Critical Geographies of Childhood and Youth

Contemporary Policy and Practice

Kraftl, Peter, Horton, John

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781447308249
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This original book explores the importance of geographical processes for policies and professional practices related to childhood and youth. Contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds explore how concepts such as place, scale, mobility and boundary-making are important for policies and practices in diverse contexts. Chapters present both comprehensive cutting-edge academic research and critical reflections by practitioners working in diverse contexts, giving the volume wide appeal. The focus on the role of geographical processes in policies and professional practices that affect young people provides new, critical insights into contemporary issues and debates. The contributions show how local and national concerns remain central to many youth programmes; they also highlight how youth policies are becoming increasingly globalised. Examples are taken from the UK, the Americas and Africa. The chapters are informed by and advance contemporary theoretical approaches in human geography, sociology, anthropology and youth work, and will be of interest to academics and higher-level students in those disciplines. The book will also appeal to policy-makers and professionals who work with young people, encouraging them to critically reflect upon the role of geographical processes in their own work.

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Editors’ introduction: critical geographies of childhood and youth

Peter Kraftl, John Horton and Faith Tucker

Why critical geographies of childhood and youth?

In May 2010, a General Election resulted in a change of government in the United Kingdom. A Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition replaced the New Labour party that had ruled since 1997. Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour had launched a succession of ‘landmark’ policy programmes targeted at young people. Policies like Every child matters (DfES, 2004), Youth matters (DfES, 2005) and the National service framework for children, young people and maternity services (DH, 2004) sought to improve safeguarding of, and service provision for, children and young people. Furthermore, the inclusion of the word ‘children’ in the name of the government department charged with policy for young people (what was then the Department for Children, Schools and Families; formerly the Department for Education and Skills) was viewed as a positive step in the UK’s relatively slow implementation of the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child (UN, 1989), ratified by the UK in 1990.

The change of government in 2010 has been followed by a series of ‘austerity measures’: ostensibly swingeing cuts in public service provision, initiated in an attempt to reverse the country’s economic fortunes after the financial crisis of 2007. Many of these cuts will directly affect children and young people: from the removal of a cap on university tuition fees to the scrapping of one of the largest school-building programmes in the UK for decades; from the withdrawal of funding for local youth work programmes to the reorientation and rationalisation of policy programmes relating to early years provision, widening participation in education, and young people not in education, employment or training. Moreover, for many practitioners, the swift renaming of the department responsible for education and children’s services, with the removal of the word ‘children’ from what is now simply the ‘Department for Education’, has been viewed as a retrograde step in youth policy.

To some extent, these post-election changes mirror the waxing and waning of (youth) policy in other geographical and historical contexts. However, we chose to begin our introduction to this volume with this recent UK context because it highlights why geography matters, profoundly, to any analysis of youth policies and professional practices. If nothing else, it should be clear that geographical and historical context are central to understanding the state of contemporary childhood and youth, and policies relating to them: so, for example, the preceding paragraph suggests a range of ways in which being a young person in the UK, at the time of writing, in the wake of particular, complex, geographically-specific political, economic and social circumstances, is likely to be characterised by some particular experiences and issues. Moreover, though, the contributions in this book highlight how key geographical themes – like space, place, scale and network – are central to the ways in which policies are created, talked about and put into practice. Many of these themes are apparent if one examines changing youth policy in the UK and elsewhere, as do the chapters in this book. As an entry point, this introductory chapter will highlight a few geographical implications of these kinds of change, in respect of a selection of youth policies from the UK and around the world.

First, in the UK and elsewhere, the past decade has witnessed an increased emphasis upon child and youth policy-making at the national scale. By this, we mean that state governments have explicitly promoted the advantages of national frameworks for youth policy-making, in some cases following international guidance to do just that (ICNYP, 2002; UNESCO, 2004). In the UK’s Every child matters White Paper (DfES, 2004) and Germany’s Child and youth plan of the Federation (BFSFJ, 2009), for example, it was expressly argued that local authorities alone were not able to effectively deliver or sponsor services for young people. In the case of the latter, for instance, national youth policy was required because particular concerns – gender equality, disability and citizenship – had significance for the whole German State. Similar justifications have driven youth policy in the US in the recent past: notably in the controversial No child left behind programme inaugurated in 2001 (USDE, 2001), where it was claimed that local testing of children’s learning was failing and that a universal, national system was required instead. In a number of African nations, meanwhile, young people have been progressively positioned as a ‘concern’ for national governments as they represent increasing proportions of the population (as in the Republic of Malawi’s (2011) National Youth Policy). However, returning to the UK, a significant ‘spatial shift’ since the election has been the privileging of localism as a way to save money and afford local decision-makers greater autonomy. The implications of this spatial shift for young people have yet to be charted but are likely to be profound.

Second, the notion of ‘the nation’ reminds us that the geographies of youth policy-making are inextricably entwined with histories of state intervention. As Massey (2005) has argued, space and time (geography and history) can never be disentangled – both in consideration of the past and the future (Anderson, 2010). For instance, notions of ‘crises’ in or the ‘disappearance’ of childhood (Postman, 1994) have persisted for centuries, taking shape in slightly different ways in different historical and geographical contexts. Those notions draw both on popular forms of nostalgia for childhoods that (probably) never existed, and upon projections that imagine children as ‘the future’. On this theme, Gagen’s (2004) work critically analyses how US national identity was instilled into immigrant populations in New York City through the urban playground movements of the early twentieth century, in direct response to concerns for the ‘future health of the nation’. These are both longstanding and dynamic concerns that are ‘spatialised’: they connect children’s micro-scale spatial practices – their play, their mobility, their use of urban environments – with the futures of whole nation states. This kind of ‘scale-jumping’ is also apparent in recent UK policy on children’s health, which links children’s reduced opportunities for outdoor play with an apparent obesity ‘time bomb’ that may detonate among the future adult population of 2030 if nothing is done (Evans, 2010). Developing earlier work by childhood studies and subcultures scholars (James and James, 2004; Gelder, 2005), several chapters in this volume critique how particular, limiting notions of space, scale and time are (re)produced in policy-making relating to childhood and youth people (see Chapter Fifteen by Norman and Chapter Three by Ansell et al). In particular, they note that notions of ‘crisis’ and ‘futurity’ are becoming equally apparent in non-Western youth policies: for instance the Government of Lesotho’s (2002) National Youth Policy for Lesotho positions young people as both a future ‘resource’ and as a social group characterised by deviance, substance misuse and criminality.

Third, in combination with the ‘national’ scale, many policies emphasise the local as a key scale at which to intervene with young people, because they are often ‘tied’ into communities and social relations in their home neighbourhoods. This is perhaps most apparent where disadvantaged young people live in particular places affected by policies designed to combat social exclusion. In France, where the term ‘social exclusion’ originated, the Politique de la Ville public policy of the mid-1980s implied that general social issues in France could not be addressed without first overcoming the problems of around 500 identified urban neighbourhoods, including education and employment opportunities for the young (Tissot, 2007). A danger of the current UK government’s ‘localism’ agenda is that it will simply reinforce a particular spatial logic already at play under the previous New Labour regime: to effectively blame local places (especially disadvantaged neighbourhoods) for nationwide problems, like antisocial behaviour or social exclusion (Cobb, 2007). As Angus Cameron (2006) argues, this approach renders social exclusion a form of spatial exclusion and – as authors in this volume also point out – ignores how the causes of social exclusion may originate far away from and at scales out of the control of those local places (see, for instance, Brown, this volume, Chapter Six). Thus, a critical-geographical approach – which highlights in particular the problems of relying on the ‘local’ as a scale for policy intervention for young people – is arguably key in undertaking critical policy analyses and any research with young people (Ansell, 2009).

Finally, the role of built spaces – in projects designed to literally re-make places – has, like the significance of ‘the nation’, waxed and waned with successive governmental regimes. During the late nineteenth century, several countries undertook large-scale school building programmes designed to improve literacy and lift disadvantaged children out of poverty. Burke and Grosvenor (2008) document how successive ‘waves’ of school design have foregrounded the importance of ‘good’ and modern school buildings to education for children – from the philanthropic schools of late-nineteenth century Spain and the US to the ‘schools of tomorrow’ planned in 1930s Britain. More recently, more-or-less nationwide programmes of school-building have sought to transform children’s education – and the nation’s fortunes – by relying on the symbolic promise and durability of bricks and mortar (Kraftl, 2011). Examples include Portugal’s Secondary school modernisation programme (OECD, 2009) and Australia’s Building the education revolution (DEEWR, 2010), the latter a scheme to rebuild 8,000 primary schools and help stimulate the nation’s economic growth. In the UK, the Building schools for the future (BSF) programme (DfES, 2003), which was to see the rebuilding of every secondary school in England, held similar ambitions for the transformative promise of a nationwide policy of school building (den Besten et al, 2011). Yet, soon after taking power, the UK Coalition government quickly axed this overtly ‘concrete’ and spatial strategy. In his speech announcing the cancellation of BSF, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, dismissed the importance of the school environment to improving children’s learning. Instead, emphasis has been placed on a far less costly and ostensibly more subtle spatial strategy: Free schools (DfE, 2011), which are to be created and run by local alliances of teachers, parents, councils and private interests but which are, ideally, to be located in an existing building. And, thus, with the changing imperatives of political ideology and economic circumstance, the significance of built spaces in policy discourses continues to wax and wane over time.

One of the key themes running through this book is that policy discourses often – if not always – involve spatial discourses. Similarly, any change in youth policy has geographical implications. Those implications may be felt at various scales. In the UK, for instance, BSF was meant not only to transform educational provision nationally, but to help regenerate the local communities and, particularly, the aspirations of young people living in disadvantaged communities (DCSF/4ps/PFS, 2008). Spatial discourses can also be symbolic: built spaces signified first the very best and then the very worst of education policy in the UK, as the changing fortunes of BSF demonstrated the very centrality of the geographical imagination to rhetoric around youth policy-making.

The chapters in this collection touch on these and many other geographical themes. Some chapters are written by academic geographers. Others are by academics who draw on geographical concepts (like space and scale) or who seek to understand how youth policies might have uneven outcomes on different groups of young people in different places. Others still (for example Chapter Nine by Cartwright and Chapter Five by Davies) are by authors who reflect on their experiences as professional practitioners who have worked with young people, and for whom space and place have become key ways to critically analyse that work. The aims of this book are fourfold:

• to analyse how geographical processes matter within youth policy formulation;
• to consider how policies ‘take place’ through professional practice and young people’s own agency;
• to explore the theoretical and applied contributions of a geographical approach to youth policy and professional practice;
• to constitute a resource for students, academics and practitioners who study or work with young people.

Taken together, the chapters in this volume represent an intervention in a number of different sub-disciplinary areas, for which we provide an overview in the following sections of this introduction. They also constitute a collective statement about how cognate sub-disciplines – especially social studies of childhood in sociology and anthropology – might usefully engage with geographical concepts and research. Significantly, the chapters in this book do not simply ‘read critically’ this or that youth policy; rather, they draw out and develop broader conceptual issues, often beyond the specific geographical context in which they are situated. To name but a few of these, the chapters contribute to theorisations of youth around aspiration, governmentality, heritage and sustainability. As we suggest in the following overviews, while social scientists working with children and young people continue to debate the merits and pitfalls of ‘policy-relevant’ versus ‘theoretical’ research, this book demonstrates that it is possible – and indeed important – to do both together. Indeed, we hope that this book will be of interest to researchers in diverse disciplines, as well as to policy-makers, practitioners and students seeking examples of how social and spatial theories can enrich ‘real-world’ work with young people and that it will afford new understandings and critical thinking about that work.

Academic context: studying children and young people in an era of ‘relevance’

The remainder of this introductory chapter provides a threefold orientation to the chapters that follow. First, we provide an overview of the context of research and enquiry from which the chapters have emerged, and which the authors seek to extend. We foreground the broadly interdisciplinary ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’ and the more specifically-focused sub-discipline of ‘Children’s Geographies’. We note how each of these bodies of work has contributed to understandings of children and young people’s everyday lives and spaces, and have both latterly demanded heightened attention to ways in which policy contexts intersect with these lives and spaces. Second, developing this latter point, we situate the book’s chapters in relation to ongoing debates about ‘relevance’ and ‘usefulness’ within the ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’ and ‘Children’s Geographies’. Specifically, we outline recent calls for theoretically-informed critical policy discourse analyses in these contexts. Then, third, we introduce and unpack the ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables, figures and boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Editors’ introduction: critical geographies of childhood and youth
• Part I: (Inter)national youth policies: politics and practices of spatial translation
• Part II: Education and employment policies: learning beyond schools and schools beyond learning
• Part III: Intervening in ‘everyday life’: scales, practices and the ‘spatial imagination’ in youth policy and professional practice
• Part IV: Concluding reflections
• References
• Notes