Louise Holt

Studentification and ‘Apprentice’ Gentrifiers within Britain's Provincial Towns and Cities: Extending the Meaning of Gentrification

This paper focuses on processes of studentification, and explores the link between higher education students and contemporary provincial gentrification. The paper provides two main, interconnected, contributions to advance debates on gentrification. First, the discussion appeals for wider temporal analyses of the lifecourses of gentrifiers to trace the formation and reconfiguration of the cultural and residential predilections of gentrifiers across time and space. With this in mind, it is argued that there is a need to rethink the role of students within the constraints of third-wave gentrification, and to consider how ‘student experiences’ may influence the current and future residential geographies of young gentrifiers within provincial urban locations. Drawing upon recent studies of studentification, it is asserted that this profound expression of urban change is indicative of gentrification. Second, the paper advances Clarks recent call to extend the term gentrification to embrace the wider dominant hallmarks and tendencies of urban transformations. Controversially, in light of a deepening institutionalisation of gentrification, we contend that gentrification can be most effectively employed at a revised conceptual level to act as a referent of the common outcomes of a breadth of processes of change.

Embodied social capital and geographic perspectives: performing the habitus

This paper reopens debates of geographic theorizations and conceptualizations of social capital. I argue that human geographers have tended to underplay the analytic value of social capital, by equating the concept with dominant policy interpretations. It is contended that geographers could more explicitly contribute to pervasive critical social science accounts. With this in mind, an embodied perspective of social capital is constructed. This synthesizes Bourdieus capitals and performative theorizations of identity, to progress the concept of social capital in four key ways. First, this theorization more fully reconnects embodied differences to broader socio-economic processes. Second, an exploration of how embodied social differences can emerge directly from the political-economy and/or via broader operations of power is facilitated. Third, a path is charted through the endurance of embodied inequalities and the potential for social transformation. Finally, embodied social capital can advance social science conceptualizations of the spatiality of social capital, by illuminating the importance of broader sociospatial contexts and relations to the embodiment of social capital within individuals.

Children with mind–body differences: performing disability in primary school classrooms

There has been a significant geographical shift in the primary school education of children with mind–body differences in England. Emphasis is increasingly placed upon the ‘inclusive’ education of ‘disabled’ children in mainstream schools (DfES, 2001a, 2001b), and children with a range of mind–body abilities are currently educated within mainstream primary school classrooms. This paper prioritises childrens experiences in examining how (dis)ability is reproduced heterogeneously through everyday practices in ‘inclusive’ classrooms. The discourses of disability which circulate through classroom spaces are influenced by wider societal representations of disability and childhood, albeit often interpreted in specific ways within the context of the education institution. This demonstrates that classroom micro‐spaces are porous, specific institutional spaces.

Children's Sociospatial (re)Production of Disability within Primary School Playgrounds

There is a contemporary shift in the institutional context of ‘disabled’ childrens education in the United Kingdom from segregated special to mainstream schools. This change is tied to wider deinstitutionalised or reinstitutionalised geographies of disabled people, fragile globalised educational ‘inclusion’ agendas, and broader concerns about social cohesiveness. Although coeducating children is expected to transform negative representations of (dis)ability in future society, there are few detailed explorations of how childrens everyday sociospatial practices (re)produce or transform dominant representations of (dis)ability. With this in mind, childrens contextual and shifting performances of (dis)ability in two case study school playground (recreational) spaces are explored. The findings demonstrate that children with mind—body differences are variously (dis)abled, in comparison with sociospatially shifting norms of ability, which have body, learning, and emotional—social facets. The discussion therefore places an emphasis on the need to incorporate ‘intellectual’ and ‘emotional’ differences more fully into geographical studies of disability and identity. The paper has wider resonance for transformative expectations placed on colocating children with a variety of ‘axes of difference’ (such as gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, and social class) in schools.

Young people's embodied social capital and performing disability

This paper teases out how the identities of young people with mind–body–emotional differences are performed and reproduced via their social relationships primarily within school spaces. Drawing upon the concept of embodied social capital (Holt 2008), the paper explores empirically how young peoples positionings within a variety of social networks (re)produces differentially valued identity positionings which can become embodied within young peoples shifting senses of self.

Editorial: Theorising other childhoods in a globalised World

This special edition emerged from a day-long conference session held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Colorado, in March 2005. The special edition, like the conference session, is inspired by collective endeavours to critique dominant conceptualisations of the ubiquitous, normally developing, middle-class, white, child resident in Northern European or English speaking nations of the Global North. Although this process began early in explorations of ‘new’ geographies of childhood, it is questionable whether this the critique has been as holistic and complete as might be desired. In this editorial we point to some potential ways in which children’s geographers can reproduce, rather than transform, dominant representations of childhood before suggesting how such problems might be, at least partially, overcome. We end by illustrating the ways in which the papers in this issue, which individually represent a range of theoretical perspectives and empirical foci, can collectively contribute to this more thorough jettisoning the ubiquitous child and to the retheorising other childhoods in a globalised world A central theoretical achievement of children’s geographies and broader social studies of childhood has been to illuminate and critique dominant conceptualisations of childhood and youth. Hegemonic representations cast young people as ‘less than’ adult, as adults inthe-making; in short as adult becomings rather than social beings (James et al., 1998; Holloway and Valentine, 2000a). Further, hegemonic discourses represent childhood as a natural, essential and ubiquitous category, with people sequentially developing in line with chronological age (Aitken, 2001a). ‘New’ geographies and social studies of childhood have emphasised that such understandings of childhood, which are naturalised and accepted as ‘common sense’ within the Global North and globalised institutions (Aitken, 2001b), are powerful social constructions specific to both time and place (Holloway and Valentine, 2000b). This is not to deny the embodied experience of maturing (Prout, 2000; Aitken, 2001a). Rather, it is to emphasise both the heterogeneity of experiences of aging and the diversity of adultist constructions of childhood (Robson, 2004) that serve to exclude and marginalise children in different parts of the world. Geographers and social scientists of children and young people have self-consciously sought to destabilise and transform spatially and temporally contingent constructions of childhood which dominate within the Global North. A central aspect of the universal child that has been challenged within children’s geographies is the child as ‘less of a Children’s Geographies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 135–142, August 2006

Exploring ‘Other’ childhoods through quantitative secondary analyses of large scale surveys: Opportunities and challenges for children's geographers

Abstract This paper considers the potential contribution of secondary quantitative analyses of large scale surveys to the investigation of ‘other’ childhoods. Exploring other childhoods involves investigating the experience of young people who are unequally positioned in relation to multiple, embodied, identity locations, such as (dis)ability, ‘class’, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race. Despite some possible advantages of utilising extensive databases, the paper outlines a number of methodological problems with existing surveys which tend to reinforce adultist and broader hierarchical social relations. It is contended that scholars of childrens geographies could overcome some of these problematic aspects of secondary data sources by endeavouring to transform the research relations of large scale surveys. Such endeavours would present new theoretical, ethical and methodological complexities, which are briefly considered.

Special units for young people on the autistic spectrum in mainstream schools: sites of normalisation, abnormalisation, inclusion, and exclusion

This paper explores the experiences of young people on the autistic spectrum (AS) who attend a special unit within a mainstream secondary school in England. The paper feeds into contemporary debates about the nature of inclusive schooling and, more broadly, special education. Young people on the AS have been largely neglected within these debates. The paper focuses upon processes of normalisation and abnormalisation to which the young people on the AS are subject, and how these are interconnected with inclusion and exclusion within school spaces. At times, the unit is a container for the abnormally behaving. However, processes of normalisation pervade the unit, attempting to rectify the deviant mind—body—emotions of the young people on the AS to enable their inclusion within the mainstream school. Normalisation is conceptualised as a set of sociospatially specific and contextual practices; norms emerge as they are enacted, and via a practical sense of the abnormal. Norms are sometimes reworked by the young people on the AS, whose association with the unit renders them a visible minority group. Thus, despite some problems, special units can promote genuine ‘inclusive’ education, in which norms circulating mainstream school spaces are transformed to accept mind—body—emotional differences.

Embodying and Destabilising (Dis)ability and Childhood

This chapter explores the embodied, interconnected corporeal and sociocultural experiences of young people with mind-body-emotional differences. By illuminating some varying responses to difference, which does not always denote otherness, the chapter begins to illuminate the emancipatory potential of theorising identities as dynamic, interconnected social and corporeal becomings. The research presented is contextualised within changing institutional geographies of disabled children’s education in the UK, where increasingly young people with a range of mind-body-emotional characteristics are co-located within mainstream schools1 (Holt 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b, 2007). However, the shift from segregated special to mainstream education for disabled children has occurred across much of the globalised world, albeit interpreted variously in different national and subnational contexts (Ballard 1999).

Learning How to Behave in School: A Study of the Experiences of Children and Young People with Socio-emotional Differences

This chapter discusses the ways in which children in school learn behaviours that are deemed to be acceptable within the school environment. It focuses on the experience of students who are defined by teachers as having ‘Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties’ (BESD)1 in one primary school and one secondary school in the same English Local Authority (LA).