61 research outputs found
Children living with ‘sustainable’ urban architectures
This paper considers the everyday geographies of children living in new large-scale urban developments in which multiple forms of ‘sustainable’ urban architecture are characteristic features. We argue that children’s experiences of living with materialities, politics and technologies of sustainability have too-often been marginalised in much chief research on childhood, youth and sustainability. Drawing on qualitative research with 8-16-year-olds living with materialities of ‘sustainable’ eco-housing, urban drainage, wind turbines and photovoltaic panelling, we explore how sustainable urban architectures are noticed, (mis)understood, cared about, and lived-with by children in the course of their everyday geographies. In so doing, we highlight the challenging prevalence and significance of architectural conservatisms, misconceptions, rumours disillusionments and urban myths relating to sustainable urban architectures
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Diverse spaces of childhood and youth: gender and other socio-cultural differences
Unbound emotional geographies of youth transitions
This paper makes the case for greater consideration of unbound emotional
geographies in research on youth transitions, based on the biographical
narratives of young people interviewed as part of a qualitative research
project on understandings of (in)security in the German city of Leipzig
(2014–2015). The need for more holistic approaches to the complex
temporalities and spatialities of transitioning in young people's everyday
lives and across their life courses is identified and I propose
developing such approaches partly on the basis of less bound understandings of
emotion as an important medium through which boundaries are crossed, times
and places intersect and both spatial intersections and boundary crossings
are sensed and negotiated. The value of such an approach is demonstrated
through empirical analysis of the accounts of young people from disadvantaged
socioeconomic backgrounds in Leipzig, focusing particularly on interpersonal
conflicts and how young people negotiate the resulting emotions in different
everyday and institutional contexts. The accounts of research participants in
Leipzig show that interpersonal conflicts evoke emotions that reach well
beyond localised settings and the present. They also require a significant
amount of emotional work to be carried out across a range of everyday
informal and institutionalised settings. An approach to emotions as unbound
and embodied can help, it is argued here, to better understand how young
people negotiate their social positioning across entangled sites and
relations and to develop support structures that are more responsive to this
entanglement
Defining the subject of speech - Constructions of authorship in post-unification German media discourse
This paper analyses how the authority of west German media workers to produce ‘truthful’ representations about unification and eastern Germany after 1989 was discursively constructed. Rather than simply assuming the superiority of western knowledge, I show that the right of western media producers to speak for and about east Germany had to be constructed and defended discursively on a number of registers. Western journalists, in particular, had to demonstrate their credibility towards west and east German audiences, evidence their ability to report objectively and authoritatively, and prove themselves superior in the production of knowledge. Their truth claims had to be negotiated in the midst of a range of competing discourses. The complicated constitution of audiences meant that western journalists had to cast themselves in various different roles to justify their position as ‘knowing subjects’: as explorers, surveyors, observers, commentators, mediators and/or educators. The paper explores, how the divergence between these different positions was reconciled through a number of discursive strategies. I highlight the ambivalences and internal contradictions produced within journalistic discourses as well as through the existence of differentiated audiences
Breaking ground - marginality and resistance in (post) unification Germany
Drawing on postcolonial theory and recent geographical debates on subaltern speech and marginal positioning this paper asks what the relevance of ‘place’ is for attempts to ‘transgress’ and ‘resist’ the marginalisation of (former) East Germans in (post)unification Germany. My intention is not to equate the postcolonial situation with that of East Germany after unification, but rather to engage the theoretical and political insights of postcolonial critiques to highlight the conflicts and contradictions that emerge from attempts to move ‘beyond’ oppressive binary constructions. Questions of speaking and listening, as well as seeing and being seen are attended to with a strong focus on the paradoxical places and spaces within which they come to matter in contradictory ways. How do the practices of listening/speaking, seeing/being-seen function to place particular groups in the social margin or centre of ‘(re)united’ Germany? Does ‘power’ reside less with the speaker than with the listener, or is it still important to claim voice (rather than being ‘given’ voice) as an ‘other’? The paper tries to work through some of the tensions, conflicts and concerns that have emerged from my PhD research on the construction of East German marginality through media practices, but also in German social, cultural, political and academic discourse. Perhaps the most significant of these conflicts is that of having lost one’s politically bounded place (as a GDR citizen) and yet finding oneself reconstituted in the (symbolic as well as socio-economic and political) margin of a nation that, to this date, is described as ‘divided within itself’. The sense of placelessness becomes politically relevant when ‘resistant’ or ‘transgressive’ acts are (to be) performed that have no ‘proper’ place from which to embark or in which to be staged. Similar to the post-colonial situation, where no ‘original beyond’ exists, and despite being frequently posited as a symbolically separate entity, ‘East Germans’ have no place for return, only an impossible situation of being constantly ‘out-of-place’ even in the locales that used to be ‘home
History after the end: post-socialist difference in a (post)modern world
This paper makes an intervention in the debates on postmodernism as dominant social and cultural order of the present from the perspective of post-socialist transformation. Grounded in an analysis of theoretical discourses and of qualitative interviews, it highlights the hierarchical time/space constructions and universalizing tendencies inherent in many proclamations of the postmodern epoch and contests the uncritical acceptance of the 'end of history' metanarrative. Post-socialist transformation is shown to be a complex process that fits uneasily into pre-given categories and disrupts an ordering logic that divides between a western, postmodern 'us' and 'the rest' of the world. My argument is formulated on the basis of research on the transformative processes in former east Germany
Berlin in not a foreign country, stupid! : growing up 'global' in eastern Germany
In this paper we analyse how young East Germans come to be differentially placed in global network space through their socioeconomically and culturally specific engagements with globalised mediascapes and ethnoscapes. We call for greater awareness of the power differentials which shape globalisation, and draw on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how unequal access to social and cultural capital influences and is reflected in the ‘glocal’ connections through which young people develop and perform their identities. Further, we seek to understand how these differential engagements impact on young people’s future trajectories through the development of different competencies. We contend that, precisely how young people are positioned in networks of global – local connectivity matters profoundly, both for the performance of their present identities, and for their future life chances
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