This volume presents the innovative methodologies, tools and techniques, as well as the challenges and ethical complexities of doing geographies of young people. Geographers of young people have reflected upon participation, power and how to approach young people, generating a vibrant and exciting methodological terrain, which this volume showcases. Understanding young people's lives has challenged researchers to be creative in their research approaches. Facilitating research with, and alongside, young people and acknowledging, and endeavouring to address, adult-child power imbalances has prompted innovation, experimentation and adaptation which has applicability to all social scientists and geographers. The volume provides critical insights into underlying epistemological and ethical debates, along with practical methods and techniques that investigate young people's geographies globally, across both majority and minority worlds. Many of the chapters consider how to facilitate participation and empowerment through the research process, and geographies of young people have a long tradition of co-production and participation in research. The collection is structured into three sections with a focus on: methodological approaches and ethics; methods, tools and techniques; co-production, participation and power. In the first section, key epistemological and methodological approaches are considered, such as critical realism, and critical pedagogy, with discussion of their implications for research design and analysis. In the second section, chapters explore the potential and challenges of a variety of innovative participatory tools: mobile technologies, geospatial methods, creative visual methods, participatory video. In the third section, chapters reflect on endeavours to promote more empowering, co-productive research including rights-based research, young people as researchers, and community engagement with young people. The collection highlights the specific methodological and ethical issues raised by relatively neglected techniques, such as archival research, autoethnography, qualitative longitudinal research and mobile interviewing. It addresses how barriers to participation with groups who are often more silenced and marginalised can be addressed, such as when conducting research with migrant and asylum seeking children in the minority world and with street youth and disabled young people in the majority world. The volume explores issues of data analysis, interpretation and dissemination, such as interpreting visual ethnography and the process of participatory dissemination.
About the Author:
Ruth Evans is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Reading, UK. Her research focuses on care ethics, intergenerationality and family geographies in relation to chronic illness, bereavement, inheritance and migration. Her recent research explored caring relations following the death of a relative in diverse families in urban Senegal (funded by The Leverhulme Trust) and she is currently conducting research with refugee families affected by chronic illness and bereavement in the UK. Her monograph focuses on children caring for parents living with HIV in global perspective (with Saul Becker, The Policy Press).
Ruth is particularly interested in participatory action research, emotions in research, care ethics and achieving social impacts. She is leader of the Participation Lab at the University of Reading, an innovative initiative which aims to co-produce knowledge with policymakers, practitioners and community members. Recent publications have reflected on care ethics and developing an 'impact' case study for her institution (Area) and on women's and young people's land rights and inheritance in Senegal (Gender, Place and Culture) and Ghana (Geoforum). Ruth teaches social, cultural and development geography and is a co-author of the text book, Key Concepts in Development Geography (with Robert Potter, Dennis Conway and Sally Lloyd-Evans, SAGE). She is an editorial board member of the journals, Gender, Place & Culture and Social & Cultural Geography and was Awards Officer of the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
Dr Louise Holt, is Reader in Human Geography at Loughborough University, UK. Louise leads the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Cluster at Loughborough, and from January 2017 will be co-editor of the journal Children's Geographies. Louise is a scholar of geographies of children, young people and families, and has an enduring interest in how inequalities are reproduced and/or transformed at a variety of intersecting spatial scales, including through the everyday social practices of young people, and the adults around them. Louise is intrigued by the ways in which everyday practices in specific spaces/places are connected to, reproduce, and can potentially transform, broader-scale inequalities that coalesce around intersecting bodily morphologies (particularly childhood and disability, but also class, ethnicity and gender). Recent research explores the material everyday geographies of infant feeding practices, taking seriously the inter-subjective agency/subjectivity of infants; and the (re)production of disability and ability through everyday practices in schools, homes and leisure spaces, and the interconnection with broader processes of social exclusion/inclusion. Among other works, Louise is editor of Geographies of Children Youth and Families: An International Perspective. Louise established the International Conferences of Geographies of Children, Youth and Families, which have continued to grow and thrive as a collaborative effor
Tracey Skelton is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She was previously Professor of Critical Geographies at the University of Loughborough in the UK. The essential elements of her research career focus on people who are socially, politically, and intellectually excluded. Her early work focused on the Caribbean and issues of gender and racial inequality, feminist geographies, and methodological analysis. She has contributed to culture and development debates, particularly through her longitudinal research on the island of Montserrat. Recently, A/P Skelton returned to this field of scholarship through research with volunteers and host organizations in Cambodia as part of a major comparative and collaborative project on development partnerships. She was the principal investigator of a major comparative urbanism research project on the livability, sustainability, and diversity of four Asian cities: Busan in South Korea, Hyderabad in India, Kunming in China, and Singapore.
A/P Skelton is a recognized international leader in the subdiscipline of children's and young people's geographies. In particular, her work has served to challenge the invisibility and marginalization of young people from geographic academic research at the same time as it has demonstrated the rich and varied ways in which young people live their lives both spatially and temporally alongside, but differently from, adults. Her research work has been funded by key research institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK; the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Academic Research Fund and the Global Asia Institute, both of the National University of Singapore; the Australian Research Council; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
A/P Skelton was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Children's Geographies and has been the Viewpoints Editor since 2005 and became the Commissioning Editor for Asia in 2010. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Geoforum, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Geography Compass, and ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies (open access). She has coauthored 2 books, edited 3 collections, guest-edited 2 special journal issues, and published more than 70 journal articles and chapters. She is a passionate teacher and graduate supervisor. She is committed to the politics of research dissemination in accessible formats, in particular to enable the participants in her research projects to understand and recognize their coproduction of knowledge whether through specialized small-scale workshops, translation of reports into local languages, or production of audiovisual materials.
