Constructing the sick child: the cultural politics of children's hospitals

Drawing on an ESRC funded study of children's experiences of hospital space this article explores the cultural politics of contemporary English childhood. Using the words and commentaries provided by both children and young people, the article argues that although, as patients, children and young people share the same hospital spaces, their experiences of them are quite different. Through mundane material and symbolic practices, a number of experiential continuities are created for the youngest children between life in hospital and life at home, continuities that work to downplay their identities as children who are sick. For young people, however, these practices are more problematic since the discourses of childhood that are recreated have little resonance with young people's own experiences and sense of self and identity. Thus this article provides evidence of the need for a more nuanced understanding of not only young people's needs in relation to hospital services, but also of the significance of understanding the ways in which particular constructions of ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ are threaded through public discourses and come to be realized in institutional settings.     

Young people’s drinking spaces and Im/Mobilities: a case of ‘hyper-diversity’?

This paper draws on a ‘palette’ of interdisciplinary methods to explore young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences in the hyper-diverse suburban locations of Chorlton and Wythenshawe, Manchester, UK. This paper contributes to literature on the emerging theme of hyper-diversity by exposing the heterogeneity of young people’s drinking experiences, with a focus on bars, pubs, streets and parks. I demonstrate how young people’s inclusion and exclusion from such spaces is bound up with the traditional identity markers of age, gender and class, alongside more performative, embodied, emotional and affective aspects; for instance, the atmospheres, smell and soundscapes of particular drinking spaces. More than this, the paper enhances understandings of hyper-diversity by elucidating the ways in which young people’s everynight alcohol-related mobilities and diversity interpenetrate each other. Through analysing young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences, I show how young people are hyper-diverse in terms of their alcohol-related lifestyles, attitudes, and activities.     

Young people’s perceptions of power and influence as a basis for understanding contemporary citizenship

Persistent simplistic binary discourses of young people’s citizenship portray them either as civically deficit and disengaged citizens or the creators of new democratic modes and approaches. This paper draws on field research with two groups of young people in Australia to better recognise the nuance of young people’s experiences of citizenship, power and influence. The study investigated the extent to which different groups of young people believe that they have the power to influence society; the ways in which they seek this influence; the current barriers to their influence; and what would enable them to have greater influence. Our analysis in this paper draws on Lukes’ concepts of power [2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan] and Arvanitakis’ framework of citizenship engagement and empowerment [in Arvanitakis, J., and E. Sidoti. 2011. “The Politics of Change: Where to for Young People and Politics.” In Their Own Hands: Can Young People Change Australia?, edited by L. Walsh and R. Black, 11–20. Melbourne: ACER Press], but also builds on an emerging scholarship concerned with the geographic dimensions of young people’s citizenship engagement and action, as well as with the affective, relational and temporal dimensions of this engagement and action. Our findings suggest that power works in different ways to both constrain and liberate young people as citizens – sometimes at the same time. The paper concludes with an argument for the continuing need to understand young people’s lived and located experiences of engagement, power and influence in more nuanced and sophisticated ways. This includes reframing the discussion about young people’s experiences in terms of the nature of their democratic engagement and action rather than simply their citizenship.     

Voice,authenticity and ethical challenges: the participatory dissemination of youth-generated visual data over social media

Using the theoretical frameworks of childhood studies and visual ethics, this article explores ethical ways of engaging children and young people in disseminating self-generated visual data (‘participatory dissemination’) over social media. The discussion draws on a research project carried out with a group of young people in an underserved community in South Africa. The project was an educational intervention that aimed to enable the participants to bring out their experiences with the HIV and AIDS pandemic in South Africa and to reflect on related issues through participatory video making. The methodological focus was on exploring visual ethics in the context of participatory dissemination. Despite a growing interest in social media, few studies have been conducted in relation to ethics in using social media as an outlet to disseminate visual data created by young people. This article contributes to addressing this knowledge gap. It is argued that (1) the process of remaking visual data can enhance the ethics of dissemination by offering young participants an opportunity to reflect on self-representation more carefully and (2) the verbal contextualisation of participant-generated visual data can contribute to a further clarification of young people’s ideas, thereby making dissemination more ethical. I am cautious, however, to overstate the significance of disseminating young people’s verbal and visual expressions without researchers’ discretion because such expressions may contribute to stigmatising the young people.     

Being Judged,Being Assessed: Young People’s Perspective of Assessment in Youth Justice and Education

Research from the Economic and Social Research Council programme on Pathways Into and Out of Crime prioritised young people’s ‘voices’ in exploring experiences of crime and a range of intervention services. Drawing on data from interviews with 110 young people, this paper explores their perspectives of professional assessment. Embedded within neo‐liberal youth welfare policies are a number of contradictions. Policies encourage ‘individualisation’, ‘responsiblisation’ and ‘self‐realisation’ while also needing to maintain control and regulation of ‘risky’ populations. This paper explores the implication of these contradictions through examining the experiences of young people being assessed in youth justice and education. The impact on their identities as neo‐liberal citizens is discussed in the conclusion.     

The ‘Mosquito’ and the transformation of British public space

This paper explores the implications of the ‘Mosquito’ Ultrasonic Teenage Youth Deterrent device. It is used in Britain to exclude young people from public spaces despite contravening British law and European and International Human Rights legislation. The paper argues that the device is changing the relationship young people have with public spaces around them. Additionally, the paper discusses how the device has transformed the ways in which specific public space legislation is implemented and enforced to the extent that it can be viewed as a purchasable manifestation of the powers conferred upon police officers through legislative acts. The existing academic literature regarding the Mosquito is to be discussed and utilised. The device is examined against the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 and the Equality Act 2010. The paper argues that the device itself can be labelled as anti-social and contravenes several pieces of UK legislation with regard to anti-social behaviour and discrimination. Finally, the paper critically appraises the impact of combatting youth anti-social behaviour with a device which itself can be labelled as anti-social.     

Navigating religious diversity: exploring young people’s lived religious citizenship in Indonesia

Against the backdrop of several concerning reports which have noted growing socio-religious conservatism and intolerance amongst Indonesia youth, this study examined how school-aged Indonesian young people navigate encounters with religious difference in their everyday lives. Recognising the significance of religious and citizenship education curricula, the research included classroom observations and interviews with 20 religiously-diverse Indonesian young people in three purposively selected high schools in Jakarta. The paper reveals that participants in all three schools agreed that religious studies and their personal religious frameworks were central to their approaches toward religious tolerance. However, their lived everyday experiences of rubbing shoulders with religious ‘others’, expanded upon and critiqued the narrowness and rigidity of these frameworks and showed greater religious inclusivity. Through this analysis the paper integrates prior work on ‘lived religion’ and ‘lived citizenship’ to fuse a ‘lived religious citizenship’ concept, arguing that this adds depth to both fields by recognising that religion cannot be separated from the experience of being a citizen. A focus on lived religious citizenship provides a deeper account of individual identity and highlights the importance of qualitative studies focused on the living out of religion and citizenship.     

Chinese youth performing identities and navigating belonging online

This paper examines the experiences of belonging of young Chinese internet users through an analysis of their online identity practices. Drawing on a qualitative research project about online citizenship practices of 31 young Chinese citizens from mainland China, I explore their experiences of belonging on two online platforms (Weibo and WeChat) and the identities formed and sustained through these experiences. The results show that young people experience different senses of belonging in different social media spaces. Their strategies in navigating these experiences are informed by (a) their perceptions of online spaces as private or public, and (b) using online identity performance as a supplement to or escape from identities in physical life. I argue that young Chinese internet users experience different senses of belonging by flexibly appropriating the affordances of social media platforms for communication and networking; these senses of belonging play a key role in forming and sustaining their identities, and are crucial for their wellbeing.     

European Muslims’ engagement in the public sphere soft counterpublics

This article addresses European Muslims’ public engagement in the arts by applying the concept of counterpublics. It examines two case studies of young German Muslims whose involvement in the public sphere can be described as soft counterpublics. The term soft counterpublics denotes publics that show some characteristics of counterpublics, but are at the same time not only about ‘countering’. They can be seen as ‘in between’ cases, neither strong counterpublics nor completely beyond counterpublics. Their art reflects a diversity of interests that are translated into public expressions and related back to their multiple identities. Motivations and themes are multi-layered. Occasionally, topics address stereotypes and negative identity representations of Muslims, which reflect important characteristics of counterpublics. However, themes can deal with a broad range of matters that go beyond this particular issue and that can be seen in isolation of counterpublics. On the one hand, there is a natural interest in the arts as a tool to express oneself, which is not a typical case of counterpublics. On the other hand, there is also the intention to speak to people through the arts. As well as wanting to reach the Muslim youth community in Germany, who can identify with their art, the case studies are also concerned about the non-Muslim German community and its perception of Muslim identity in Germany.     

Experiencing parenthood,care and spaces of hospitality

Drawing on research conducted in Australia and the United Kingdom, this paper explores how parenting and care provision is entangled with, and thus produced through, consumption in hospitality venues. We examine how the socio‐material practices of hospitality provision shape the enactment of parenting, alongside the way child‐parent/consumer‐provider interactions impact upon experiences of hospitality spaces. We argue that venues provide contexts for care provision, acting as spaces of sociality, informing children's socialization and offering temporary relief from the work of parenting. However, the data also highlight various practices of exclusion and multiple forms of emotional and physical labour required from care‐providers. The data illustrate children's ability to exercise power and the ways in which parents’/carers’ experiences of hospitality spaces are shaped by their enactment of discourses of ‘good parenting’. Finally, we consider parents’/carers’ coping behaviours as they manage social and psychological risks associated with consumption in such public spaces of leisure.     

Online ghettoes,perils or supernannies? Australian young people with chronic illness and disability challenge some moral panics about young people online

Current literature focusing on young people’s digital technology use often reflects concerns that they may live virtual lives and withdraw from locally geographically situated spaces. It assumes the existence of a split between offline and online ‘worlds’ corresponding to ‘real ‘and ‘non-real’ respectively. This article reports research findings on how young people locate new social media technologies in their daily lives with particular focus on the relationship between their online and offline experiences. The voices of the young people guided the research, which found that their social media use contradicts conventional narratives of moral panic about the alleged unreality and fearful dangers of online spaces for young people.     

Young people as global citizens: negotiation of youth civic participation in adult-managed online spaces

With the proliferation of new media technologies, online spaces for civic engagement are being used as new sites by the young people for enacting global citizenship. Some of these online civic spaces are managed by parent organizations and guide the participants towards accomplishing goals that align with the institutional policies. We use Stuart Hall’s theoretical framework to ground the two methods we used for empirical research- textual analysis of the selected online spaces and in-depth interviews with young bloggers. Our analysis shows how negotiated reading of the encoded messages on the online platforms for youth civic engagement marks a political moment of signification in which there lies a possibility of challenging the dominance of the adult centered notions of civic engagement. Shelat’s online civic culture framework [2014. “Citizens, Global Civic Engagement on Online Platforms: Women as Transcultural Citizens.” Dissertation] helped us examine how these managed platforms encode global citizenship with pre-designed participatory practices that reinforce the hegemonic definition of youth political participation. Interviews of young bloggers on two online global spaces foreground the process of negotiation with the dominant definitions and the use of decoding strategies to create scope for subjective, more local definitions, as well as practices of civic engagement and global citizenship. Though literature suggests that adult-management of online youth spaces perpetuate a gap between the adult-centric notions of participation and the youth oriented ideas of civic engagement, our study reveals that the young participants find ways of articulating their ideas and enter these spaces with plans on how to fulfill their civic goals.     

The meanings of citizenship: media use and democracy in South Africa

In 1994, South Africans embarked on a project to create new meanings of citizenship in order to transcend the disenfranchisement and divisions created by apartheid. This article examines the context in which new forms of citizenship are evolving in South Africa and how South African citizens use the media to give meaning to concepts such as “an active public sphere,” “civic agency” and “participatory politics.” The objective of the research is to provide information about the way in which the media contribute to the quality of democracy in South Africa through mediating citizenship in a way that improves prospects for citizens to exert influence over public decisions. As has been the case in other post-authoritarian and postcolonial settings, the continuation of existing unequal relationships to government persists even when new democratic spaces have opened up. This article interrogates the assumption that media are central to citizens’ political and civic engagements in a transitional society marked by persisting inequalities. This interrogation draws on empirical research with citizens to investigate the question that the media are central to constructions of citizenship and participation and engagement with democratic processes. Our research finds that young South Africans interviewed are disengaged from politics and find that the media does not speak to or connect with their everyday lives. They view the state on both national and local levels as not being prepared to listen to their experiences, ideas or conditions of life. While the respondents trust the media as credible institutions, they do not experience the media as being relevant to their lives. The perceived disinterest of the state and the lack of relevance of the media, work together to create a sense of powerlessness and inability to influence policy-making among the young people interviewed. For the media to intervene in this state of affairs, it would have to create more opportunities for young people to participate directly in meaning production through the media, starting by listening more closely to their experiences in order to respond to their concerns in a relevant way.     

‘Going to Brazil’: transnational and corporeal movements of a Canadian‐Brazilian martial arts community

In this article I use a case study of capoeira (an Afro‐Brazilian martial art/dance/game) in Canada to bring together sport and transnationality literatures. I show that understandings of transnationality can be extended through both investigating people born and raised in the North, since they play an important role in creating transnational spaces, and attending to the corporeal means that people deploy to connect to a homeland or ‘travel’ to a foreign country. Through adopting a particular racialized/ national style of movement, those who ‘stay put’ in the North can ‘move’ across ethnic boundaries, if not geopolitical borders. Real (international), imagined (virtual and emotional), and corporeal (embodied) ‘travel’ to Brazil are key experiences of the senior capoeirista (capoeira devotee). Sporting activities provide an exceptional window onto transnationality studies, given that ways of moving are fundamental to social, cultural and national identities.     

Education and affinity? pedagogies of sexual citizenship in LGBTIQ youth support videos

ABSTRACT

This article provides an analysis of some of the ways in which educational resources for youth frame identity, sexuality and normativity within broader contexts of support and sexual citizenship. It focuses on online video resources for young people produced in Australia by the LGBTIQ support and curriculum advocacy organisation Safe Schools Coalition Australia and by the Minus18 Foundation. Developed as part of the larger All of Us educational package, these videos are explicitly pedagogical, presenting the viewer with ‘real life’ experiences from a range of young Australians. We consider the work the All of Us videos do in engaging with concepts of sexual citizenship, particularly as they seek to help young people navigate multiple forms of belonging and support. Of special interest is a series of tensions between normalising tendencies and the complexification of identities, communities, intimacies and belongings. While the videos may be perceived to operate within largely normative conceptualisations of sexuality, they explore ways of building affinity, peer support, and alternative ways of being that extend well beyond the logics usually offered by these frameworks.     

Women and citizenship post‐trafficking: the case of Nepal

This article analyses the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship embedded in models of citizenship in the Global South, specifically in South Asia, and the meanings associated with having – or not having – citizenship. It does this through an examination of women's access to citizenship in Nepal in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the ‘new’ Nepal ‘post‐conflict’. Our analysis explores gendered and sexualized constructions of citizenship in this context through a specific focus on women who have experienced trafficking, and are beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and actively lobby for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. Building from this, in the final section we consider important implications of this analysis of post‐trafficking experiences for debates about gender, sexuality and citizenship more broadly.     

Arts policy and practice for disabled children and young people: towards a ‘practice spectrum’ approach

This article argues for an approach to the evaluation of arts policy and practice for disabled children and young people that goes beyond the dialogic antagonism between Disability Arts and community arts, and towards a ‘practice spectrum’. Little is known about the extent to which a Disability Arts perspective has extended into arts policy and practice for disabled children and young people. The article aims to redress this knowledge gap. It is based upon two sets of data collected in relation to the East Midlands region of England during 2014. First, a critical evaluation was conducted of official and institutional attitudes to arts practice with disabled children and young people. Second, interviews exploring contemporary practice were conducted with 24 arts organisations. Their practice represents a diverse range of art forms and programmes undertaken in the region, and a range of attitudes and positions taken towards disabled children and young people. We argue that the best way to conceive of current practice is as a spectrum, as opposed to an antagonism between community arts and Disability Arts perspectives. There is, however, little evidence of the penetration of a Disability Arts perspective into policy and practice for children and young people.     

Becoming,Being and Having Been: Practitioner Perspectives on Temporal Stances and Participation across Children’s Services

This article is based on a study of the changing meanings and experiences of citizenship and participation for young people in transition from primary to secondary school. One of the primary concerns of the study is to better understand how different professional practices impact upon young people’s uptake of participation and adoption of civic identity. To gain some insight into this area the article first looks at the contexts in which participation work is developing and the interrelationships between these developments across children’s services. How different practitioner’s conceptualise participation is tied into different assessments of young people’s or children’s capacity. Recasting questions of capacity as dialogues across differing temporal stances can offer practitioners new ways to reflect upon the power negotiations within their relations with young people. The key role temporality plays in configuring power relationships and transactions is explored as it arises within practitioner life history interviews. The shifts between temporal stances that young people experience as they interact with different practitioners are illustrated through fieldwork data.     

Young people’s participation in Fiji: understanding conceptualizations and experiences

Young people’s participation has become a cliché in western democracies. In the case of Fiji, it is a novel concept, not because young people have not participated before but because they are exposed to new and different ways of involvement. This paper is one of the earliest attempts to explore young people’s understanding and experiences of participation in Fiji. It is based on data drawn from an exploratory study conducted with a select group of young people in Suva, Fiji. Forms of young people’s engagement although diverse are dominated by the traditional discourse of participation represented in ‘performance and responsibility’ and tend to be represented in the media and policy circles. This paper shows that young people are not bound by these conceptions but talk of participation as experienced in the hybridized settings of their everyday reality. The study offers a window into understanding young people’s participation in Fiji and suggests that a deeper appreciation of this facet of their lives can be achieved with an emphasis on participatory talk with and an exploration of spaces where young people are constantly negotiating the traditional expectations of being young, being dutiful citizens and self-directed individuals.     

Exploring Narratives and Antenarratives of Graffiti Artists: Beyond Dichotomies of Commitment and Detachment

In this article, we propose engagement in critical analysis of social phenomena—here, that of ‘commitment’—through consideration of narratives of and about graffiti artists (‘graffers’). We discuss ways in which graffers are viewed as demonstrating conformance with or rebellion against prevailing social mores. We address representations of them through their own work, as well as in the media and in academic literature. We find that graffers are generally portrayed in simplistic terms, being either vilified and seen as detached from norms of society or justified through incorporation into the discourse of modern art. In our analysis, we employ Boje’s concept of ‘antenarrative’ to challenge the dichotomous depictions of graffers, particularly in relation to the notion of commitment. We posit that the antenarrative approach can also enable analysis of less extreme groups, helping us to explore relevant concepts and phenomena.