Tracey Skelton

• Associate Professor at National University of Singapore

Children and young people are everywhere (present) but often nowhere (absent). They can be seen but not heard, they may use their voice but not be listened to. As a substantially marginalised group of humans, they experience absence and presence in different ways to older people and are confronted with contradictory experiences and recognition. Chi...

Reflecting on a previous article, I evaluate changes encountered around teaching sexuality over the past 22 years in different geo-political settings. This article examines the ways in which my teaching practices, as an academic committed to equality, have developed in relation to different academic and political contexts. This personal pathway thr...

Although international volunteerism has been a part of official development assistance for decades, the capacity development (CD) impacts of such programs in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the Global South have received scant attention. This article provides insights into the ways international volunteerism contributes to endogenous CD processes...

The city of Hyderabad plays a significant role in urban transition processes at play in India. Cyberabad, a section of the city of Hyderabad, developed through the rapid urbanisation of rural villages and land, becoming a high-tech, state of the art, globally connected enclave. On weekday mornings in the neighbourhood of Madhapur, smartly dressed H...

This chapter introduces volume 1, which gathers together debates at philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual levels that have influenced the formation and continuation of Geographies of Children and Young People. Emphasis is placed on well-known and less well-known but influential theorists including Bourdieu, Darwin, and Spinoza. Contemporary ag...

Children’s and young people’s geographies is one of the most recent sub-disciplines within human geography. It has rapidly developed to a level of critical mass which includes established academic work, key names within academia, growing numbers of graduate students, expanding numbers of university level taught courses, as well as national and inte...

Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures published in 1998 effectively launched young people's geographies and provided interesting examples of the ‘cultural’ and ‘feminist turns’ through its engagement with cultural studies. It placed young people as central and showcased young arts students through their printmaking self-portraits. This article...

In this editorial article we frame how young people in Asia are reworking rapidly changing socio-economic, cultural conditions and constraining political structures to create possible successful futures and achieve their aspirations. We critically engage with interdisciplinary debates that conceptualise youth futures and provide an overview of curr...

In 2014, an interesting youth movement collective started small p political and big P Political action and resistance in Taiwan. Their protest was against the way a major trade agreement proposed between China and Taiwan was being non-democratically pushed through the Taiwanese legislature. In this article, we provide an analysis of the activities...

The relatively recent geographical focus on children and youth has developed rapidly into an established subdiscipline and has brought important social science approaches into the discipline of geography. The difficulty and complexity of accurately defining children, childhood, youth, and young people remains, but it has forced geographers to rethi...

Geographies of everyday life focus on the everyday spaces where humans live out their lives. Theoretical insights are derived from de Certeau and Lefebvre, both of whom worked to develop critical insights of the everyday as problematic and to analyze the spaces and places of everyday life. Geographers pay attention to the mundane and banal aspects...

There is growing recognition that building relationships is central to creating sustainable partnerships to achieve meaningful development outcomes. International development volunteers, embedded in the community where they are volunteering, are seen as being ideally placed to build and facilitate these relationships. The nature of international de...

In this essay, I aim to make two closely connected, intersecting and in some cases parallel scholarly and political contributions to wider discussions about area studies through a focused engagement with Caribbean Area Studies. First, I position myself within Caribbean (area) studies as a feminist anti-racist researcher and scholar. I explore the i...

This paper engages with contemporary debates in labour geography through its focus on: migrant workers as active agents of change; precarious employment, its complexities and consequences; and the importance of material spaces in migrant labour struggles. Since the early 2000s the South Korean government has been strengthening the institutionalised...

Youth geographies are complex and highly dynamic. Young people are everywhere in our social worlds and are a significant part of the social fabric of everyday living. As a subdiscipline of geography, the focus on young people is relatively new but the theoretical and empirical work has developed rapidly and our awareness of what young people are do...

The concept of partnership is frequently invoked in international development as discourse and policy prescription to better understand relationships and engagements between donors and beneficiaries. Despite the increasing prominence of the idea of partnerships, in reality mutual, equal and sustainable development partnerships remain limited. This...

Busan is the largest port city and second largest city in Korea. Through the last decade, the city has experienced intensified competition within a domestic and international port hierarchy, rapid de-industrialisation, population ageing, and hollowing-out processes. As a response to these challenges, the city has been striving to transform itself i...

This paper focuses on outdoor play-behavior of children (aged 7 to 14) in two selected housing areas, Tiong Bahru and Punggol Cove, in Singapore. It begins the discourse with reference to the Child Friendly City (CFC) initiatives and Article 31(1) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC 1989), of which Singapore is a sign...

This review essay covers a decade of scholarship developed by geographers who engage with children, young people and politics. It first outlines the boundaries within which the review was conducted. It then sets the scene of the starting points in 2003 of the when and where of the scholarship of children's and young people's political geographies....

There is a mobility turn in the social sciences affecting how we scrutinise, research and represent the city. In recent scholarship on mobilities, global human mobilities have been identified as predominant. Nevertheless there have been calls for research that focuses on issues relating to everyday transportation, materialities and the spatial cont...

Preamble This Special Issue integrates two often distinct contemporary strands of urban engagement: the mobility turn within the social sciences; and interdisciplinary theori-sations and conceptualisations born of the rejuvenation of urban research. At this important juncture, it is also timely that a hitherto neglected set of actors, young people,...

Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The main part of the article considers three strands of work on friendship that push the boundaries of research in human geography: (1)...

This paper discusses the ways in which a methodological approach evolved through research work with young women (aged 14-17) living in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales. The project was an investigation of their cultural geographies and micro-geographies and was informed by feminist geography's conceptualisation of gender. The qualitative methods w...

Geographers play an important role in expanding our understanding of children's lives, socio-spatial identities and material practices. As a sub-discipline, Children's Geographies is experiencing exponential growth throughout the wider discipline of geography. There has been a tendency to corral Children's Geographies into special issues of journal...

This article challenges the absence of young people from Political Geography. It shows how in many parts of the world young people are in an in-between space politically and legally. This article suggests that the geographically divergent liminal positioning of young people within political–legal structures and institutional practices is what makes...

Communication technologies have historically isolated D/deaf and hard of hearing people from information in mainstream society, for example, the telephone, radio, and television are all inaccessible to D/deaf without relay services or subtitles. This paper therefore begins by examining the consequences for D/deaf people's personal information lands...

While there is a burgeoning literature on the role of ICT in the creation of new forms of social networks, dubbed on-line communities, much less attention has been paid to the complex set of relationships which are emerging between some off-line communities and the internet, and in particular to some of the new spatialities that are emerging as a r...

This article offers a discussion of the ways in which institutional ethical frameworks can obstruct and obfuscate research with children and young people at the very same time as they attempt to protect these subjects of research. The article shows that key aspects of institutional ethical guidelines and regulations fly in the face of contemporary...

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is part of a significant shift in thinking about children, young people and childhood. It has introduced participation as the third P, alongside provision and protection. Development actors and policies have identified participation as a facet of meaningful social development. Academics have constructed...

In this paper we address the importance and contestation of language in terms of citizenship and the development of political communities by focusing on the example of a minority language – British Sign Language. Language is crucial to debates about citizenship and belonging because the State has to rely on language for its very functioning, indeed...

Traditionally, young people's transitions from a state of dependent childhood to an independent adult identity have been measured in terms of a developmental stage model. However, it is increasingly being recognised that young people are not a universal category and that their transitions need to be understood within the diverse context of peers, f...

In this article we examine the ways in which young D/deaf British people express and experience their identities and how their D/deafness intersects with other self-identifications. We examine the controversial debates within D/deaf communities, cultures and studies about D/deafness as disability versus D/deafness as linguistic minority. We explore...

In recent years, geographers and urban sociologists have sought to map and understand the emergence and development of lesbian and gay spaces within the city - popularly dubbed 'the scene'. It is often asserted that the city is a space of sexual liberation and that specifically the 'scene' can play an important part in lesbian and gay men's identit...

In late modernity there has been a shift in the ways that individuals relate to society, in which traditional ideas, expectations, and hierarchies are being reworked. Released from the constraints and social norms of tradition, individuals, it is argued, are now freer to choose between a range of options in the pursuit of their own happiness. Notab...

This paper critically examines the dominant, and predominantly negative, discourses around young people's political participation, or supposed lack of it. Drawing upon contemporary debates about young people within geography, political science and sociology, it considers the ways in which a redefinition of what constitutes ‘the political’ is requir...

In this paper we examine D/deaf young people's sociospatial transitions from childhood to adulthood. We begin by identifying the common processes through which D/deaf young people may become marginalised in four spaces: at home, in educational institutions, in the workplace, and within Deaf communities. We then go on to consider how these shared pr...

The concept of transition has been at the heart of social science work on youth for several decades. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when the labour market was severely depressed, structuralist explanations dominated understandings of the routes that young people follow into adulthood. The emphasis was on the way that young people’s class...

In discussing methodological and ethical codes for working with children there is a danger that young people can become homogenised as a social category. In this paper we examine the way in which common methodological and ethical dilemmas, such as accessing potential interviewees or gaining consent, can become more complex and significant when the...

When a violent and unpredictable volcano erupted on the small Caribbean island of Montserrat the implications for the people who lived there were to be profound. Not only was this a natural disaster which forced people out of their homes and, for many, away from their island, it was also a point of conflict of political and cultural identity. Monts...

Although there has been an increasing number of articles on teaching and gender, there has been little discussion of the implications of feminist research methodologies for student projects. This paper aims to overcome this 'blind spot' through discussion of the pedagogic implications raised by the adoption of such methodologies in student projects...

This article is based on the author's personal experience of teaching sexuality within the context of a second‐year geography option on social and cultural geography. The paper considers the issues which might surround deciding to teach sexuality and the complex questions around ‘coming out’ as a straight or gay tutor. It also addresses the questio...

For many contributors to the critiques of development discourse the role of 'culture' in all its complexities of definition has become a central focus. This article engages with the relationship between culture and development through a consideration of 'cultures of land' in the Caribbean. Using ethnographic research the complexities of meanings of...

BLDSC reference no.: DX91859. Thesis (doctoral)--University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1989.

About the book: In recent years, the study of human geography has been reshaped by the work of feminist geographers, and as a result a considerable number of universities now include feminist geography and gender issues in their courses. This text provides an introduction to contemporary debates in feminist geography. These explorations in diversit...