The Public Playground Paradox: "Child’s Joy" or Heterotopia of Fear?

Literature depicts children of the Global North withdrawing from public space to“acceptable islands”. Driven by fears both of and for children, the publicplayground – one such island – provides clear-cut distinctions between childhoodand adulthood. Extending this argument, this paper takes the original approach oftheoretically framing the playground as a heterotopia of deviance, examining –for the first time – three Greek public playground sites in relation to adjacentpublic space. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Athens, findings show fear tounderpin surveillance, control and playground boundary porosity. Normativeclassification as “children’s space” discourages adult engagement. However, in anovel and significant finding, a paradoxical phenomenon sees the playground’spresence simultaneously legitimizing playful behaviour in adjacent public spacefor children and adults. Extended playground play creates alternate orderings andnegotiates norms and hierarchies, suggesting significant wider potential toreconceptualise playground-urban design for an intergenerational public realm

An example to us all: child development and identity construction in early 20th-century playgrounds

At the turn of the 20th century, children's play came under new and heightened scrutiny by urban reformers. As conditions in US cities threatened traditional notions of order, reformers sought new ways to direct urban-social development. In this paper I explore playground reform as an institutional response that aimed to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children. Supervised summer playgrounds were established across the United States as a means of drawing children off the street and into a corrective environment. Drawing from literature published by the Playground Association of America and a case study of playground management in Cambridge, MA, I explore playground training as a means of constructing gender identities in and through public space. Playground reformers asserted, drawing from child development theory, that the child's body was a conduit through which 'inner' identity surfaced. The child's body became a site through which gender identities could be both monitored and produced, compelling reformers to locate playgrounds in public, visible settings. Reformers' conviction that exposing girls to public vision threatened their development motivated a series of spatial restrictions. Whereas boys were unambiguously displayed to public audiences, girls' playgrounds were organised to accommodate this fear. Playground reformers' shrewd spatial tactics exemplify the ways in which institutional authorities conceive of and deploy space toward the construction of identity.

Scouting for girls? Gender and the Scout Movement in Britain

This article was published in the journal, Gender, Place and Culture [© Taylor & Francis (Routledge)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.583342This article brings a feminist geopolitics to bear upon an analysis of the Boy Scout Movement in Britain in order to illustrate how an emphasis upon seemingly banal, embodied practices such as dressing, writing and crafting can provide a counter-view to prevailing notions of the elite, organisational `scripting' of individualised, geopolitical identities. Here, these practices undertaken by girls are understood not as subversive, or even transgressive, in the face of broader-scale constructions of the self and the collective body, but rather as related moments in the emergence of a complex, tension-ridden `movement' that exceed specific attempts at fixity along the lines of gender. Using archival data, this article examines various embodied practices by `girl scouts' that were made possible by such attempts at fixity but which also, in turn, opened up new spaces of engagement and negotiation. A cumulative shift from a determinedly masculine to a co-educational organisation over the course of the twentieth century thus reflects complex geographies of gender, national identity and citizenship and offers a historical contribution to the feminist geopolitics literature

Alternate H2 Sinks for reducing rumen methanogenesis

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock is about 7,516 million metric tons CO2-eq.year-1and has multiple components that include enteric methane emissions, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from manure and carbon dioxide emissions associated with feed production and grazing. An uninterruptedly increasing concentration (155 % more than preindustrial level), a comparatively high global warming potential and a short half-life of methane make it a bit more important than any other GHG in the control of global warming and climate change. Enteric methane mitigation is not only important from a global warming point but also for saving animal dietary energy which is otherwise lost in the form of methane. Due to the central regulatory role of H2, it is generally referred as the currency of fermentation and most of the mitigation strategies revolve around its production or disposal in such a way as to ensure the conservation of energy into desirable end products. In the chapter, an attempt is made to address the prospects of some emerging approaches to redirect metabolic H2away from methanogenesis and serve as potential alternate sink for H2in the rumen for conserving energy. The prospects of alternate sinks, for instance, sulphate and nitrate reduction and reductive acetogenesis and propionogenesis, are debated in the chapter along with the anticipated benefits that can be achieved from the practically feasible 20 % enteric methane reduction