1st Edition
The Space and Power of Young People's Social Relationships Immersive Geographies
The book examines the power of young people’s social relationships in schools to transform, or more often, to continue, differences that pervade societies: mind-body-emotional diff erences or Special Educational Needs and Disability, gender, poverty, race/ethnicity, sexuality and their intersections. The book details extensive qualitative research with young people, foregrounding their accounts.
In challenging educators and others to engage with young people’s own agencies and to make space for their socialities, the concepts of embodied social and emotional capital and young people as contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies are developed, emphasising both young people’s agencies and how these are socio-spatially situated, constrained and enabled. The book is most concerned with how and when young people challenge and change enduring differences. The concept of ‘immersive geographies’ outlines the potential of change inherent in the repeated coming together of the same people in space, doing similar things that are, however, always provisional and always with the potential to be done diff erently. Examples of when diff erence is transformed are presented.
The book marks a major interdisciplinary contribution to geographies and social studies of children, youth and education, child development, social work, social policy and education studies. Furthermore, it is of appeal to anyone interested in young people, social reproduction and sociality: from educators, policy makers, youth workers and social workers to parents.
- The spaces and power of young people’s friendships: geographies of immersion
- Methods, approaches, contexts
- Young people’s friendships and power
- Towards spaces of immersion
- Young people’s friendships: embodied, emotional and social capital
- Young people as nodes of the intergenerational reproduction of enduring differences: (re)producing subjectivities
- Geographies of immersion and imminent transformation: young people’s powerful socialities – the power to challenge and change enduring inequalities
- Constraining and enabling young people’s power – some thoughts on the social-spatial contexts of schools
- Conclusions
Biography
Louise Holt is Professor of Human Geography at Loughborough University and an internationally recognised scholar in the fi elds of geographies and social studies of children and youth and social and cultural geography. Louise was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Children’s Geographies for many years and founded the International Conferences of Geographies of Children, Youth and Families. She has published three key edited collections and many journal articles.
"In this wonderful engagement with the ways young people are immersed and engaged in the world, Louise Holt brings together research, ideas and musings about schools and schooling at a time when those institutions, spaces and practices are under siege. With an ironic focus on the futurity of young people she wonders why they are side-lined and ignored when they have so much to say and do. Louise’s passion is to transform what is broken in our world by giving young people more consideration and care, more agency and power. The book is meant as an emotional and social challenge, and yet throughout there is a sense of joy and hope. Young people can change the world and our job as older people is to let them."
-Dr. Stuart C. Aitken, Albert W. Johnson Distinguished Professor, Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Member, June Burnett Endowed Chair, Director - Center for Research on Youth, Environment, Society and Space (YESS), Fellow of Aemula Lauri - the Royal Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Fellow of the American Association of Geographers.
"Building from over twenty years of in-depth field-based research, Louise Holt offers a fresh, invigorating and inspiring exploration of young people in their school life-worlds. Attending to the stories and experiences of particular individuals – with different attributes and aptitudes; from differing backgrounds and often in complex intersectional conjunctions – she carefully uncovers achievement and struggle, joy and sadness, fun and boredom, friendship and animosity, care and control, inclusion and exclusion. Deploying the novel concept of ‘immersion’, she shows the importance of varying time-space contexts within which social relationships and power dynamics arise and become consequential: as young people acquire and deploy stocks of social, emotional and embodied ‘capital’, sometimes to reinforce enduring patterns of discrimination, other times to create exciting new possibilities from which ‘we’ all should learn. This book is a major new resource and provocation for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, educationalists and indeed anyone interested in what makes for ‘liveable’ or ‘unliveable lives’ for young people."
- Professor Christopher Philo, University of Glasgow
