“Why would they care?”: Youth,resource extraction,and climate change in northern British Columbia,Canada

Discussion about local decision making tends to overlook rural and remote youth engagement. Resource extractive industries are, however, fixtures in many rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in settler colonial British Columbia, Canada. These industries shape youths' perceived options for social and economic ventures when they are looking towards their futures. By engaging literature on climate change, settler colonialism, and critical Indigenous studies, and drawing on empirics from workshops conducted with youth from northern British Columbia, this paper explores how rural and remote northern and Indigenous youth engagement and perspectives can transform discussions on climate change and resource extraction. The paper documents how rural and northern youth have been engaged in environmental decision making, particularly in light of resource extraction. The paper also suggests that environmental decision making has at times been extractive itself. The paper concludes that when engaged meaningfully, youth desire to work collectively against social and environmental injustices.     

Improving the transition to university: introducing student voices into the formal induction process for new geography undergraduates

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the area of school to university transitions within geography. This article focuses upon one aspect of these transitions, namely the induction programmes offered by universities to their new undergraduates. It argues in favour of extending the length of the induction period currently offered by many institutions and incorporating student voices into the induction process through peer mentoring. In making this argument, the article reports upon the new Extended Induction to Geography programme that Newcastle University piloted for the first time in 2011–2012.     

Ethiopian students' relationship with their environment: implications for environmental and climate adaptation programmes

Historically the voices of young people have been excluded from research and debates about how to respond to environmental degradation and climate change. To include the perspectives of young people in the climate change and adaptation debate, we conducted a Photovoice and draw-and-write project with 29 school students in Ethiopia, through which students were given a platform to explore their social representations of the environment. Thematic analysis of our findings suggested that young people have a deep appreciation of the moral, health-related and economic importance of the environment, a commitment to preserving it and a sense of responsibility and agency in relation to contributing to this preservation. Students saw environmental degradation as reversible, through a combination of commitment by themselves, local government and the global community. We conclude by discussing ways our findings might best be taken up in school-level programmes to strengthen youths’ existing social networks for the consolidation of ‘green’ identities, action and activism.     

The bricolage of the here: young people's narratives of identity in the countryside

Memories are crucial to our construction of place. They simultaneously offer an anchor for identity and different temporalities to encounters with landscapes. Memory allows different spaces, pasts, and futures to become embedded in particular locales. Yet the spontaneous assemblages of meaning that memory enables are not apolitical. Thus the mechanisms and processes by which meaning is articulated in these encounters are fundamental to our understandings of place. This paper, therefore, brings together the work of Henri Bergson on memory and Paul Ricoeur on narrative, to examine the stories individuals produce which define the self. By drawing on research into the lives of young people in the countryside, the paper does three things: it discusses the role of memory in creating identity; it examines the political process of narrative by which memories become woven into understandings of place and create a bricolage of the here; and finally, it offers the ‘storied-self’ as a resolution of the competing constructions and experiences of personal continuity and the inconsistencies and constant change in the project of the individual.     

Sketching culture,sketching nature: uncovering anchors of everyday nature for urban youth

There has, historically, been considerable uncertainty over the meaning of ‘urban nature’ and, therefore, the extent to which culture and nature are bound in the urban setting. We explore, in this paper, the spatiality of everyday nature as experienced by youth in an urban setting. To do so, we draw on the results of a participatory mapping activity that was designed to elicit information about where youth felt most connected to nature while in the city. Using sketch-map survey instruments, we collected hand-drawn responses from forty-three high school students in the downtown core of Tacoma, Washington. Data were digitized and analyzed in a GIS, and results were revealing of the contingency of the ‘nature’ concept in urban space as well as the centrality of ‘loose’ space to urban experiences that are evocative of being in nature.     

Environment and leisure in Italy during Fascism

While vacation colonies, camps for children and young people, well-equipped beaches and playgrounds, and the first national parks were conceived in Italy during the Liberal period, it was not until the late 1920s/1930s that they were created and transformed by the Fascist regime. This article will analyse the purposes of the use of the environment and protected areas by Fascist organisations during the Fascist regime by different social groups and classes. It will try to answer several questions: how did Fascist mass organisations (youth organisations such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) and Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL), leisure organisations like the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), sports associations) relate to environmental space? Which popular activities were conceived for open-air, urban and national parks? How did the relationship between outdoor leisure and the environment develop in the ‘new’ middle class in the 1930s? How did Fascism conceive of the relationship between human beings and nature? The Nazi regime and the US New Deal were the strongest models at that time in terms of the politics of land conservation and leisure time. Did Fascism look to those experiments; did Fascism find its own modern ‘conservative’ relationship with the environment? This article will try to answer some of these questions, mindful of the lack of studies on Italy in comparison with the expanding historiography on the German and American cases.     

Youth–community–university partnerships and sense of place: two case studies of youth participatory action research

This paper describes two youth participatory action research initiatives undertaken in East Palo Alto, CA, USA, as part of university–community partnerships. We discuss the process of engaging youth researchers to build youth skills, facilitate relationships with community-based organizations, and enhance study integrity. We report interview and artifact data that address: (1) how the youths' involvement in the research process affected their sense of place and self-efficacy for creating community change; (2) how the youths' interactions with adult community leaders shifted adult perceptions of youths' abilities and roles in the community; and (3) how the initiatives affected youth and adult participants' perspectives of the university.     

“The Old Man is Dead”: Hip Hop and the Arts of Citizenship of Senegalese Youth

The 2012 Senegalese presidential elections engulfed the country in unprecedented controversy, violence, and protest. Urban youth in Dakar animated the massive opposition movement that eventually led to the incumbent's defeat through voter registration, public critique, and mass mobilization. Two prominent factors fomenting youth action were the direct engagement of a host of well known rappers and the pervasive power of hip hop culture. This article probes the valence of the globalized art form of hip hop as a medium of political identity formation and a language of resistance in these elections through considering the spatial practices and imaginaries of rappers and their followers. It argues that hip hop fosters new geographies of citizenship inspiring urban youth to transgress prescribed boundaries in allowed speech and political behavior to make new claims on their city and nation. Insight is drawn for understanding youth politics, the power of music, and questions of urban citizenship.     

The Effects of a Campaign on Awareness and Participation Among Local Youth at the Lenggong Valley World Heritage Site,Malaysia

The capacity of a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site (WHS) to sustain its designated criteria into the future is a function of how valuable local residents perceive the WHS to be, and how motivated they are to contribute toward efforts to maintain its status. In June 2012, Malaysia’s Lenggong Valley became a WHS. We investigate the effectiveness of a campaign targeting young local residents to increase their awareness of the importance of preserving the heritage of Lenggong. We undertook a questionnaire — designed to assess participants’ awareness of the value of the WHS and their willingness to participate in efforts to maintain the WHS — aimed at students from all three secondary schools in Lenggong before and after the campaign. In all, 175 completed questionnaires were analysed: the data revealed that the campaign had a significant effect on improving participants’ awareness of the value of the WHS and on improving their willingness to participate in WHS conservation activities.     

Critical voices from adolescent ‘shape shifters’ – accessing portraits in ‘Becoming Educated’

What young people have to say about schooling can be most revealing, particularly when they expose and challenge the injustices and logic of school policies and practices. This paper captures voices from secondary school students from a school in Victoria, Australia, as part of a research project called Becoming Educated. The paper explores a particular geography of youth around the notion of ‘shape shifter’ as it relates to young people's education in two ways: first, in understanding the changing roles and identities of students as observers of, and participants in, education policies and practices; and second, as a way of interpreting the intent of those who ‘shape’ new ideas and policies to create a kind of ‘temporary alteration of outside appearances for the purpose of deception’ [Merchant, B. 1995. “Current Educational Reform: ‘Shape-shifting’ or Genuine Improvements in the Quality of Teaching and Learning?” Educational Theory 45 (2, Spring): 251–268]. The latter has a particularly significant impact on the former, and this paradox is not one that goes unnoticed by young people.