Diverse Spaces of Childhood and Youth


Book Description

Diverse Spaces of Childhood and Youth focuses on the diverse spaces and discourses of children and youth globally. The chapters explore the influence of gender, age and other socio-cultural differences, such as race, ethnicity and migration trajectories, on the everyday lives of children and youth in a range of international contexts. These include the diverse urban environments of Istanbul, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Toronto, London, and Bratislava and the contrasting rural settings of Ghana and England. The analyses of children's, young people's, parents' and professionals' experiences and discourses provide critical insights into how gender and other socio-cultural differences intersect. The importance of everyday practices and performances in the formation of children's and young people's identities is revealed, through for example, friendships and everyday sociality, mobilities and movements across space in both rural and urban environments. The volume shows how discourses of childhood, particularly those associated with risk, intersect with difference. The recognition of young people’s agency and participation is central to many of the chapters, whilst also raising methodological questions about how discourses of childhood and youth are researched. Overall, the book provides an original contribution to geographies of children, youth and families and research on diversity and difference in global contexts. This book was published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.




Geographies of Alternative Education


Book Description

This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education - including Steiner, human scale and forest schools, care farms and homeschooling.Based on original research with teachers, parents and young people at over 50 learning spaces, Geographies of alternative education demonstrates the importance of a geographical lens for understanding alternative education. In so doing, it develops contemporary theories of autonomy, emotion/affect, habit, intergenerational relations and life-itself. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduates in the fields of geography, sociology, education and youth studies. Given ongoing concerns about the state's role in providing children's education, and an increase in the number of alternative education providers in the UK and elsewhere, the book also highlights several critical questions for policy makers and practitioners.




Space, Place and Inclusive Learning


Book Description

This collection explores ways in which theories of space and place can be used in understanding processes of exclusion and inclusion in education. The contributions foreground how the ‘spatial turn’ and geographical knowledges can inform: debates on the relationships between learning, space and place understandings of the ways in which space and place affect education and learning ‘familiar’ research agendas through the application of conceptual perspectives from different disciplines The ten chapters which make up this book are by contributors from Australia, Italy and the United Kingdom who draw, in very different ways, on spatial theory as a means of exploring processes of inclusion and exclusion in education. Each one of the authors not only seeks to challenge growing orthodoxies in their respective field but is interested in cross-disciplinarity and spatial theory in education. This book provides key readings for experienced and beginning teachers studying for bachelors, masters and research degrees or professional qualifications. It will be particularly useful to equality and diversity post-holders, lecturers, researchers and policy makers working in all education establishments which take issues of inclusion seriously. The international content of the diverse papers in Space, Place and Inclusive Learning will be of interest not only to those practising in the United Kingdom but to educationists working in other countries who seek to understand how space and place modulate opportunities for inclusion. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education.




Intersectionality and Difference in Childhood and Youth


Book Description

This book explores the alternative experiences of children and young people whose everyday lives contradict ideas and ideals of normalcy from the local to the global context. Presenting empirical research and conceptual interventions from a variety of international contexts, this book seeks to contribute to understandings of alterity, agency and everyday precarity. The young lives foregrounded in this volume include the experiences of transnational families, children in ethnic minority communities, street-living young people, disabled children, child soldiers, victims of abuse, politically active young people, working children and those engaging with alternative education. By exploring ‘other’ ways of being, doing, and thinking about childhood, this book addresses questions around what it is to be a child and what it is to be marginalised in society. The narratives explore the everydayness and the mundanity of difference as they are experienced through social structures and relationships, simultaneously recognizing and critiquing notions of agency and power. This book, including a discussion resource for teaching or peer reading groups, will appeal to academics, students and researchers across subject disciplines including Human Geography, Children’s Geography, Social Care and Childhood Studies.




Childhood and Disability


Book Description

Drawn from Disability & Society over the period 1997-2012, the twelve chapters in this book address a range of personal, cultural and institutional arenas in which challenges experienced by disabled children are played out. The book includes a mix of theoretical and applied material offering both powerful conceptual tools and practical insights, enabling readers to connect the work of recent decades to their own research and questions about disability and childhood. Readers will find this book an invaluable resource for understanding what we have learned about disability and childhood through the pages of the world leading international journal in the field. The collection makes available a well-informed understanding of conditions, policies and practices that create disability in children's lives so that we can further the struggle for a more inclusive future in which inequalities structured around impairment are removed. The importance of children’s own voices for resisting disablement in childhood is clearly foregrounded in this invaluable collection. This book was originally published as a special issue of Disability & Society.




Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents


Book Description

This textbook showcases innovative approaches to the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies, examining how young people in a wide range of contemporary and historical contexts around the globe live their young lives as subjects, objects, and agents. The diverse contributions examine how children and youth are simultaneously constructed: as individual subjects through social processes and culturally-specific discourses; as objects of policy intervention and other adult power plays; and also as active agents who act on their world and make meaning even amidst conditions of social, political, and economic marginalization. In addition, the book is centrally engaged with questions about how researchers take into consideration children’s and young people’s own conceptions of themselves and how we conceptualize child and youth potentials for agency at different ages and stages of growing up. Each chapter discusses substantive research but also engages in self-reflection about methodology, positionality, and/or disciplinarity, thus making the volume especially useful for teaching. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including childhood studies, youth studies, girls’ studies, development studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, education, history, geography, public policy, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies and global studies.




Governing through Diversity


Book Description

This cross-disciplinary edited collection presents an integrated approach to critical diversity studies by gathering original scholarly research on ideational, technical and actual social dimensions of contemporary governance through diversity.




Children, Young People and Care


Book Description

The very notions of childhood and youth are intimately connected to contemporary norms, practices and spaces of care, caring and care-giving. The provision of care is widely figured as both the primary responsibility of parents, carers and practitioners who work with children and young people, and the primary factor in shaping children and young people’s development, education, socialisation, wellbeing and contentment. However, children and young people themselves are rarely figured as key actors in the provision of care. An overwhelming presumption that children and young people are to be cared for has effectively marginalised their agency and responsibilities as carers, or in relation to practices and spaces of care. Bringing together a significant array of multidisciplinary work on children, young people and families, this collection draws together new research on the diverse lives and experiences of children and young people as carers, as cared for, and in relation to spaces and institutions of care. It is the first collection specifically devoted to the subject of care in relation to childhood and youth. As such, the book will be a key resource for academics, practitioners and students seeking leading-edge empirical and conceptual material on this topic.




Young People in the Global South


Book Description

Young People in the Global South: Voice, Agency and Citizenship explores the spatial, relational, affective and material dimensions of adolescents’ and young people’s civic engagement and political participation in lower- and middle-income contexts. This textbook questions how the ‘everyday politics’ of exercising voice and agency is experienced at different scales, from the interpersonal to the global. It explores how structural inequalities and marginalisation, as well as social norms and attitudes, shape how voice, agency and participation are expressed by diverse young people in particular contexts with unique histories. Contributing authors focus on the experiences of young people who are marginalised based on age, gender, sexuality, disability, citizenship status and geographical location. Together they show how ageing through adolescence enables or constrains agency and voice. Textbook features include case studies on Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as reflective accounts authored by adolescents and young people themselves, discussion questions and eResources. Filling a key gap in the knowledge about the concerns and experiences of young people in contexts beyond the Global North, this textbook will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners in the fields of childhood and youth studies, international development, social movements, human geography, sociology and comparative politics.




Children and Young People's Participation and Its Transformative Potential


Book Description

Bringing together theories, ideas, insights and experiences of practitioners and researchers from Brazil, India, South Africa and the UK, this book explores children and young people's involvement in public action. The contributors consider the potential of children and young people's participation to be transformative.