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Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Working Group
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RGS-IBG Sessions 2007 |
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1) Children, young people and 'disability' Sponsored by GCYF-WG Convenors: Michelle Pyer, Sara Ryan, John Horton, Peter Kraftl and Faith Tucker In the last two decades, Geographers have contributed importantly to understandings of the social, spatial and environmental barriers experienced by people with 'disabilities', impairments and mental health issues. However, within this body of work, the geographies of children and young people remain relatively marginalised. Presently, there is a particularly pressing need for better understandings of these too-often neglected geographies in at least three senses. First, there is growing awareness that Social Scientific research regarding children and young people - under the rubric of 'Children's Geographies', for example - has too-often failed to consider the experiences, issues and needs of children and young people with 'mind-body-emotional differences' (Holt, 2004). Thus there is a need for a much wider spectrum of research and enquiry, to begin to attend to the diverse experiences, geographies and 'differences' in existence. Second, a raft of recent legislative interventions - such as the UK's Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (2001) - demand better understandings of, and new modes of practice and engagement with, younger disabled people. In addition, there is thus a need for reflection upon relationships between policy, practice and academic enquiry in this field. Third, diverse work by 'disability' activists and practitioners has successfully articulated a range of profound methodological, philosophical, and empirical challenges for academic researchers. Thus there is a need for innovative methods, concepts, ethics and participatory mechanisms which facilitate and enhance current and future empirical research and practice, particularly with the diversity of individual experience in mind.
This session thus seeks to draw together, and reflect upon, the widest possible range of recent/ongoing research, practice and theory regarding geographies of children and young people with 'disabilities', impairments and/or 'mind-body-emotional differences'. In particular, we encourage submissions relating to the following themes. * 'Disability',
childhood and youth in diverse geographical contexts (past and present) Please submit abstracts (maximum 200 words) to michelle.pyer@northampton.ac.uk Deadline for abstract submissions: 31st January 2007
Co-sponsored by GCYF-WG and the Postgraduate Forum Convenor: Lesley Gallacher Immaturity tends to be viewed as a negative attribute: an unfortunate state of dependency, silliness, and inadequacy that should be overcome, grown out of and eliminated. Furthermore, to be immature is to be unfinished; it is to be in the process of maturing. The end point of this process, maturity (independence, stability and competence), is to be preferred over immaturity. Because of these negative associations geographers have not exactly been drawn towards immaturity as a concept. This is particularly the case for those working with children and young people, for whom 'immaturity' seems all too easily to reinforce the subordination of childhood to adulthood. It could be said that children and young people are defined by their immaturity. Whether this immaturity is conceived of as biological or social, or both, young people are considered to be growing, learning and maturing. Similarly, postgraduates might be said to be immature researchers; they are still learning and in need of supervision. But immaturity cannot be said to belong only to the young and inexperienced. Older people can be immature in various ways, and the experienced are not infallible. Conceptualising immaturity entirely negatively seems somewhat unhelpful. Apart from anything else, this implies that stability, fixity and independence are to be aspired to, while open-endedess, change and (inter)dependence are to be avoided. This session aims to explore immaturity without denigrading it, without understanding it solely as a misfortune to be transcended. In this way, the session, seeks to join those who have begun to explore the critical potential of immaturity: conceptual, methodological, political and ethical (for example, Lee 2001; Horton, 2001). It wants to critically rehabilitate —rather than to judge or hide—immaturity, dependency, frivolousness and fallibility. I welcome offers of papers or other contributions which explore all manner of immature geographies, and by 'immature geographers' (at whatever stage of their career they may find themselves). Papers can be empirical, conceptual, or somewhere in between. They might consider, but are by no means limited to, themes such as: * the geographies
of the immature (whatever age they may be) Please submit abstracts (maximum 200 words) to lesley.gallacher@ed.ac.uk Deadline for abstract submissions: 31st January 2007
Co-sponsored by UGRG, WGSG and GCYF-WG Principal convenors: Dr Helen Jarvis and Dr Rachel Pain Co-convenors and discussants: Dr Seraphim Alvanides, Newcastle University Dr Harriet Bulkeley, Durhan University Professor Colin Pooley, Lancaster University Two linked sessions with confirmed keynote speaker: Mayer Hillman For school age children, social sorting by parental occupation and neighbourhood status combine with the regressive effects of market competition in the state education system to produce highly unequal experiences of childhood. Evidence that this secures the reproduction of middle class privilege reflects the neo-liberal legacy of a 'post-welfare' society: upward social mobility is promised on the back of a dominant work ethic, property ownership (debt) and competition in education and the labour market (Tomlinson 2001: 154). The result is greater emphasis on 'parental responsibility' and 'consumer citizenship' both with respect to school choice (often via the housing market) and the journey to school (where the private car allows access to non-local schools at the cost of acute traffic congestion and rising childhood obesity). In the post-welfare state, housing and neighbourhood-related assets play an increasingly crucial role in determining how successfully children fare at school and in later life. Exploitation of private household assets (housing, transport, unpaid domestic labour, kin networks of support) adds a new dimension and scale to childhood inequality. A ready example would be the way overcrowding at home damages educational attainment through lack of a quiet room in which to study. A significant proportion of better off households now draw on superior private assets to shore up perceived failures in state services, abandoning those who are unable or unwilling to pay this 'top up' to a creeping source of disadvantage. Viewed from this integrated perspective, prospects for social mobility in later life encompass not only the 'local' state school but also the journey to school - which may serve to militate against or further define social polarisation. How and where young children are chaperoned to school evolves out of socially viable and pragmatic combinations in relation to specific cultural settings as well as the linked lives of household members. Consequently there exist very different local actualities of people's daily lives. This session seeks to unite the sometimes isolated debates on school choice and the school run to recognise a far more integrated set of problems spanning highly segregated cities and changing welfare regimes. Issues
addressed could include: Please submit abstracts (maximum 200 words) to helen.jarvis@ncl.ac.uk or rachel.pain@durham.ac.uk Deadline for abstract submissions: 25th January 2007
Co-sponsored by GCYF-WG and TGRG Convenors: Gina Porter, University of Durham, UK and Elsbeth Robson, University of Durham/University of Malawi This session focuses on mobility and immobilities among children and young people. Mobility is not a clear–cut and homogenous phenomenon (Kesselring 2006): discourses, institutions and practices bring it into social reality. New opportunities for mobility not only produce and change societies, but can shape the life course of individuals in complex ways, with potentially far-reaching consequences. For some young people, the potential for mobility offers excitement, challenges and dangers; for others immobility is simply one reflection of a life characterised by constraint and lack of opportunity. We would welcome papers which consider both daily and longer-term movements of children and young people, in low income and Western country contexts, past and present. Potential
themes might include: Please submit abstracts (maximum 200 words) to r.e.porter@durham.ac.uk and copied to e.robson@Africa-Online.net Deadline for abstract submissions: 25th January 2007
Sponsored by GCYF-WG Convenor: Greg Mannion In the UK
and around the world, there have been a number of initiatives that have
raised the profile of outdoor learning and its potential as a vehicle
for addressing sustainability issues. In Scotland, for example, a current
initiative called Outdoor Connections, put in train by government agencies
and a natural heritage body (Scottish Natural Heritage) is making strong
links across educational, civic and environmental priorities and policies.
As the findings from this sort of research and development emerges, there
is a need to bring together findings and expertise from various countries
and review the field. An important sub-theme cutting across many of these
projects relates to the effects of the location of outdoor learning in
naturalised contexts, its impacts on children and young people’s
relationship with nature and their learning about issues in relation to
sustainability. Papers are invited to explore the links between the geography
of children’s lives in and out of school, formal and informal outdoor
learning and sustainability issues through considering topics such as:
Please submit abstracts (maximum 200 words) to gbgm1@stir.ac.uk Deadline for abstract submissions: 31st January 2007
Sponsored by WGSG, RGRG and GCYF-WG Conveners: Carol Ekinsmyth and Mark Riley This session will bring together varied work that has as its focus the relationship between stages, or a stage, in the life course and the social production of space or place. This relationship is broadly conceived, the session aiming to open dialogue and bring together diverse interests that may have useful synergies. There is currently a good deal of work being undertaken in Geography on varying age groups (from children and youths to the elderly), varying households/ family types (symmetrical, non-symmetrical and GLBT families) and on social change conceived under the banner of the second demographic transition. The session hopes to bring together some of these strands and in doing so encourage further theorisation of the role of space/place in the lives of individuals and families at various stages through the life course and the role of changing household demography and composition in the transformation of places. While much of the initial interest in the broad areas of life course, age and family have emerged from a gender perspective, parallel interests are burgeoning in the marginalisation and ‘otherness’ of groups in rural areas and this session hopes to provide a useful forum for dialogue between those researching in these areas. Possible
themes may include but not be restricted to: Please submit abstracts (maximum 200 words) to carol.ekinsmyth@port.ac.uk or mark.riley@port.ac.uk Deadline for abstract submissions: 31st January 2007 |
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