Cultural geographies of education

Cultural geographies of educatio

Introduction: geographies, histories and practices of informal education

Introduction: geographies, histories and practices of informal educatio

Introduction: children’s emotions in policy and practice

Introduction: children’s emotions in policy and practic

Geographies for play in austere times

This concluding essay to a collection of 10 papers examining, Best of times to worst of times? Appraising the changing landscape of play in the UK, reviews six key themes that emerge – re-fuelling longstanding tensions within playwork; organisational legacy of the investment years; broad acceptance of the wider value of play in society; the need to develop a critical play intelligence within the sector; the reconfiguration of play geographies and the impact of play provision on local play cultures; and the need for a much more central focus on play cultures in our enquiry. Without question, Austerity has undermined the public investment in play and play services that characterised the UK in early years of the Millennium. Nevertheless, for every ‘threat’ that this poses, others are able and willing to conceptualise this as an opportunity to reprioritise play priorities. It is argued that play is resilient, and adept an adapting to the changing realities of the financial landscape

What are alternative education spaces - and why do they matter?

This article examines alternative education spaces: schools and other sites that offer children an explicit alternative to attending mainstream school in the United Kingdom. It is situated within burgeoning, diverse work on ‘geographies of education’, key approaches to which are outlined in the article. Subsequently, research undertaken at 59 alternative education spaces is used to exemplify how geographers examine both what happens ‘within’ and ‘beyond’ the school walls, at different spatial scales. The article offers an overview of a range of geographical (and other) processes that make alternative education spaces ‘alternative’, which includes their financing and physical layout, as well as their ultimate social and educational aims. Brief case studies from two learning spaces are offered to bring these processes to life. In so doing, the article prompts consideration of why alternative education spaces might matter – both to geographers and to the wider world

Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children's emotional geographies

In this paper I argue that a significant proportion of research on children’s emotional geographies has been deployed to reinforce the importance of children’s ‘voices’, their (independent) ‘agency’, and the various ways in which voice/agency maybe deemed ‘political’. Without wishing to dismiss or dispense with such approaches, I explore potential ways to go ‘beyond’ concerns with voice/agency/politics. Initially, I review studies of children’s participation (and participatory methods), activism and everyday lives that mobilise emotion and affect in productive ways. I contrast such studies with important questions raised by a reinvigoration of interest in the need for children to be able to represent themselves. I then explore the possibilities raised by so-called ‘hybrid’ conceptions of childhood e which go beyond biosocial dualisms e to enable further strides beyond voice/agency. Drawing on examples from alternative education and contemporary attachment theories, I explore some potential implications for children’s emotional geographies and relational geographies of age of what I term ‘more-than-social’ emotional relations. Yet I do not offer an unequivocal endorsement of these hybrid emotions. Thus, I end the paper by issuing some words of caution e both in terms of the critical questions raised by more-than-social emotional relations, specifically, and in terms of engendering broader debate about how and why scholars do (children’s) emotional geographies

Architectural Movements, Utopian Moments: (In)Coherent Renderings of The Hundertwasser-Haus, Vienna

This article explores some of the manifold entanglements of architecture and utopia. It takes as a case study a social housing block in Vienna: the Hundertwasser-Haus. The house was designed by the artist-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser and has attracted enormous attention from the architectural press and tourists. I articulate a series of architectural “movements”, manifest in Hundertwasser’s design philosophy, press reportage about the house, residents’ experiences of living at the house, and visitors’ activities outside it. I argue that from these movements, a series of essentially unconnected utopian “moments” emerged. The article makes two contributions. First, it builds upon gathering interest in the geographies of utopia – specifically by moving beyond an emphasis upon utopian hope. It locates utopian impulses that are imbued with euphoria and joy, and which are not beset by a sense of lack. It also provides empirical examples of “unsettling” utopias of different registers (such as textual and experiential). Second, the article contributes to recent geographical approaches to studying architecture. It uses the analytical motif of movements to gain a sense of how a material building – and the idea of that building – is constituted as much by tenuous relations and disjunctures (even non-relations) as by relations. Whereas contemporary geographies of architecture do not leave room for tenuous relations and disjunctures in their narratives, this article tries to do so. It highlights how utopian moments at the Hundertwasser-Haus are proximate to each other: they are located metaphorically and/or literally at the house. Yet those moments neither conform to a coherent, singular narrative, and in some cases, nor do they relate to each other. The article opens debate about the significance of non-relational socio-technical constituents to the geographies of architecture

Liveability and urban architectures : Mol(ecul)ar biopower and the 'becoming lively' of sustainable communities

Contemporary analyses of biopolitics and the governance of 'life itself' have concentrated on molecular processes in domains such as medicine and neuroscience. In this paper, I turn an analytical lens on urban architectures, with a focus upon a particular programme of large-scale housebuilding in the UK: the Sustainable Communities agenda. I argue first that Sustainable Communities constitutes a resonant but qualitatively different attempt to plan for and govern life itself, particularly encapsulated by the term 'liveability'. Significantly, according to policy and technical documentation, Sustainable Communities appears to address the future at both molar and molecular levels, and through a focus on obduracy in ordinary, banal, everyday spaces (rather than in exceptional or border architectures). My analysis is, however, interwoven with attention to the 'becoming lively' of urban architectures. Drawing on a large, ethnographic research project, this paper offers three navigational aids to understanding how professionalised deployments of 'liveability' become co-opted into, resisted by, or creatively reinterpreted through, practices of inhabitation by residents of sustainable communities

Informal Education, Childhood and Youth: Geographies, Histories, Practices

This collection of original chapters brings together cutting-edge research on informal education - that is, learning practices that emphasise dialogue and learning through everyday life. For the first time, it highlights the way in which geography matters to informal education practices. Through a range of examples from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and from a range of geographical contexts, the authors explore the relationship between history, geography and practice in the field of informal education. Case studies include youth work, Scouting, Guiding, Care Farms, youth music programmes and the use of online/information technologies. This book will be of interest to geographers and sociologists of education, childhood and youth scholars. It also provides an engaging resource and collection of case studies for educators, youth workers and other professionals who work with young people

Mapping and making spaces of childhood

Mapping and making spaces of childhoo