118 research outputs found
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Imagining migration: The impact of place on children’s understanding of ‘moving house’ in Southern Africa
Research pertaining to children’s geographies has mainly focused on children’s physical experiences of space, with their ‘imagined geographies’ receiving far less attention. The few studies of children’s imagined geographies that exist tend to focus on children’s national identities and their understanding of distant places. However, children’s lives are not necessarily static and they often move between places. Research has not so far considered children’s images of these transitional spaces or how such images are constructed.
Through an examination of over 800 thematic drawings and stories, regarding ‘moving house’, produced by children aged 10 to 17 years in urban and rural communities of Lesotho and Malawi, this paper explores southern African children’s representations of migration. The research considers how ideas of migration are culturally-constructed based on notions of family, home and kinship, particularly in relation to the fluid family structure characteristic of most southern African societies. The results suggest that most children imagine migration as a household rather than an individual process, rarely including micro-migrations between extended family households in their drawings. Further, children’s images of migration are place-rooted in everyday life experiences. Their representations concentrate on the reasons for migration, both negative and positive, which are specifically related to their local social and environmental situations. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of these conceptualisations of moving house for children’s contemporary migration experiences
Children’s migration as a household/family strategy: Coping with AIDS in Lesotho and Malawi
This paper examines the diverse ways in which southern African households/families employ children’s migration as a strategy to enable them to cope with the impacts of HIV/AIDS. Based on qualitative research with both guardians and migrant children, it explores how decisions are made concerning where children should live. Such decisions are aimed at both meeting children’s needs and also using their capacities in meeting wider household needs. Hence strategies adopted are often compromises, based on the sense of obligation of individual relatives, household resources and needs, the perceived needs and capabilities of children, and children’s own preferences
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Socio-economic causes of food insecurity in Malawi
The food crisis that Malawi experienced in 2002 led to hundreds – maybe thousands – of hunger-related deaths, which is more than any famine in living memory. During this famine, maize production fell by over 30% and maize prices rose by over 300% (Devereux, 2002). At the peak of the crisis, nearly a third of the population were dependent on food aid (USAID/Malawi, 2004)
The spatial construction of young people's livelihoods in rural southern Africa
Young people in southern Africa, in common with young people around the world, are social agents, constructing their own lives, albeit within significant structural constraints. Unlike young people in some regions, for most the need to generate a livelihood is a key consideration. Livelihood construction is a profoundly spatial activity, yet while there have been a number of studies of the spatial construction of young people's livelihoods in African cities, the spatiality of rural livelihoods has received less attention. Rural environments pose particular challenges for livelihood construction, and require particular spatial strategies. Four are discussed here: accessing education and training; migration for work; developing extensive social networks; and producing for markets. There are, however, aspects of the spatial structuring of rural southern African societies that seriously constrain the pursuit of productive livelihoods by young people. Two are considered: migration (for reasons unconnected with young people's livelihoods) and marriage practices
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Income-generating activities for young people in southern Africa: Exploring AIDS and other constraints
Copyright @ 2010 The Authors. The Geographical Journal © 2010 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). The published version of the article can be accessed via the link below.This paper reports on a study with rural young people (aged 10–24 years) in Malawi and Lesotho, focusing on their opportunities to learn skills and access capital and assets to engage in incomegenerating activities (IGAs). Participatory group exercises and individual interviews provide many examples of how young people learn skills and start small businesses, as well as an insight into their strategic thinking about engaging in these livelihood options. Various factors, including the effects of AIDS, are shown to affect young people’s prospects of succeeding in their ventures.Young people are very keen on starting IGAs, and are supported by adult members of their communities in asking for interventions to help them. We argue that expanded vocational and business training, focusing on locally appropriate types and scale of businesses, coupled with help to raise start-up capital has the potential to improve the chances of young people who are poor and/or AIDS-affected securing sustainable rural livelihoods in their futures. Since AIDS is intertwined with many other issues affecting young people’s livelihoods, it is problematic to single out and target only AIDS-affected young people with interventions on skills building and IGAs. Policymakers’ attitudes to vocational skills training and support for IGAs in Malawi and Lesotho are also explored, and policy recommendations made to support vulnerable rural young people in their attempts to build sustainable livelihoods.ESRC/DFI
Rural young people's opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship in globalised southern Africa: The limitations of targeting policies
This paper is based on a study with rural young people in Malawi and Lesotho, focusing on their possibilities for accessing (self)employment in the face of the various constraints imposed by their poor rural situations. Participatory group exercises, combined with individual interviews in two rural villages, provided personal stories about jobs and businesses that the young people were engaged in, as well as previous experiences and future plans. Constraints, as well as enabling factors, working at both individual and structural levels were analysed. Policies intended to address the needs of young people tend to seek to target the most vulnerable, often on the basis of individual-and household-level characteristics (e.g. women, orphans and AIDS-affected households). We argue that this: (1) neglects the structural factors operating at national and global levels; and (2) fails to recognise that factors interact to produce vulnerability, rather than this being rooted in separate characteristics. We demonstrate that an intersectional approach, drawn from feminist studies, is a useful theoretical lens, which, in combination with a livelihoods perspective, helps illuminate the needs of rural young people. In situations characterised by high levels of poverty and multiple vulnerabilities, we argue that it can be costly and ineffective to try to decide 'who is most vulnerable'; rather, resources can be more effectively spent in trying to improve conditions that will benefit all rural young people
Children’s experiences of migration in Southern Africa: moving in the wake of AIDS
Despite the recent significance children's geographies have been afforded within many geographical subdisciplines, their experiences of migration have received relatively little attention. However, children do migrate and their migration is often distinct from that of entire households. In this paper we explore children's migration in southern Africa within the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, focusing in particular on the impacts of moving house on children's sociospatial experiences. Migration has consequences for several areas of children's lives, and the nature of those consequences is shaped by the context within which migration takes place. In southern Africa AIDS is an unavoidable aspect of the sociospatial context, but the impact it has on children varies. This exemplar has wider implications for two areas of geographical research. First, in the paper we advocate the importance of including children's experiences of migration within culturally informed studies of migration. Second, there is a need for research in children's geographies to extend beyond the microlevel. We advocate a refocusing of research beyond children's static relationship to environments to also encompass children's transient geographies in discussions of their life experiences
Fears for the future: The incommensurability of securitisation and in/securities among southern African youth
© 2017 The Author(s). Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalence and recurrent food shortages. International institutions have responded to these challenges by framing them as security concerns that demand urgent intervention. Young people are implicated in both crises and drawn into the securitisation discourse as agents (of risk and protection) and as (potential) victims. However, the concepts of security deployed by global institutions and translated into national policy do not reflect the ways in/security is experienced ‘on the ground’ as a subjective and embodied orientation to the future. This paper brings work on youth temporalities to bear on social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation. It reports on research that explored insecurities among young people in Lesotho and Malawi. It concludes that, by focusing on ‘threats’ in isolation, and seeking to protect ‘society’ as an abstract aggregate of people, global securitisation discourses fail either to engage with the complex contextualised ways in which marginalised people experience insecurity or to proffer the political responses that are needed if those felt insecurities are to be addressed. However, while securitisation is problematic, in/security is nonetheless an important element in young people’s orientation to the future and needs to be taken seriously, both in understanding youth temporalities and in order to promote long-term wellbeing.This research was funded under the joint ESRC-DFID funding scheme, contract RES-167-25-0167.ESRC-DFID Poverty Alleviation Research scheme, ref RES 167-25-0167
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Livelihood Trajectories of Rural Young People in Southern Africa: Stuck in Loops?
Attempts to boost rural development in the Global South tend to focus on ways in which people can transform their lives. Interventions are often designed to help overcome specific envisioned constraints and push individuals onto a pathway out of poverty. Research has contributed to nuancing this vision by documenting the non-linearity of pathways, which often results in people being left in limbo or stuck, rather than moving forward. Based on a study in two villages in Malawi and Lesotho, this article argues that even these nuances do not fully capture the real-life experiences of the 63 young people who participated. Interviews tracing the course of their lives between 2007–08 and 2016–17 reveal trajectories that are circular rather than linear, and show the detrimental effects of being stuck in these frustrating loops of taking action without progressing. Conceptualizing rural young people's livelihood trajectories in contexts of severe poverty as loops highlights the structural issues that need to be addressed if their lives are to be transformed. Understanding development as emancipation from sources of unfreedom means focusing on the structural constraints that keep some people in poverty, and the importance of attaining agency if they are to put their needs on the agenda and demand basic rights.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-DfID. Grant Number: ES/M009076/
Qualitative methods III: animating archives, artful interventions and online environments
Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Author's draft version; post-print. Final version published by Sage available on Sage Journals Online http://online.sagepub.com/In this report we review recent work in geography which engages with innovative qualitative methods, focusing on three selected arenas: the archive, artistic collaborations and online engagements. Qualitative archival research illustrates the tensions around assembling accounts and incorporating uncertainty as geographers strive to animate the archives. Collaborative artistic endeavours, whether through participatory video, artistic installations or co-curating exhibitions, open new arenas for geographers to engage research subjects as well as possibilities for unfolding uncertainty into research practice. An exploration of the use of online environments for research also presents new ways to develop research collaboration and participation. Geographical experiments raise questions both about ethical frameworks for online research and about the ways in which power hierarchies may, or may not, be challenged
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