1st Edition
Young People, Border Spaces and Revolutionary Imaginations
Drawing from discussions that pulled together child researchers working near the borders of Mexico, the United States and Canada, this book explores how material and metaphoric borders give way to young people's experimentations with cultural, social and political change. The contributors highlight the capacities of children to revolutionize thought and practice through creative re-imagining of the boundaries, borders, events, circumstances and familial relations that affect their everyday lives.
The first section, in different ways, highlights borders and movements through them as a bricolage of images, symbols, tensions and joys. In the second section, the idea of a portable border is explored in three chapters that consider a migrants' lifecourse, citizenship and political activism respectively. The last section of the book brings together three chapters that uncover how youth resist, confront and transform the borders that envelop their lives. By weaving narratives pertaining to young people's creative stories, transnational migrations, personal identities, pen-pal programs, masculinites, inter-generational change, border crossings, political activism and addictions, the contributors in toto raise the idea of young people taking bounded and embodied events, places and institutions and moving them towards something emancipatory sin fronteras - without borders.
This book was published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.
1. Overturning Assumptions about Young People, Border Spaces and Revolutions Part 1: Borders as Bricolage 2. The Importance of Looking at the Border from a Young Person's Perspective 3. Listening for Spaces of Ordinariness: Filipino-Canadian Youths' Transnational Lives 4. Narratives from the Other Side: The Revelations and Dynamics of a Bi-national Pen-pal program in border spaces Part 2: Young People as La Frontera 5. "Not Bad for a Little Migrant Working Kid" 6. Glocalists in Tijuana: Youth, Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Identity 7. Play, Work or Activism? Broadening the Connections Between Political and Children's Geographies Part 3: Border Spaces and Revolution 8. Border Rootedness as Transformative Resistance: Youth Overcoming Violence and Inspection in a U.S.-Mexico Border Region 9. Youth on the Line and the No Borders Movement 10. Institutional Borders, Revolutionary Imaginings and the Becoming-adult of the Child Hadi 11. 'For Every Border, There is also a Bridge': Overturning Borders in Young Aboriginal Peoples' Lives
Biography
Stuart C. Aitken is Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. His research interests include children, families, critical theory and qualitative methods. His books include The Awkward Spaces of Fathering (Ashgate, 2009) and Global Childhoods (Routledge 2008). He is current North American editor of Children's Geographies.
Fernando J. Bosco is Associate Professor of Geography at San Diego State University, California, USA. He works at the intersection of social, political and cultural geographies, and his main research interest is critical analysis of space-society relations, with specific foci on children, families, communities, collective action and social change.
Thomas Herman is Adjunct Professor of Geography and Project Director for the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Youth and Space at San Diego State University. His research examines the social geographies of children, families, and urban neighborhoods, and he provides technical assistance to non-profits and local governments in San Diego.
Kate Swanson is Assistant Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. She is broadly interested in marginality, exclusion, and identity. She is the author of Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador's Urban Spaces (University of Georgia Press, 2010).
