The Geography of Young People: Morally Contested Spaces

by Aitken,Stuart C

• ISBN13: 9780415223959
• ISBN10: 0415223954
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-08-09
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Anxieties over children's safety or teenage propensities towards violence and sex have precipitated a moral panic in a large swathe of our society. This provocative work traces the changing scientific and societal notions of what it is to be a young person, and argues that there is a need to rethink how we view childhood spaces, child development and the politics of growing up. The book challenges popular myths that evoke general notions of childhood as a natural stage in the development towards adulthood and offers alternative theories that value the embodiment and local embeddedness of young people.

Table of Contents

List of figures	ix
Preface	x
Acknowledgments	xiii
Putting young people in their place	1	(26)
Encountering young people 1: the cave	1	(7)
Encountering young people 2: the Zocalo	8	(4)
Geography and the study of children	12	(6)
Critical children's geographies	18	(9)
From the ground up: natural developments	27	(35)
Scientific and biological discourses	28	(2)
The natural child	30	(10)
The developing child	40	(11)
Child-centered pedagogy and the ordered child	51	(6)
The socially constructed child and post-structural accounts of development	57	(5)
Learning through the body	62	(26)
Placing the body	65	(3)
Studying children's bodies	68	(11)
Mignontage: the shaping of bodies	79	(9)
Draped outside in and hung inside out: embodying sex and race	88	(31)
Innocence and the sexual child	91	(2)
Getting it right	93	(5)
Alterity, space and embodiment	98	(4)
Transgressive and geographically embedded bodies	102	(9)
Children embedded in object relations	111	(8)
Material transformations: local children in global places	119	(26)
Transforming childhood	120	(10)
Globalization and the reconstitution of reproduction	130	(12)
Unhinging the local and the indeterminacy of the global child	142	(3)
Destined to suffer the most	145	(24)
The unchildlike child	146	(20)
Rethinking last century's childhood	166	(3)
A space to play and a time for justice	169	(17)
Critical moral geographies	170	(16)
Epilogue	186	(4)
Bibliography	190	(18)
Index	208