Fernando J. Bosco

Play, work or activism? Broadening the connections between political and children's geographies

Scholarship on children often fails to consider the impact of childrens agency from a political perspective. Recent literature in political and childrens geography has begun affording children the possibility of being political actors. Attention to the differences that children bring and make through their everyday becomings – what children often do – permits recognizing a range of childrens activities as political work. Examples from childrens everyday activities in Latino immigrant families along the US/Mexico border demonstrate how children often connect their families to politics at a variety of scales. They also help recognize the political possibilities that emerge out of consideration of the many spaces that children occupy and produce in contemporary societies.

Women and children in a neighborhood advocacy group: engaging community and refashioning citizenship at the United States–Mexico border

This article looks at the community participation of recent Latina immigrant mothers and their children in a neighborhood advocacy group near the US–Mexico border. It documents the work that women and children do as they struggle to become involved in their new community and improve their quality of life – despite legal, social, economic and cultural obstacles. Local context, family and ethnic networks, gendered patterns of womens experiences as immigrants and children participation in ‘adult’ decision-making are hugely important in understanding their community engagement. The article reflects on the advocacy work that women and children perform through a neighborhood group to argue for a difference-centered perspective on citizenship that is inspired by feminist thinking. Such a perspective makes sense in light of the ironic tensions within neo-liberal policies that, on the one hand, burden people with more responsibilities while, on the other hand, legislating against their freedom to pursue those responsibilities.

Racial geographies and the challenges of day labor formalization: a case study from San Diego County

Recent debates surrounding immigration in the United States have brought renewed attention to day laborers. In their search for employment, day laborers temporarily occupy public and quasi-public spaces. The visibility of day labor and the appearance of day labor hiring sites raise new questions about public space and its ‘proper’ use. The establishment of a new day labor hiring site often creates a locational conflict. Creating formal spaces for day labor congregation is the current ‘best-solution’ for controlling day labor and eliminating community conflict that often surrounds informal day labor hiring sites. Drawing on an ethnographic research project at a formal day workers’ center in San Diego County, the paper shows how the effectiveness of formalization efforts is highly dependent on the particular geographies of day labor in a neighborhood. Our overall argument is that racial categories and processes of racialization that are part of the geographies of day labor impact the effectiveness of formal day labor sites. Moreover, it is argued that processes of racialization often work to promote conflict and/or cooperation among day laborers themselves and between day laborers and employers.

Ethnic markets and community food security in an urban “food desert”:

In recent years, the concept of food desert has come to dominate research and policy debates around food environments and their impacts on health, with mounting evidence that low-income neighborhoods of color lack large supermarkets and therefore may have limited access to fresh, affordable, and healthy foods. We argue that this metaphor, which implies an absence of food, is misleading and potentially detrimental to the health of poor and racially diverse communities because it ignores the contribution of smaller stores, particularly that of so-called ethnic markets. Current applications of the food desert concept in this setting reflect classed and racialized understandings of the food environment that ignore the everyday geographies of food provision in immigrant communities while favoring external interventions. Our investigation of ethnic markets in City Heights, a low-income urban neighborhood in San Diego with a diverse immigrant population, offers evidence of their positive role in providing access to affordable, fresh, healthy, and culturally appropriate foods. Our results contribute to research by providing a nuanced description of the food environment beyond access to supermarkets, focusing specifically on immigrant neighborhoods, and pointing to ethnic markets as valuable partners in increasing food security in diverse urban areas.

A doubly articulated cartography of children and media as affective networks-at-play

With increasing concerns surrounding childrens agency and questions of the impacts of globalizing media, it is imperative to critically explore how interactions with media objects become part of childrens social lives. Working through Deleuzian-Guattarian ideas of what bodies are and do, we approach child–media interactions as horizontal components of becoming. Through this, we argue that media objects can be important social elements of the emergent nature of ‘affective networks-at-play’ and illustrate this by creatively working through two narratives of media object relations: one, drawn from the actions of Tomohiro Kato on 8 June 2008 in Tokyo, Japan; the other, of a child named Juana and her interactions with the Latin American version of the Disney educational show Manny a la Obra (Handy Manny). In engaging child–media relationships as mutual and affirmative elements in becoming, we challenge strict dichotomous understandings of children and adults while addressing debates surrounding childrens agency.

Planning for Resilience: Urban Nature and the Emotional Geographies of Children’s Political Engagement

This chapter focuses on the circulation of emotions in the process of planning and developing urban nature for children. We argue that emotions about children motivate policy interventions and shape children’s participation in planning, while at the same time children’s own emotions are structured and moulded by the policy process, thereby creating neoliberal subjectivities among children.

Relational space and place and food environments: geographic insights for critical sustainability research

This article draws from critical human geography to argue that research guided by relational conceptualizations of place and space, and grounded by empirical analyses based on fieldwork, participatory methodologies, and critical mapping, provides an opportunity to enrich research on local food environments and daily food practices. The perspective is explained by discussing insights from a research project that examined how a group of high school students in an urban, lower-income community navigate their food environment and make decisions about their food on a daily basis. The focus is primarily on the geographic thinking that framed the project and on its associated methodology. Similar approaches can inspire further critical research on the food environment and food justice and guide work on critical sustainability.

Food Journeys: Place, Mobility, and the Everyday Food Practices of Young People

We examine the everyday food practices of a group of high school students living in an urban, multicultural, and lower income community in San Diego, California. We integrate theoretical and empirical insights from research in health, food, and youth geographies and offer a relational conceptualization and analysis of the food environment that is sensitive to young peoples everyday mobilities and encounters with food. We pay particular attention to how young people journey through the local food landscape and navigate contradictions between food norms across places, including home, school, and neighborhood. Our goal is to uncover young peoples personal and emotional engagements with what, how, and where they eat. Our methodology begins by recognizing young peoples agency and centers on an analysis of the spatiality of their food routines. We present results of a year-long participatory study involving Global Positioning System–tagged photography, Photovoice interviews, and surveys. Our results provide a fine-grained analysis of young peoples daily engagements with their food environments and reveal how their food journeys are structured and governed by social relations, physical and material constraints, biopolitics, and emotional geographies. Our approach permits a critical and dynamic understanding of the food environment and its relationship to young peoples food practices, with useful insights for health research and policy.

Spaces of contention: spatialities and social movements

conceivable when participants possess a sufficient degree of hope, perhaps a utopian aspiration, that a rupture in the neoliberal status quo is possible. As she writes, ‘What affirmative politics turns away from is the cynical refusal of a possible outside or alternative to capitalism, a refusal that defines much of late twentieth century postmodern cultural theory’ (p. 207). This optimism is desperately needed in the border regions of Mexico that Hennessy introduces to us.

A Review of “Global Culture Industry”

of information is inadequate for students without a background in geography to connect and apply information to the main discussion. An example is the box on central place theory (p. 291). On the other hand, reactions from students who have been affected directly or indirectly by global economic forces at the local level will be a lack of interest, if not hostility. The approach to uneven development as a feature of capitalism appears to require additional inquiry and comparison. Parts of the world have experienced a different approach to economic development and practices, such as those regions influenced by a centrally planned approach. Yet, these regions appear to exhibit a pattern of uneven development similar to those regions that developed under a capitalistic regime. The search for an explanation for the similarity of patterns of uneven development in such regions leads to the question of the applicability of the approach utilized in the book.