Children’s emotional geographies: politics of difference and practices of engagement

Children’s emotional geographies: politics of difference and practices of engagemen

Labour exploitation of non-EU migrants in Slovakia: patterns, implications and structural violence

Labour exploitation of non-EU migrants in Slovakia: patterns, implications and structural violenc

Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking–doing children's emotional geographies

The paper introduces Anna Freud's early writing from the perspective of the theory and practice of children's emotional geographies. Discussing especially Freud's view on the theory of defence mechanisms and her early arguments with Melanie Klein about the nature of the child's mind, it explores how children's emotions can be approached beyond children's own representational accounts of their emotional experiences. The paper advocates an engagement with Anna Freud's work and psychoanalysis that would account for different forms of knowledge produced in the intersubjective processes of research and for the significance of the relationships with child participants

Migration, vulnerability and the complexity of violence: experiences of documented non-EU migrants in Slovakia

Migration to East and Central Europe (ECE) remains under-researched, not least because of the relatively small number of migrants in the region. Exploring experiences of documented non-EU migrants in Slovakia with various forms of violence – including violence motivated by hate and associated with work exploitation – the paper uncovers patterns of violence and vulnerability across the migrant cohort. As a broader contribution to studies of migration, the research alerts scholars to the need for a greater attention to the experiences of smaller cohorts of migrants, which often remain under the radar because of their size. The second line of the argument highlights the complexity and relations between different kinds of violence. Several risk factors are identified as contributing to the risk of migrants’ exposure to various forms of abuse at the same time, providing with implications for preventive and supportive policies and practices. The analysis particularly emphasises the importance of ties between migrant communities and formal institutions for mitigating violence

Feeling our way: academia, emotions and a politics of care

This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalized neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with

Introduction: children’s emotions in policy and practice

Introduction: children’s emotions in policy and practic

Editorial: thinking and doing children's emotional geographies

Editorial: thinking and doing children's emotional geographie

‘It’s good but it’s not enough”: the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions

Developing a critical analysis of the relational and situated practices of social policy, this paper draws on an evaluation of an early intervention project in Scotland (UK) where volunteer adult mentors supported young people ‘at risk’ of offending or anti-social behaviour. Contributing to ‘enlivened’ accounts of social practice, we explore how practices of mentoring developed through the co-presence of mentor and young person in the often transitory spaces of care which characterised the ‘diversionary activities’ approach in the project. We expand the notion of the relational in social practice beyond the care-recipient dyad to include wider networks of care (families, programme workers, social institutions). The paper explores how such social interventions might both be ‘good’ for the young people involved, and yet recognise critiques that more individualised models of intervention inevitably have limitations which make them ‘not enough’ to deal with structural inequalities and disadvantages. Acknowledging the impacts of neoliberalism, we argue critical attention to diverse situated relational practices points to the excessive nature of engagement in social policy and provides scope for transformative practice where young people’s geographies can be ‘upscaled’ to connect to the realms of social policy and practice

Participatory video with children and young people

The changing discipline of children’s geographies (Holloway, 2014) has entailed methodological proliferation and diversification (van Blerk and Kesby, 2008). Ways of conducting research have been informed and affected by a number of debates, including about children’s participation (Matthews, Limb and Taylor, 1999) and power (Holt, 2004), structural difference among children and young people (Hopkins, 2013) and between children and adults (Jones, 2008), emotional dimensions of research with children and of children’s lives themselves (Blazek and Windram-Geddes, 2013), the questioned primacy of the voice and the problematic legitimacy of other modes of knowledge (Kraftl, 2013), the increased recognition of childhoods outside the Minority Global North (Jeffrey, 2012), the importance of intergenerational relations (Punch and Tisdall, 2012), increased inter-disciplinary (Holloway, 2014) and collaborative praxis (Mills, 2013), demand for policy-focused research (Vanderbeck, 2008) and not least a range of technological advancements facilitating research (Mikkelsen and Christensen, 2009). The emergence of participatory video in geographical research with children and young people can be traced explicitly to most of these debates and it has been recognized as having a potential to shape further methodological but also epistemological and political agendas of geographies of children and young people. Yet, its use and especially published written accounts in geographical work with children and young people remain scarce. This chapter reviews participatory video as an emerging methodological approach to geographies of children and young people over the last decade. It discusses the place of participatory video in the sub-discipline in three steps. First, it examines the scope of participatory video in the wider field of social sciences and humanities, and it explores its emergence in geographical scholarship on children and young people at the interface of the induction of participatory video to geography in general, the shaping of the discipline of children’s geographies, and the emerging work with participatory video and young people in other social scientific disciplines. Second, the chapter presents current achievements and dilemmas of participatory video in the production of knowledge in the work with children and young people and suggests possible routes through which participatory video could play an even more important epistemological role in the sub-discipline. Finally, the chapter explores ethical and political issues related to participatory video work with children and young people and relates them to wider questions of geographical research

Rematerialising children's agency: Everyday practices in a post-socialist estate

Rematerialising children's agency: Everyday practices in a post-socialist estat