Anna Ortiz

Kορίτσια, Bambini, Meninos, Niñas: a view of children's geographies in southern Europe

Different geographic contexts produce different academic contexts. Traditions, academic programs, funding sources, research agendas, approaches, and methodologies are quite different between some European countries and others, specifically between Northern and Southern Europe, and therefore it is worthwhile to take a close look at what occurs in a particular European region so we can visualise a panorama that often becomes diluted in the most innovative international debates. We reflect here on the role and development of children’s geographies in four European countries that seem to us representative of what occurs in some countries of Southern Europe: Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Without attempting an exhaustive analysis, we present some examples of what has been done in these countries in this field, almost always within social and cultural geographies. In Greece, there is almost no human geography research that focuses on children and youth. This is not surprising if we take into account the late arrival of institutionalised geography. In 1950 the first human geography courses were offered in economics, statistics, and architecture, but it was not until 1994 that the first Geography Department was created in a Greek university. The evolution of the discipline in Greece is focused more on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) than cultural and social geography (Vaiou 2005). Nonetheless, veteran researchers who had studied other disciplines, but became geographers through postgraduate studies, have formed a very open academic community, with a strong international vocation that is close to a cultural geography perspective. Specifically, from the urban planning side, studies of the city have been developed that take a social, cultural, and feminist perspective, focussing on the daily life of urban environments. Even though these studies have dealt with gender, ethnicity, and social class, they have not yet addressed the topic of age, which could include children and young people in the urban context. From the cartography perspective, some engineers have taken children into consideration. In this sense the work of Filippakopoulou, Nakos and Michaelidou on cartography and childhood stands out, in which they address children’s cartographic perception and understanding, their production of maps, their ability to work with categories and symbols, the interaction between the teaching of cartography and of geography, etc., applying Children’s Geographies Vol. 9, Nos. 3–4, August–November 2011, 477–481

Student on the Move: Academic Career and Life Transitions of Foreign PhD Students in Barcelona (Spain)

This chapter focuses on PhD students’ mobility and migration, a relatively unexplored topic in literature. Specifically it revolves around the motivations and expectations of 27 young PhD students at Catalan universities, their reasons for migration, their personal and labour transitions, their evaluation of the migration process and the role of the city of Barcelona as an attractive place for living and studying. Perhaps unexpectedly, migration motivations are not always associated with a clear decision to do a doctorate, but they relate to other reasons, such as the attractiveness of the city of Barcelona. Arrival in Barcelona is a point of rupture which, in some cases, coincides with leaving the family home. Thus, there are complex multiple processes associated with migration: emancipation from family, entry into a doctorate and adaptation to a new country. From that perspective, the city is perceived as a vital kaleidoscope with multiple edges that allows for a wide variety of experiences and exchanges. The chapter so analyses the use and appropriation of everyday spaces of students, in the framework of a temporary migration. Since migration occurs in a crucial time in their lives corresponding to a learning period in a city with different potentialities and constraints from their place of origin, immigrants’ everyday practices and experiences may be “released” in a new territory. This positive scenario becomes gloomy and dark for the future due to the lack of opportunities in Catalan universities (yet it is accepted that geographical mobility is a feature of the current university job market).