Faith Tucker

Growing-up in the countryside: children and the rural idyll

The recent surge of interest in the study of children and childhood has brought with it a keener recognition of the diversity of growing-up. In this emerging geography, most attention has been given to the experiences and behaviours of urban children. Few studies have explicitly focused on what it is like to grow-up in the countryside, particularly within the United Kingdom today. In this paper we begin to address this hidden geography by reporting on a study undertaken within rural Northamptonshire. We explore some of the ways in which children encounter the countryside through their own experiences, and (re)examine the `rural’ from their own viewpoint. We uncover an alternative geography of exclusion and disenfranchisement. Rather than being part of an ideal community many children, especially the least affluent and teenagers, felt dislocated and detached from village life. Yet socio-spatial exclusion of this kind is also typical of many childhoods away from the rural and can relate to children almost anywhere. What particularly distinguishes a rural upbringing, however, is the sharp disjunction between the symbolism and expectation of the Good Life (the emblematic) and the realities and experiences of growing-up in small, remote, poorly serviced and fractured communities (the corporeal).

The Road Less Travelled – New Directions in Children's and Young People's Mobility

This collection emerges from the intersection of two vibrant, dynamic and expanding academic endeavours. The papers are situated within ‘new’ social-scientific studies of childhood and youth and also draw upon a burgeoning interest in mobility (for which this journal is clearly a cornerstone). This editorial essay provides an introduction to extant and prospective work at the intersection of these lines of enquiry, and has a twofold structure. First, we provide a sketch-map of recent social-scientific studies – especially those which have emerged from the academic sub-discipline that has come to be termed ‘Children’s Geographies’ – which have interrogated some of the manifold mobilities fundamental to younger people’s lives. We argue, though, that much of this extant research concerning children’s and young people’s mobilities remains limited – both theoretically and empirically. So, second, we elaborate a number of ways in which intersections of mobilities and (young) age ought to pose significant questions for future research and enquiry regarding ‘mobility’, ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, and perhaps those very terms themselves. In so doing, we provide an introduction to the papers in this collection which – though dealing with diverse mobilities and locales, and though showcasing various conceptual and methodological inclinations and new directions – share a concern to take the road less travelled by attending to, and beginning to open out, such challenging, and potentially fruitful, questions.

The challenges of 'children's geographies': A reaffirmation

The majority of papers published in this edition of Children’s Geographies were first presented at the New Directions in Children’s Geographies conference held at The University of Northampton, UK, on 7–8 September 2006. At this event, more than 40 research papers were presented by authors from a dozen different countries, and from diverse backgrounds and career stages. Their work addressed manifold aspects of children and young people’s everyday geographies in diverse socio-historical contexts. The aim of this edition of Children’s Geographies is to provide a snapshot of this diversity. We have sought to compile a selection of papers which – ranging across multiple methodological approaches, conceptual preferences, inherent politics and subject matters – gesture towards the assorted vitality of work represented at the conference and, as such, of the contemporary subdiscipline of ‘Children’s Geographies’ at large. By way of an introduction to the following collection of papers, we present three kinds of reflection. First, we consider a handful of critical contemporary responses to the New Directions in Children’s Geographies conference. Figuring the conference as a microcosm of, and/or metaphor for, the subdiscipline of ‘Children’s Geographies’ itself, we propound these critiques as challenging to (our) subdisciplinary habits, concerns and ways of working more broadly. In particular, we suggest that they require ‘Children’s Geographers’ to articulate the challenge of ‘Children’s Geographies’; that is, they should prompt us to ask, in what ways should extant work by ‘Children’s Geographers’ be conceived as fundamentally challenging to broader contemporary currents and domains of research and enquiry, such as Human Geography and the New Social Studies of Childhood? Second, we develop one set of answers to this latter question, refracting the diverse themes aired at the New Directions in Children’s Geographies conference. We list a succession of ways in which the work of ‘Children’s Geographers’ ought to ‘talk back’, more frequently and forcefully, to broader domains of theory and practice, and specifically mainstream academic Geography. Third, turning to the edition of the journal in hand, we introduce Children’s Geographies Vol. 6, No. 4, November 2008, 335–348

Children, young people and ‘disability’: challenging children's geographies?

This editorial puts forward a selection of papers which were first presented at the 2007 Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), in a session entitled Children, young people and ‘disability’. The session drew together researchers from a range of disciplines – and with a variety of interests related to the lifeworlds of ‘disabled’ children and young people – to discuss research conducted in a range of diverse settings (including Canada, Botswana and the UK). The contributions here not only represent diversity in terms of the impairment or ‘disability’ explored, they are also cross-cut by differences in culture, focus and methodology. Essentially though, the core motivation of each of the authors represented is a collective recognition that greater attention should be paid to the geographies of children and young people who are effectively marginalised as a consequence of their ‘disability’ – even within sub-disciplinary contexts which are ostensibly committed to the inclusion of diverse younger people. In 1990, Sarah James, asked ‘is there a place for children in geography?’ (James 1990). This question was intended to draw attention to the systematic neglect of children and young people from geographical research and understandings. The proliferation of research into the lifeworlds of children and young people since 1990 has led to a realisation of the many and varied ways in which children and young people’s experiences both inform, and can be interpreted through, a geographical approach (Hopkins and Pain 2007). This collection of papers, we hope, begins to address this question in relation to the place(lessness) of disabled children in geographies with, for and of, children and childhood. As an increasing number of geographers have noted, the experiences of children and young people affected by disability have been underrepresented in the new social studies of childhood (Butler 1998, Skelton and Valentine 2003, Valentine and Skelton 2003, 2007, Holt 2004a, 2004b, 2007a, 2007b, Ryan 2005a, 2005b). The recent Children’s Geographies Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2010, 1–8

‘With us, we, like, physically can’t’: Transport, Mobility and the Leisure Experiences of Teenage Wheelchair Users

Abstract This paper reflects upon the experiences of 69 British teenage wheelchair users in their attempts to access leisure environments. Heiser’s (Heiser, B. 1995. “The Nature and Causes of Transport Disability in Britain, and How to Remove It.” In Removing Disability Barriers, edited by G. Zarb, 49–64. London: Policy Studies Institute) notion of transport disability is developed, and the concepts of transport anxiety and mobility dependency are explored. The challenges that young people in general experience when attempting to access public and private forms of transport (namely, buses, trains, taxis and private cars) are discussed, and the additional ‘layers’ of disadvantage experienced by teenage wheelchair users explored. The ramifications of barriers to transport for young wheelchair users in particular are shown.