The final argument for a more coherent focus on teenagers' geographies rests on the contribution that geographers can make to challenging negative stereotypes of teenagers within policy and the media. The paper concludes by outlining what form an emphasis on teenagers' geographies may take.     

Refusing Reform,Reworking Pity,or Reinforcing Privilege? The Multivalent Politics of Young People’s Fun and Friendship within a Volunteering Encounter

This paper analyses initiatives which took British young people from ethnic minority and disenfranchised backgrounds to volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa. It asks whether decolonial possibilities can be seen in the politics of youthful fun and friendship amid a practice undeniably driven by interpenetrating neocolonial logics, where enrolment in helping “needy” others is seen as a means to “improve” working-class and racially marked youth. The paper argues that volunteers’ investments in leisure constituted a politics of refusal towards how they were acted upon as objects of concern. More ambivalently, playful, friendly interactions between British and African youth disrupted relations of charitable pity and signalled desires for solidarity and equality, but cannot be claimed as fully decolonial. At times, fun also re-entrenched neocolonial and other oppressive relations. Overall, the paper demonstrates that a close reading of the multivalent, affective politics of young people’s fun and friendship can reveal much about the reproduction or subversion of contemporary neocolonial logics that operate both within and beyond the borders of postcolonial Britain.     

Weathering the Ill Wind: The Affective and Embodied Dimensions of Anti-Immigrant Political Discourses on Young African Men in Italy

Using the election of the far-right populist coalition government in Italy in 2018 and resultant legislative changes to immigration it brought about as an analytic lens, I examine the material and emotional impact of these changes on young African men, hosted as “unaccompanied minors” in a reception centre in a northern Italian town. I refer to these changes as an “ill wind” and in this paper examine its impacts using Christina Sharpe’s notion of “weathering” to refer to the totality of the ongoingness of the anti-Black climate and its effect on Black bodies. I contextualise the young men’s experiences within the Italian race landscape, thus drawing attention to the postcolonial legacies of race and racialisation still underpinning Italian society today. I present how historical structures of racial governmentality are integral to the geography of subordination and produce the racialised figure of the migrant, leaving some strangers to remain stranger than others.