Growing up in a tourist destination: negotiating space,identity and belonging

There is little research on children’s experiences of growing up in a popular tourist destination, where place and space are contested with visitors, migrants and temporary residents. Existing literature on young people’s experiences of their socio-spatial surroundings has focused predominantly on the rural/urban dichotomy, often neglecting to explore how identity and belonging are negotiated in complex community contexts such as tourist destinations. This paper reports on recent research that suggests that young people’s experiences of growing up in such an environment are nuanced and diverse, with their rich narratives disrupting socially constructed distinctions between the rural and the urban, merging experiences from both worlds.     

The City Evita Built. Cinematic Childhood and Peronism in Luis César Amadori’s Soñemos (1951)

This article examines the under-studied film productions known in Peronist Argentina as “docudramas”. Placing documentary elements within a fictional plot, docudramas marked a significant change in the state propaganda machine and were used as a new vehicle to influence social habits. I focus particularly on Soñemos [Let’s Dream], a short film directed in 1951 by Luis César Amadori to showcase urban reforms. Through an analysis of Amadori’s docudrama in regard to its representation of the Children’s City built by the Eva Perón Foundation, I discuss relationships between entertainment, the constitution of a political hegemony, and modernisation. With film techniques such as the dissolve, Soñemos depicts the Children’s City as an enterprise capable of delivering material happiness and amplifies the narrative of a fairy tale come true promised by Evita’s social service programmes. Ultimately, the docudrama affirms the central role played by the state in the definition of the “right to a home” – from supportive benefactor to constitutive replacement.     

Time,temporality, and woman–child relations

This is the second in a series of Viewpoints about a symposium on the intersections and antagonisms between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This article traces the various ways in which time and temporality were mobilised in symposium papers and discussions and considers the implications for efforts to conceptualise woman–child relations. In conclusion, the potentials and risks of focusing on temporality when theorising relations between those positioned as women and those positioned as children are considered.     

Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances*

This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. Sustained protest action emerged at the site amidst initiation of test borehole drilling activity by the pipeline company. In this paper, I engage with the potential of geotheorizing children’s relations as a critical response that interrupts dominant understandings of what is seen as appropriate for young children’s curriculum. I consider the effects of refiguring children’s subjectivities through geologic and geontological relations for the normalization and resistance of settler colonialism’s human-centric and extractive structurings.     

Cultural Worldview and Preference for Childhood Vaccination Policy

In the face of the reemerging threat of preventable diseases and the simultaneous vaccine risk controversy, what explains variations in Americans’ policy preferences regarding childhood vaccinations? Using original data from a recent nationwide Internet survey of 1,213 American adults, this research seeks to explain differing public opinions on childhood vaccination policies and related issues of governance. As Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky's grid‐group cultural theory of policy preference formation suggests, cultural biases have a significant impact on the formation of preferences toward various vaccination policies. Hierarchs are in support of mandatory vaccination, oppose religious and philosophical exemption, and believe the government should preside over vaccination‐related decisions. Fatalists strike a bold contrast in their opposition to mandatory vaccination policy and support for religious and philosophical exemptions and the role of parents in deciding on vaccinations. Falling between hierarchs and fatalists, egalitarian support for vaccinations is stronger than individualists‘.     

19世纪英国工人阶级子女童年生活转型原因探析

在19世纪,英国工人阶级子女的童年生活,逐渐由参加劳动转变为接受教育。这种转型根源于当时的社会、政治、经济生活所发生的深刻变化。思想文化界看待童年的观念变迁影响着人们对待儿童的态度。工业社会对劳动者的素质提出了新要求,改变了人们对待儿童的劳动和教育问题的传统态度;国家出于社会控制以及对民族未来的考虑,也在下层儿童的教育和劳动立法问题上采取越来越主动的态度;工人阶级家庭对于子女的教育和劳动问题的态度,也因为时代和社会的变化以及生活水平的提高而发生着改变。正是在这些因素的作用下,工人阶级儿童的生活重心逐渐由劳动转移到教育,这种转变不仅改变了几个世纪以来英国普通儿童的命运,也使得现代意义的童年生活初具模型。     

‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells,before the dark of reason grows’: children’s geographies at 12

This Keynote essay argues for a supplement to existing studies in children’s geographies, one that explores the potential of a non-child-centric children’s geography alert to the work done by the figure of ‘the child’ in all manner of worldly situations. Taking a cue from the poetry of John Betjeman, notably his 1960 Betjeman, J. 1960. Summoned by Bells. London: John Murray. [Google Scholar] Summoned by Bells, the essay considers both the intimate spaces of childhood – ones gauged by the immediacies of ‘sounds and sights and smells’ – and the challenges posed by a wider world raddled by adult preoccupations and abuses, those characterised by Betjeman as stemming from ‘the dark of reason’. The essay builds from this foundation to address the ‘darkness’ in two sets of Nazi children’s wartime geographies, as well as engaging with the complexities of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s claims, in the horizon of WWII, about the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. Within the latter – and also, notably, in Adorno’s later writing – the figure of ‘the child’ surfaces as one miniscule crumb of hope, of experiencing and knowing the world otherwise, set against the face of adult Enlightenment’s seemingly inevitable decay. At the close, Adorno’s own brief dalliance with imagining a small slice of children’s geographies allows the essay to arc back towards its original claims, and to a renewed sense of why childhood ‘sounds and sights and smells’ continue to matter far beyond just the domain of geographers researching children.     

‘The terrible twos’: Gaining control in the nursery?

‘The terrible twos’ are often described as a time of ‘gaining control’, usually thought of as adults asserting control over children, who learn to control themselves. However, toddlerhood is as much about children learning to take control for themselves. This paper is an attempt to detail something of the social geography in the toddler room of a Scottish nursery, considering both styles of adult control and the ways in which toddlers attempt to appropriate and reconfigure space and time for themselves. That is, the ways in which space and time are negotiated in the course of day-to-day nursery life.     

Childhoods in Shifting Analytical Spaces: Cross-Cultural,Biocultural, and Human Ecological Perspectives

In this article I discuss the variation and possible connections among human ecological, biosocial, and cross-cultural approaches to the anthropology of childhoods. On the basis of this comparison I consider recent analytical innovations in theorizing children's enculturation and socialization, and new research possibilities related to childcare and relatedness. Finally, I address the dimension of power in the study of children as active participants in socialization within their life worlds. Heterogeneity characterizes current childhood studies.     

The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria , 27 January 2001

The article examines the first official, national Holocaust memorial day in Italy, the so-called Giorno della memoria (Day of memory), marked on the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 2001. It looks at the ways in which the day acted as a filter for issues of national collective memory and identity, in particular state and public negotiation of the legacy of Fascism, as well as addressing broader issues of Holocaust remembrance. The article looks first at the origins of the Giorno della memoria in political and in legislative terms. Then it sketches in the events of the day itself, at national and local levels, in political, educational and cultural terms. This is followed by an analysis of media coverage and contemporary commentary, showing how various lines of interpretation addressed general issues related to the Holocaust and specifically Italian historical, ideological and contemporary questions.