Children's Spatialities


Book Description

Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, architecture and geography, and international contributors, this volume offers both students and scholars with an interest in the interdisciplinary study of childhood a range of ways of thinking spatially about children's lives.




The Evolution of Young People’s Spatial Knowledge


Book Description

Young people imagine, perceive, experience, talk about, use, and produce space in a wide variety of ways. In doing so, they acquire and produce stocks of spatial knowledge. A quite dynamic and ever-changing process by nature, young people’s production and acquisition of spatial knowledge are susceptible to many kinds of conditions—from those that shape their everyday routines to those that constitute historical turning points. Against this backdrop and drawing on a qualitative metaanalysis, the authors set out to discover what changes the spatial knowledge of young people has undergone during the past five decades. To that end, sixty published studies were sampled, analyzed, and synthesized to offer a meta-interpretation in terms of both the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge and the refiguration of spaces. As such, this book will appeal to scholars conducting spatial research on childhood and youth as well as scholars interested in urban studies from diverse disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban planning, and design. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The Open Access fee was funded by Technische Universität Berlin




Rematerialising Children's Agency


Book Description

This book is a detailed study of children’s everyday practices in a small, deprived neighbourhood of post-socialist Bratislava, called Kopčany. It provides a novel empirical insight on what it is like to be growing up after 25 years of post-socialist transformations and questions the formation of children’s agency and the multitude of resources it comes from. What happens if we accept children’s practices as cornerstones of communities? What is uncovered if we examine adults' co-presence with children in everyday community spaces? With a background in youth work, the author writes from the unique position of being able to develop in-depth insights into both children’s life-worlds, and practitioners’ priorities and needs.




Space


Book Description

Space is the first accessible text which provides a comprehensive examination of approaches that have crossed between such diverse fields as philosophy, physics, architecture, sociology, anthropology, and geography. The text examines the influence of geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy, empiricism, and positivism to the development of spatial thinking, as well as focusing on the contributions of phenomenologists, existentialists, psychologists, Marxists, and post-structuralists to how we occupy, live, structure, and perform spaces and practices of spacing. The book emphasises the multiple and partial construction of spaces through the embodied practices of diverse subjects, highlighting the contributions of feminists, queer theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and post-colonial scholars to academic debates. In contrast to contemporary studies which draw a clear line between scientific and particularly quantitative approaches to space and spatiality and more ‘lived’ human enactments and performances, this book highlights the continual influence of different mathematical and philosophical understandings of space and spatiality on everyday western spatial imaginations and registers in the twenty-first century. Space is possibly the key concept underpinning research in geography, as well as being of central importance to scholars and practitioners working across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences.




Exploring Materiality in Childhood


Book Description

Exploring Materiality in Childhood: Body, Relations and Space explores the multiple ways that childhood and materiality are intertwined and assembled. Bringing together a diverse range of authors, this topical book makes a scholarly contribution to our understanding of the entanglements of materiality and childhoods in international contexts. Chapters explore how various environments and material resources, including technologies and consumer goods, affect children’s lives. The book caters to a diverse range of theories, in sociomaterialist, posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and more-than-human research, critically exploring the boundaries of these theoretical approaches with diverse empirical cases. These wide ranges of perspectives develop alternatives to human-centred approaches in understanding children and childhoods. With its diverse theoretical and methodological choices, the book also serves as a versatile example for how to conduct research with children and on childhood. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in childhood studies, early childhood education, social sciences, cultural sciences and sociology.




Third-Space Exploration in Education


Book Description

The third space can simultaneously be a safe haven for experimentation and creativity and a risky space in which there is likely to be contestation and uncertainty. Understanding the strategic role in examining and activating third spaces is necessary, which applies not only to organizations that seek to apply the contemporary concept of third space in either digital or face-to-face settings but also to individuals who exist as actors in third-space environments. These organizations and individuals often have to perform outside of the first space, a dominant social or settler colonial identity group. Third-Space Exploration in Education investigates the knowledge, relationships, legitimacies, and languages that problematize and accommodate the paradoxes, tensions, and possibilities at the heart of understanding education-related third-space environments. The book is useful in providing insights and support for readers concerned with the creation, management, negotiation, or reconceptualization of expertise, knowledge, information, and organizational development within culturally diverse third-space communities and environments. This reference work is ideal for audiences in various disciplines centering on education as well as interdisciplinary areas or areas that can relate to education such as ethnic studies, sociology, psychology, medicine, technology, and business.




Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments


Book Description

Urban living has dramatically changed over the past generation, refashioning children’s relationships with the towns and cities in which they live, and the modes of living within them. Focusing on the global shift in urban planning towards sustainable urbanism - from master planned ‘sustainable communities’, to the green retrofitting of existing urban environments - Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments offers a critical analysis of the challenges, tensions and opportunities for children and young people living in these environments. Drawing upon original data, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments demonstrates how the needs, interests and participation of children and young people often remain inferior to the design, planning and local politics of new urban communities. Considering children from their crucial role as residents engaging and contributing to the vitalities of their community, to their role as consumers using and understanding sustainable design features, the book critically discusses the prospects of future inclusion of children and young people as a social group in sustainable urbanism. Truly interdisciplinary, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments forms an original theoretical and empirical contribution to the understanding of the everyday lives of children and young people and will appeal to academics and students in the fields of education, childhood studies, sociology, anthropology, human geography and urban studies, as well as policy-makers, architects, urban planners and other professionals working on sustainable urban designs.




Children's Mobilities


Book Description

This book offers a critical and comprehensive analysis of children’s mobilities by focusing on its interdependent, imagined and relational aspects. In doing so, it challenges existing literature, which, in mobilities studies, tends to overlook the mobilities of marginalised social groups; in social science more generally, tends to immobilize children’s studies; and in children’s mobility studies has mainly focused on the ‘independent’ and corporeal travel of children. The book situates children’s mobilities in wider contexts, offering an interdisciplinary and critical perspective throughout and drawing on scholarship at the confluence of childhood and mobilities and a range of research to offer new insights that inform the field of mobilities and studies of childhood. In this way, the book aims at widening the perspective on children’s mobility towards the inclusion of diverse age groups and of the manifold forms of mobilities that are part of children’s lives, from an interdependent and relational point of view.




Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction


Book Description

Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time intersects considerations about children’s and youth’s agency with the popular culture genre of science fiction. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency in children’s lives, this collection places science fiction at the heart of this endeavor. Retellings of the past, narratives of the present, and new landscapes of the future, each explored in science fiction, allow for creative reimaginings of the capabilities, movements, and agency of youth. Core themes of generation, embodiment, family, identity, belonging, gender, and friendship traverse across the chapters and inform the contributors’ readings of various film, literature, television, and virtual media sources. Here, children and youth are heterogeneous, and agency as a central analytical concept is interrogated through interdisciplinary, intersectional, intergenerational, and posthuman analyses. The contributors argue that there is vast power in science fiction representations of children’s agency to challenge accepted notions of neoliberal agency, enhance understandings of agency in childhood studies, and further contextualize agency in the lives, voices, and cultures of youth.




Researching Child-Dog Relationships and Narratives in the Classroom


Book Description

This interdisciplinary book explores posthuman and psychological approaches to childhood education and well-being by examining ‘animal-assisted’ education, using qualitative approaches to understand the nuanced mechanisms which unfold in child-dog interactions. Mapping the lives of children in a primary school setting and the relationships they share with their school and classroom dog, Ted, the book provides insight into everyday child-dog encounters, the importance of touch in middle childhood and how ‘bodiment’ offers a corporeal and compassionate means to understand the rhythm and musicality in interspecies communication. In doing so, the book uses the unique orientation of ‘rhythmanalysis’, a posthuman critical theory, and new materialist orientation in multispecies empathic childhood flourishing in the future. Reflecting contemporary interest in child-dog companionship, picture books, children’s flourishing, and children’s well-being, the book provides a nuanced multi-disciplinary overview of the field. Using creative methods as well as spatial, sensory, and movement theory, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and academics in the fields of cognitive psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, and primary and elementary education. Those interested in the early years will also benefit from this volume.