1st Edition
Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home
Biography
Peter Hughes Jachimiak is senior lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales, UK. His research interests are to do with children’s cultures of the 1970s and 1980s and the way in which the cultural artefacts of childhood, of those two decades, manifested themselves within the wider cultural geographies of the time. As such, Peter Hughes Jachimiak’s current work explores, on one hand, ’children, spectralities, and ghost cultures’, and, on the other, ’utopia, dystopia, and science fiction aimed at children and young adults’.
"The cultural context of Peter’s childhood is widely explored in this book taking up a large proportion of the content. The author gives a vivid and familiar (to those who remember) sense of media influences in the 1970s and evokes the layers of social change in play at the time, not least the haunting of earlier generations and the echoes of war time fears. The moments of autobiography in the book though are the most compelling for me since it is with these that the author captures the often unspoken aura of childhood imaginings and experience. These beautifully written excerpts from memory tell how a child’s way of being in the world emerges through sensual and feeling experience to cast an uncanny shadow over later life. Peter Hughes Jachimiak’s book expresses a haunting of smells, tastes, fears and wonderings that linger some-times benignly but at other times profoundly in our adult selves."
- Jane Franklin, Housing Studies
