Search results

Football games, youth-led creative projects, spaces to ‘drop in’ and ‘hang out’, mentoring, fun trips are some things that youth work and community organisations do with young people. The informality, flexibility and responsiveness of youth work make it an accessible and important space for young people who are disenfranchised from schooling and even from informal educational services. Furthermore, geography is a constitutive element of youth work, which engages with young people in their everyday neighbourhood spaces, movements and communities, as well as facilitating their mobility beyond the neighbourhood. In this chapter, we reflect on our experiences in the United Kingdom and Slovakia to explore some of the methodologies, challenges and richness of researching the geographies of youth work. Decentring narrative methods in favour of ethnography was essential to capturing the primacy of relationships, the significance of the embodied and emotional and the place-based nature of youth work. However, more than this, ethnographic approaches needed to be aligned with youth work principles, collective dynamics and localised politics. At times, methodological strategies and research agendas – the desire to learn about research participants and their learning, lives, and places – had to be laid aside in favour of a mutual learning to be together. We came to understand both research and the learning that goes on in youth work settings as processes that are simultaneously individual and collective, private and public, cognitive and emotional, spatial and political.

In an era when engagement in public spaces and places is increasingly regulated and constrained, we argue for the use of literary analytic tools to enable younger generations to critically examine and reenvision everyday spatialities (Rogers, 2016; Rogers et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to consider how spatial analyses of contemporary young adult literature enrich interrogations of the spaces and places youth must navigate, and the consequences of participation for different bodies across those spheres.

In a graduate seminar of teachers and writers, we examined literary texts through a combined framework of feminist cultural geography, mobilities and critical mobilities studies. In this paper, we interweave our own spatial analyses of two selected works of young adult fiction with the reflections of our graduate student participants to explore our spatial framework and its potential to enhance critical approaches to literature instruction.

We argue that spatial literary analysis may equip teachers and students with tools to critically examine the spaces and places of everyday life and creatively reenvision what it means to be an engaged citizen in uncertain and troubling times.

While we have engaged in this work for several years, we found that in light of the global pandemic, coupled with the recent antiracist demonstrations, a spatial approach to literary study emerges as a potentially even more relevant and powerful component of literature instruction.

To explore the advice given by the British Girl Guides Association, a popular girls' youth organisation, to urban members in the period from 1930 to 1960.

This article is based on an analysis of the Girlguiding publications The Guide and The Guider in 30 years spanning 1930–1960.

The article shows that, although rural spaces maintained symbolic position in the education and training of the British Girl Guides Association throughout the mid-twentieth century, the use of urban spaces were central in ensuring that girls embodied Guiding principles on a day-to-day basis. While rural spaces, and especially the camp, have been conceptualised by scholars as ‘extraordinary’ spaces, this article argues that by encouraging girls to undertake nature study in their urban locality the organisation stressed the ordinariness of Guiding activity. In doing so, they encouraged girls to be an active presence in urban public space throughout the period, despite the fact that, as scholars have identified, the post-war period saw the increased regulation of children's presence in public spaces. Such findings suggest that the organisation allowed girls a modicum of freedom in town Guiding activities, although ultimately these were limited by expectations regarding the behaviour and conduct of members.

The article builds upon existing understandings of the Girl Guide organisation and mid-twentieth century youth movements. A number of scholars have recently argued for a more complex understanding of the relationship between urban and rural, outdoor and indoor spaces, within youth organisations in the 20th century. Yet the place of urban spaces in Girlguiding remains under-explored.

This paper examines the national solidarity in Brunei Darussalam during the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequential impact on younger generations. Utilising Emile Durkheim's solidarity theories, I examine how young people's social media use builds on state discourse in the pandemic. I contend that a shift towards an organic society is visible through a social cohesion that is based on differentiated roles. I argue that the citizenry plays a vital role in the forward momentum toward Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0, which illustrates that solidarity cannot be forged as a top-down directive. By prompting economic and creative divisions of labour, the local use of social media in a public health crisis has shown the government a new way to foster solidarity. Significant implications for youth as future leaders of the nation are discussed.

This chapter draws on experiences of research with children who work as street traders in Nigeria, with a focus on establishing trust and the related concepts of power and rights. The discussion stems from a study which used a rights-based approach to gather children’s accounts of their experiences of working as street traders within a large market in a Nigerian city. Seventeen children (aged 10–15 years) took part in semi-structured interviews and focus groups. Children talked about difficult situations as they undertook tiring work and received conflicting messages about the importance of making an economic contribution to the family, versus the need to attend school. Researching these accounts entailed a number of ethical challenges, which centred on access and recruitment; consent/assent and participation; sensitivity of research; and researcher positionality. First, recruitment was limited to children with parents/guardians who could give consent, with assent from the children. Second, a relationship of trust had to be negotiated between the researcher and the participating children. This involved acknowledging different elements of adult–child positionality, which had implications for the ways in which children participated in the study. Third, sensitivity was essential given that children could discuss attitudes or activities, which were not universally seen as acceptable. Fourth, researcher positionality influenced all aspects of the study, including access to children, how relationships were forged and the interpretation of data. All of these challenges relied heavily on building trust with children. However, the authors illustrate how trust must be employed cautiously in research with children, given adult–child power disparities.

This paper introduces two methodological innovations for qualitative research. We apply these innovations to holistically understand youth peer cultures and improve participant-driven qualitative methodology.

It moves the methodological frontier forward by blending technology with the “go-along” approach used by ethnographers to prioritize participants’ perspectives and experiences within their socio-cultural contexts.

We introduce the youth-centered and participant-driven virtual tours, including a neighborhood tour using Google Maps designed to explore how youth navigate their socio-spatial environments (n = 64; 10–17 year-olds; 2013) and a social media tour designed to explore how youth navigate their networked publics (n = 50; 10–17 year-olds; 2013), both in relation to their local peer cultures.

Applicable to a wide range of research populations, the Google Maps tour and the social media tour give the qualitative researcher additional tools to conduct participant-driven research into youths’ socio-cultural worlds. These two innovations help to address challenges in youth research as well as qualitative research more broadly. We find, for example, that the “go-along” aspect of the virtual tour minimizes the perceived threat of the researcher’s adult status and brings youth participants’ perspectives and experiences to the center of inquiry in the study of local peer cultures.

The facilitation of digital spaces, in lieu of urban material spaces, for social interaction through computer gaming and other play activities has become particularly important to children in the wake of the 2020–2021 Coronavirus pandemic, to combat the negative effects of physical lockdown restrictions. Pre-pandemic, autistic children living in urban areas may already experience exclusion from physical society and may consequently already be isolated from current imposed normative societal groupings due to their neuro-difference, sensory sensitivities to the surrounding environment, communication comprehension, and social understanding. However, an exploration into personally and independently chosen play activities by autistic youth has identified how such isolation can be overcome and positive social experiences created. A particular play practice, cosplay, and related companionable fandom activities are providing and creating digital spaces for autistic youth to be social. Character play is also enabling the use of limited physical spaces within urban contexts and as such combatting anxiety from sensory overstimulation. Thematic analysis of online content together with semi-structured interviews with autistic young people have indicated a positive connection between cosplay practice, increased social activity, and reduced levels of sensory overload, anxiety, and depression, with early findings suggesting transferrable elements that could inform more effective support for others with social, environmental, and communication challenges or restrictions.