Space, Place, and Environment

ISBN-13: 9789812870438 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 566 str.

Karen Nairn; Peter Kraftl; Tracey Skelton

Opis

Geographies of children and young people is a rapidly emerging sub-discipline within human geography. There is now a critical mass of established academic work, key names within academia, growing numbers of graduate students and expanding numbers of university level taught courses. There are also professional training programmes at national scales and in international contexts that work specifically with children and young people. In addition to a productive journal of Children's Geographies, there's a range of monographs, textbooks and edited collections focusing on children and young people published by all the major academic presses then there is a substantive body of work on younger people within human geography and active authors and researchers working within international contexts to warrant a specific Major Reference Work on children's and young people's geographies. The volumes and sections are structured by themes, which then reflect the broader geographical locations of the research.

O autorze

Associate Professor Karen Nairn is currently based at the Otago University College of Education, Dunedin, New Zealand. Her current research focuses on youth identities and post-school transitions. Her recent book Children of Rogernomics. A neoliberal generation leaves school, connects the stories of young people with the wider social and economic story of New Zealand during the last three decades. More broadly, her research focuses on processes of exclusion in education shaped by gender, sexuality and race. Her research portfolio is interdisciplinary in nature with contributions to education, youth studies, geography, and qualitative research. Prior to her university career, she was a high school geography teacher.

Her future research plans revolve around investigating how diverse collectives of young people think about a future threatened by climate change, economic precarity, and political instability. Her new research intends to find out what young people consider the most urgent issues to address, how hope influences their collective actions for change, and how their identities are shaped in the process. 

Tracey Skelton is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She was previously Professor of Critical Geographies at the University of Loughborough in the UK. The essential elements of her research career focus on people who are socially, politically, and intellectually excluded. Her early work focused on the Caribbean and issues of gender and racial inequality, feminist geographies, and methodological analysis. She has contributed to culture and development debates, particularly through her longitudinal research on the island of Montserrat. Recently, A/P Skelton returned to this field of scholarship through research with volunteers and host organizations in Cambodia as part of a major comparative and collaborative project on development partnerships. She was the principal investigator of a major comparative urbanism research project on the livability, sustainability, and diversity of four Asian cities: Busan in South Korea, Hyderabad in India, Kunming in China, and Singapore.

A/P Skelton is a recognized international leader in the subdiscipline of children’s and young people’s geographies. In particular, her work has served to challenge the invisibility and marginalization of young people from geographic academic research at the same time as it has demonstrated the rich and varied ways in which young people live their lives both spatially and temporally alongside, but differently from, adults. Her research work has been funded by key research institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK; the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Academic Research Fund and the Global Asia Institute, both of the National University of Singapore; the Australian Research Council; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

A/P Skelton was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Children’s Geographies and has been the Viewpoints Editor since 2005 and became the Commissioning Editor for Asia in 2010. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Geoforum, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Geography Compass, and ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies (open access). She has coauthored 2 books, edited 3 collections, guest-edited 2 special journal issues, and published more than 70 journal articles and chapters. She is a passionate teacher and graduate supervisor. She is committed to the politics of research dissemination in accessible formats, in particular to enable the participants in her research projects to understand and recognize their coproduction of knowledge whether through specialized small-scale workshops, translation of reports into local languages, or production of audiovisual materials.

Blurb

This volume demonstrates the multiple ways that space, place and environment interact with children and young people’s lives. The contributors offer a suite of cutting-edge tools and lively examples for theorising how space, place and environment are (con)figured in children and young people’s lives. They demonstrate how the social borders between childhood and adulthood, and spatial borders between rural and urban, countries, neighbourhoods, and institutions, are relationally produced.

The volume is organised into five sections: Indigenous Youth: Space and Place; Children, Nature and Environmental Education; Urban Spaces; Home/less Spaces; and Border Spaces. These themes signal the major issues in cutting-edge children’s geographies scholarship. Diverse geographical contexts are covered in this volume – including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Peru, Slovenia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

All of the contributors advocate greater recognition of children and young people’s spatial rights, whether in the home, outdoors, at school, crossing borders, in public and digital spaces, or simply looking for a safe place to sleep. Children and young people’s perspectives on space, place and the environment, and their desire for places to call their own, tie the volume together. The volume is a testament to the politics of the spaces and places of childhood, highlighting how many children and young people face obstacles to living well and to living where they desire.