Matej Blazek

Emerging relationships and diverse motivations and benefits in participatory video with young people

The paper reflects on the process of participatory video production with young people from a deprived neighbourhood in Bratislava. We draw on Kindons [2003. Participatory video in geographic research: a feminist practice of looking? Area, 35 (2), 142–153] and Parrs [2007. Collaborative film-making as process, method and text in mental health research. Cultural geographies, 14 (1), 114–138] arguments that the process of participatory video can bear more significance for all actors of the video than the video-as-a-product. The paper thus explores relationships between particular groups of actors (young participants, the researcher and the practitioner) as well as among them, in the video-making process. We are especially interested in the diversity of motivations behind different actors’ decisions to be involved in participatory video, and we explore the dynamic changes of such motivations and the range of ultimate benefits that participatory video provided. These insights in turn help us to understand multiple types and layers of knowledge produced by young people through participatory video. We conclude the paper by highlighting the intersubjective diversity of participatory video, and we suggest how this can be approached to make participatory video research transformative and efficient for the purpose of research at the same time.

Place, children's friendships, and the formation of gender identities in a Slovak urban neighbourhood

The paper explores how children form their peer relationships in a small urban neighbourhood in Bratislava, and how their gender identities are affected by practices of friendship. Drawing on Hörschelmann and Stennings (2008, Progress in Human Geography, 32, 339) idea of the ‘ethnographic attitude’ to researching ‘post-socialist’ change, the paper identifies links between childrens everyday performances and broader structures in which these are embedded. Special attention is given to the spatial ranges of childrens practices, developing an argument about the significance of childrens neighbourhood as a pivotal spatial domain for the constitution of childrens friendships.

Children’s emotional geographies: politics of difference and practices of engagement

Geography is a discipline with much to say about space but, until relatively recently, more reluctance to talk about children and emotions. Over the last 20 years, however, both these areas have become established sub-disciplinary fields within geography with successful dedicated journals (Children’s Geographies was established in 2003 and Emotion, Space and Society in 2008), a flourishing tradition of international conferences (the 5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies and the 4th International Conference on the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families took place in 2015) and a number of journal articles and book publications with impact across the field of geography and far beyond.

Feeling our way: academia, emotions and a politics of care

Abstract This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalised neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with.

Mapping and making spaces of childhood

The contributions to this book have explored some of the manifold ways in which emotions are positioned in policies and practices for children. The contributors offer nuanced understandings of emotion, which advance theoretical, empirical and applied insights into the workings of emotion in diverse contexts. In this concluding chapter, we seek to draw out some of the most prominent themes that appear throughout the volume. The chapter has two aims. First, it seeks to prompt further reflection — particularly conceptual, but in some cases methodological — about future research agendas around children’s emotions in policy and practice. Second, it aims to build upon the bulleted ‘implications for policy and practice’, presented at the end of each chapter, so that in this conclusion some more general reflections might be offered for policy-makers and practitioners working with children. With this focus, the chapter addresses the propositions from Chapter 1 by reflecting on how spaces of childhood are ‘made’ through policy and practice, and by discussing approaches to find a way through — to map — spaces of childhood as a an inspiration for adults. However, given that these aims are very much entwined throughout the book — and that some readers may well be interested in both — we do not institute an artificial separation between ‘theoretical’ and otherwise ‘useful’ discussions (Horton and Kraftl, 2005).

‘It’s good but it’s not enough’: the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions

Abstract Developing a critical analysis of the relational and situated practices of social policy, this paper draws on an evaluation of an early intervention project in Scotland (UK) where volunteer adult mentors supported young people ‘at risk’ of offending or antisocial behaviour. Contributing to ‘enlivened’ accounts of social practice, we explore how practices of mentoring developed through the co-presence of mentor and young person in the often transitory spaces of care which characterized the ‘diversionary activities’ approach in the project. We expand the notion of the relational in social practice beyond the care-recipient dyad to include wider networks of care (families, programme workers, social institutions). The paper explores how such social interventions might both be ‘good’ for the young people involved, and yet recognize critiques that more individualized models of intervention inevitably have limitations which make them ‘not enough’ to deal with structural inequalities and disadvantages. Acknowledging the impacts of neoliberalism, we argue critical attention to diverse situated relational practices points to the excessive nature of engagement in social policy and provides scope for transformative practice where young people’s geographies can be ‘upscaled’ to connect to the realms of social policy and practice.

Understanding (How to Be with) Children’s Emotions: Relationships, Spaces and Politics of Reconnection in Reflections from Detached Youth Work

Across various sectors of professional practice, children’s emotions are being diagnosed, fostered and regulated. Driven by the rationales of mental health and wellbeing (Cowie et al., 2004), youth justice and prevention (Berelowitz and Hibbert, 2011), therapy (Southam-Gerrow, 2013) or education (Schutz and Pekrun, 2007), examinations, interventions and elicitations no longer target only children’s behaviour, social environment and cognitive learning, but also the qualities of how they feel.

Labour Exploitation of Non-EU Migrants in Slovakia: Patterns, Implications and Structural Violence

Writing a few years after the countries of East and Central Europe joined the EU in 2004, Castles and Miller (2009: 116) named them ‘future immigration lands’. Fuelled by the opening of new labour markets and dynamic economic growth, the number of migrants in Slovakia skyrocketed from 22,108 in 2004 to 73, 783 in 2014 (ADP, 2014), although, as with its neighbours, Slovakia still retains one of the very smallest populations of migrants in the EU, in both absolute and relative numbers. Small numbers and their peripheral position in European migration flows are among the key reasons why the focus on migration in post-socialist European countries concentrates instead on the East-West flows of labour migrants (Burrell, 2009) and, to a lesser extent, on their return (White, 2014).

Introduction: Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice

This edited collection focuses on children’s and young people’s (aged 0–25) emotions in policy-making and professional practice. It explores diverse kinds of policy and practice: from governmental policies to informal education, from psychotherapy to volunteering schemes. It covers multiple substantive issues: from youth offending to nature, and from military recruitment to suicide. Critically, however, given a surge in interest in emotion, affect and feeling across several social-scientific disciplines over the past decade, the book examines the many ways in which emotions matter within these diverse contexts and forms of intervention. The chapters explore diverse forms of emotion and emotion work, including: emotions experienced during the course of professional interventions; emotions underpinning and evident (or overlooked and absent) in policy-making for children; management of young people’s emotions as part of professional practice; and the use of emotion to justify particular moral or political imperatives.