Fiona M. Smith

Guest Editorial: Political geographies of children and young people

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the present Special Issue of Space & Polity tackling the political geographies of children and young people. Historically given scant attention by the sub-discipline, since children and young people appear to have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, geopolitics and the like, there are now small signs of how and why political geographers might look anew at the experiences and contribu tions of this population cohort. An empirical vignette, based on letters written by children and young people to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great De pression, is deployed to develop this claim. Contrasts are then drawn between political geographies of children and young people that are ‘adult-centred’ and those that are ‘child-centred’, as related to claims about the distinctions and connections between ‘macro-politics’ and ‘micro-politics’. It is suggested that, notwithstanding the exciting insights to be derived from child-centred approaches, the situation should not be a matter of privileging these over adult-centred approaches. Indeed, it is argued that there are dangers in going down such a route and of thereby collapsing ‘the political’ into ‘the personal’, thus missing what is distinctively political about the geographies needing to be researched and written. Following a brief excursion into debates about the supposed political apathy of (post)modern children and young people, the paper then introduces the other contributions to the Special Issue.

Qualitative systematic reviews of treatment burden in stroke, heart failure and diabetes - Methodological challenges and solutions

BackgroundTreatment burden can be defined as the self-care practices that patients with chronic illness must perform to respond to the requirements of their healthcare providers, as well as the impact that these practices have on patient functioning and well being. Increasing levels of treatment burden may lead to suboptimal adherence and negative outcomes. Systematic review of the qualitative literature is a useful method for exploring the patient experience of care, in this case the experience of treatment burden. There is no consensus on methods for qualitative systematic review. This paper describes the methodology used for qualitative systematic reviews of the treatment burdens identified in three different common chronic conditions, using stroke as our exemplar.MethodsQualitative studies in peer reviewed journals seeking to understand the patient experience of stroke management were sought. Limitations of English language and year of publication 2000 onwards were set. An exhaustive search strategy was employed, consisting of a scoping search, database searches (Scopus, CINAHL, Embase, Medline & PsycINFO) and reference, footnote and citation searching. Papers were screened, data extracted, quality appraised and analysed by two individuals, with a third party for disagreements. Data analysis was carried out using a coding framework underpinned by Normalization Process Theory (NPT).ResultsA total of 4364 papers were identified, 54 were included in the review. Of these, 51 (94%) were retrieved from our database search. Methodological issues included: creating an appropriate search strategy; investigating a topic not previously conceptualised; sorting through irrelevant data within papers; the quality appraisal of qualitative research; and the use of NPT as a novel method of data analysis, shown to be a useful method for the purposes of this review.ConclusionThe creation of our search strategy may be of particular interest to other researchers carrying out synthesis of qualitative studies. Importantly, the successful use of NPT to inform a coding frame for data analysis involving qualitative data that describes processes relating to self management highlights the potential of a new method for analyses of qualitative data within systematic reviews.

Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated, Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.

The third sector in a devolved Scotland: From policy to evidence

Scotlands post-devolution government has implemented a number of policies engaging with the third sector. These sit within the UK context of New Labours welfare reform with its twin emphases on neoliberalism and neo-communitarianism. Moves by the Scottish Executive to translate these themes into the Scottish context are illustrated by policies on the relation between the state and third sector organizations, on the social economy, and on volunteering. However, as a case study of the sector in Glasgow demonstrates, significant challenges emerge for the realization of policy claims for the development of social capital and citizenship in practice.

Boundaries and e-health implementation in health and social care

BackgroundThe major problem facing health and social care systems globally today is the growing challenge of an elderly population with complex health and social care needs. A longstanding challenge to the provision of high quality, effectively coordinated care for those with complex needs has been the historical separation of health and social care. Access to timely and accurate data about patients and their treatments has the potential to deliver better care at less cost.MethodsTo explore the way in which structural, professional and geographical boundaries have affected e-health implementation in health and social care, through an empirical study of the implementation of an electronic version of Single Shared Assessment (SSA) in Scotland, using three retrospective, qualitative case studies in three different health board locations.ResultsProgress in effectively sharing electronic data had been slow and uneven. One cause was the presence of established structural boundaries, which lead to competing priorities, incompatible IT systems and infrastructure, and poor cooperation. A second cause was the presence of established professional boundaries, which affect staffs’ understanding and acceptance of data sharing and their information requirements. Geographical boundaries featured but less prominently and contrasting perspectives were found with regard to issues such as co-location of health and social care professionals.ConclusionsTo provide holistic care to those with complex health and social care needs, it is essential that we develop integrated approaches to care delivery. Successful integration needs practices such as good project management and governance, ensuring system interoperability, leadership, good training and support, together with clear efforts to improve working relations across professional boundaries and communication of a clear project vision. This study shows that while technological developments make integration possible, long-standing boundaries constitute substantial risks to IT implementations across the health and social care interface which those initiating major changes would do well to consider before committing to the investment.

The Child-Body-Politic: Afterword on ‘Children and Young People's Politics in Everyday Life’

The phrase ‘body-politic’ is often deployed to mean all of the people comprising a given ‘political’ unit, perhaps a country, nation or state, and sometimes conceived as the multitudes ruled over by a monarch or other supreme ruler. Thomas Hobbes’ great political tract of 1651 Leviathan carries a frontispiece, an etching by Abraham Bosse prepared in discussion with Hobbes, which is taken as a classic illustration of the body-politic (Olwig, 2002, p. 87), wherein the body of the king is literally composed of numerous tiny people all facing towards the king’s head (see Figure 1). Unsurprisingly perhaps, the people appear overwhelmingly to be adults, with the possible exception of one or two smaller figures, notably one just a little way up the lower portion of the king’s right arm. Might that be a child perhaps? The iconography of the image nonetheless conveys the impression that the bodypolitic, the massing of (human) bodies comprising the basis and target for political life, is predominantly an adult body—a body presumably ‘embodying’ the physical and mental capacities deemed essential, by most streams of Western political thought, for partaking in the conduct of political life. Hobbes and Bosse probably never gave it a moment’s consideration that these tiny people should all, or almost all, be adults (seemingly both men and women). In a similar fashion, it might be argued that most academic labours within the fields of political theory, political science and political geography have largely taken it for granted that the human subjects in their purview are adults, a situation continuing even once feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, queer and other identitypolitics-inspired critiques have entered the fray to question the exact (often highly partial) version of the adult human embraced by such ‘political’ fields of inquiry. Excitingly, however, there is now another critical voice on the block, one questioning the adultism of these fields and thereby enjoining them to contemplate their adult-centricism or failure to consider whether there are a large number of other human beings—children and, up to a point, young people—who might also legitimately be regarded as part of the body-politic. It might be responded that these fields have talked about children and young people, but the rejoinder would then be a guarded ‘yes’, but only really insofar as these non-adult humans have comprised resources or problems for adult-centred political debate, organising

Housing tenures in transformation: questioning geographies of ownership in eastern Germany

Abstract Ownership represents a key relation between people and places. Eastern European transformations since the late 1980s confront western norms of private property rights within a capitalist system with the legacies of an alternative ownership system and with attempts to establish property markets from first principles. The developments in the former GDR and in eastern Germany after German reunification offer an opportunity to question assumptions of use and value which underlie western models of property tenure. While common themes of privatisation and commodification link eastern and western experiences, the particular manifestations of transformations in eastern Germany challenge the claims of the primacy of ownership and the legitimacy of claims for control over the built environment.

Work and wonder at the weekend: on emotions in feminist geographical praxis

This article explores intersections between academic work and emotional work at a feminist geography reading weekend held by the Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers in the UK in 2006. It points to the importance of the fleeting, often unreported, spaces of feminist geographical praxis and of inserting these in our disciplinary histories. Using a performative textual strategy it offers a poly-vocal reflection on the complex, challenging and productive experiences of this kind of academic workspace. In so doing it contributes to feminist engagements with the practices of neo-liberal academia, to debates about the emotional geographies of feminist geographical work, and to discussions of the value of activities outside the norms of academia in providing potentially supportive and creative spaces for geographical praxis.

Euro-commentary: Encountering Europe Through Fieldwork

Debates about geographical practice in Europe are explored through the spaces and practices of an undergraduate field-course in the Costa Blanca in Spain. Students encounter ‘Spain’ and ‘Europe’ through diversely embodied engagements and material encounters with familiarity and difference, inclusion and exclusion, which offer possibilities for de-centring dominant Anglo-American geographies and understanding the diverse practices which produce geographical knowledges.

Contested geographical imaginings of reunification: A case study of urban change in Leipzig

Abstract Geopolitics and city restructuring are typically regarded as separate scales and processes: the international and national versus the local. The local politics of urban change in an east German city in the period after reunification question this divide. The ‘pathways’ approach to post-socialist transitions is utilized to illustrate how reunification is contested as much in neighbourhood restructuring and actions in response to incoming capital and the dominance of western legalpolitical norms as it is in national or international discourses and practices. Assumed divisions between East and West, professional and lay, and local and national are questioned.