This reader takes debates about children's services forward by drawing on ideas based in social pedagogy and arguing that the concept of 'space' is crucial to relationships and practices with children and young people. It will stimulate students to question and rethink, and practitioners to innovate and challenge mainstream thinking.
The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People is a thorough and practical resource for all who wish to influence policy and design decisions in order to increase young people’s access to and use of public spaces, as well as their role in design and decision-making processes. The ability of youth to freely enjoy public spaces, and to develop a sense of belonging and attachment to these environments, is critical for their physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development. Young people represent a vital citizen group with legitimate rights to occupy and shape their public environments, yet they are often driven out of public places by adult users, restrictive bylaws, or hostile designs. It is also important that children and youth have the opportunity to genuinely participate in the planning of public spaces, and to have their needs considered in the design of the public realm. This book provides both evidence and tools to help effectively advocate for more youth-inclusive public environments, as well as integrate youth directly into both research and design processes related to the public realm. It is essential reading for researchers, design and planning professionals, community leaders, and youth advocates.
This volume draws together scholarly contributions from diverse, yet interlinking disciplinary fields, with the aim of critically examining the value of narrative inquiry in understanding the everyday lives of children and young people in diverse spaces and places, including the home, recreational spaces, communities and educational spaces. Incorporating insights from sociology, geography, education, child and youth studies, social care, and social work, the collection emphasises how narrative research approaches present storytelling as a universally recognizable, valuable and effective methodological approach with children and young people. The chapters points to the diversity of spaces and places encountered by children and young people, considers how young people ‘tell tales’ about their lives and highlights the multidimensionality of narrative research in capturing their everyday lived experiences.
Rethinking Young People's Lives Through Space and Place explores three main themes, how children navigate real and imaginary borders, how space constitutes belonging, meaning-making, and representation, and how space informs learning and identities.
The book examines the power of young people’s social relationships in schools to transform, or more often, to continue, differences that pervade societies: mind-body-emotional diff erences or Special Educational Needs and Disability, gender, poverty, race/ethnicity, sexuality and their intersections. The book details extensive qualitative research with young people, foregrounding their accounts. In challenging educators and others to engage with young people’s own agencies and to make space for their socialities, the concepts of embodied social and emotional capital and young people as contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies are developed, emphasising both young people’s agencies and how these are socio-spatially situated, constrained and enabled. The book is most concerned with how and when young people challenge and change enduring differences. The concept of ‘immersive geographies’ outlines the potential of change inherent in the repeated coming together of the same people in space, doing similar things that are, however, always provisional and always with the potential to be done diff erently. Examples of when diff erence is transformed are presented. The book marks a major interdisciplinary contribution to geographies and social studies of children, youth and education, child development, social work, social policy and education studies. Furthermore, it is of appeal to anyone interested in young people, social reproduction and sociality: from educators, policy makers, youth workers and social workers to parents.
Young people imagine, perceive, experience, talk about, use, and produce space in a wide variety of ways. In doing so, they acquire and produce stocks of spatial knowledge. A quite dynamic and ever-changing process by nature, young people’s production and acquisition of spatial knowledge are susceptible to many kinds of conditions—from those that shape their everyday routines to those that constitute historical turning points. Against this backdrop and drawing on a qualitative metaanalysis, the authors set out to discover what changes the spatial knowledge of young people has undergone during the past five decades. To that end, sixty published studies were sampled, analyzed, and synthesized to offer a meta-interpretation in terms of both the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge and the refiguration of spaces. As such, this book will appeal to scholars conducting spatial research on childhood and youth as well as scholars interested in urban studies from diverse disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban planning, and design. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The Open Access fee was funded by Technische Universität Berlin
The very notions of childhood and youth are intimately connected to contemporary norms, practices and spaces of care, caring and care-giving. The provision of care is widely figured as both the primary responsibility of parents, carers and practitioners who work with children and young people, and the primary factor in shaping children and young people’s development, education, socialisation, wellbeing and contentment. However, children and young people themselves are rarely figured as key actors in the provision of care. An overwhelming presumption that children and young people are to be cared for has effectively marginalised their agency and responsibilities as carers, or in relation to practices and spaces of care. Bringing together a significant array of multidisciplinary work on children, young people and families, this collection draws together new research on the diverse lives and experiences of children and young people as carers, as cared for, and in relation to spaces and institutions of care. It is the first collection specifically devoted to the subject of care in relation to childhood and youth. As such, the book will be a key resource for academics, practitioners and students seeking leading-edge empirical and conceptual material on this topic.
Research about children and young people's participation and involvement in research is an emerging area of academic inquiry. Based on the themes of participation, citizenship and intergenerational relations, this edited collection draws on the latest research in this area, and includes chapters co-authored with children and young people.