Identities and Subjectivities

Geographies of children and young people is a rapidly emerging sub-discipline within human geography. There is now a critical mass of established academic work, key names within academia, growing numbers of graduate students and expanding numbers of university level taught courses. There are also professional training programmes at national scales and in international contexts that work specifically with children and young people. In addition to a productive journal of Children’s Geographies, there’s a range of monographs, textbooks and edited collections focusing on children and young people published by all the major academic presses then there is a substantive body of work on younger people within human geography and active authors and researchers working within international contexts to warrant a specific Major Reference Work on children’s and young people’s geographies.
The volumes and sections are structured by themes, which then reflect the broader geographical locations of the research.

Dr Nancy Worth is affiliated with the Department of Geography at York University in Toronto, Canada.  Her work has focused on young people’s transitions to adulthood, gendered precarious work and young people’s co-residence with parents.  She is interested in how social categories of difference are bound up with the age and lifecourse, especially around concepts of generation and intergenerationality.  Her work has recently been funded by a Banting Fellowship and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  More about her currently funded project Gen Y at Home: Well-being, Autonomy and Co-residence with Parents is available at www.genyathome.ca

Nancy’s publications include the coedited collections Intergenerational Space and Researching the Lifecourse: Critical Reflections from the Social Sciences. Journal articles include ‘Who we are at work: millennial women, everyday inequalities and insecure work Gender Place & Culture; ‘Feeling precarious: millennial women and work’ Environment & Planning D: Society and Space; ‘Student-focused assessment criteria: thinking through best practice’ Journal of Geography in Higher Education; ‘Experimenting with student-led seminars’ PLANET (Journal of the Higher Education Academy); ‘Visual impairment in the city: young people’s social strategies for independent mobility’ Urban Studies; ‘Making friends and fitting in: a social-relational understanding of disability at school’ Social & Cultural Geography; Evaluating lifemaps as a versatile method for lifecourse geographies’ Area; ‘Understanding youth transition as becoming: identity, time and futurity’ Geoforum; ‘Making use of audio diaries in research with young people: examining narrative, participation and audience’ Sociological Research Online; ‘The significance of the personal within disability geography’ Area. Book chapters include ‘Youth, relationality, and space: conceptual resources for Youth Studies from Critical Human Geography’ for Springer’s Handbook of Youth Studies and ‘Age identity and the geographies of children and young people’ (this volume).  She sits on the editorial board for Children’s Geographies and is on the American Association of Geographers’ Enhancing Diversity Committee.

Dr. Claire Dwyer has been based at the department of geography, University College London, since 1995. She is a reader in social and cultural geography and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at UCL. She teaches social and cultural geography at all levels and is the course director of the Msc Global Migration.  

Claire’s main research interests are in the geographies of faith, migration and multiculturalism. She is currently leading an AHRC-funded research project Making Suburban Faith, which runs from 2015-2019, and explores the changing geographies of suburban faith in West London. This continues work undertaken in Vancouver (funded by Metropolis Canada and conducted with Professor David Ley and Dr Justin Tse) exploring the role of faith and migration in shaping Vancouver’s suburban landscapes. Research from these projects has been published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Social and Cultural Geography, Journal of Material Religion, Cultural Geography and  Built Environment. Claire has longstanding interests in transnationalism and migration and has published widely on the role of commodity culture in shaping transnational spaces including her co-edited book Transnational Spaces (Routledge, 2004, co-edited with Peter Jackson and Phillip Crang). Her research interests in geographies of race and racism and the contemporary geographies of multiculturalism has included research on faith schools, community cohesion policies and the educational attainment of ethnic minority pupils funded most recently by a large grant from the Leverhulme Trust (2003-2007) working in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. This work has been published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Sociology and Sociological Review. She is the co-editor, with Caroline Bressey of New Geographies of Race and Racism (2008, Ashgate).

Claire has longstanding research interests in the geographies of young people and particularly the intersections of gender, generation, faith and ethnicity. Her PhD research, completed in 1997, focused on the identity formations of young Muslim women with pioneering research on the politics of veiling. This research was published in journals such as Gender, Place and Culture, Women’s Studies International Forum, Environment and Planning A and the co-authored volume Geographies of New Femininities (1999,New York Longman). Subsequent research focused on the contested identities of young Muslim men in Britain in the context of changing politics of terrorism and security, published in Gender, Place and Culture and Sociological Review. She is also interested in qualitative methods and co-edited Qualitative Methodologies for Geographies: Issues and Debates (2001, Arnold) and reports on methods for Progress in Human Geography (2007, 2008, 2009).

Claire served on the committee of the Women and Geography Study Group (now Gender and Feminist Geography Research Group) of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) from 1997-2011, and the Commission on Gender for the International Geographical Union from 2009-2016. She was a member of the collective which co-wrote Feminist Geographies (1997, Longman).

Tracey Skelton is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She was previously Professor of Critical Geographies at the University of Loughborough in the UK. The essential elements of her research career focus on people who are socially, politically, and intellectually excluded. Her early work focused on the Caribbean and issues of gender and racial inequality, feminist geographies, and methodological analysis. She has contributed to culture and development debates, particularly through her longitudinal research on the island of Montserrat. Recently, A/P Skelton returned to this field of scholarship through research with volunteers and host organizations in Cambodia as part of a major comparative and collaborative project on development partnerships. She was the principal investigator of a major comparative urbanism research project on the livability, sustainability, and diversity of four Asian cities: Busan in South Korea, Hyderabad in India, Kunming in China, and Singapore.

A/P Skelton is a recognized international leader in the subdiscipline of children’s and young people’s geographies. In particular, her work has served to challenge the invisibility and marginalization of young people from geographic academic research at the same time as it has demonstrated the rich and varied ways in which young people live their lives both spatially and temporally alongside, but differently from, adults. Her research work has been funded by key research institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK; the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Academic Research Fund and the Global Asia Institute, both of the National University of Singapore; the Australian Research Council; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

A/P Skelton was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Children’s Geographies and has been the Viewpoints Editor since 2005 and became the Commissioning Editor for Asia in 2010. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Geoforum, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Geography Compass, and ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies (open access). She has coauthored 2 books, edited 3 collections, guest-edited 2 special journal issues, and published more than 70 journal articles and chapters. She is a passionate teacher and graduate supervisor. She is committed to the politics of research dissemination in accessible formats, in particular to enable the participants in her research projects to understand and recognize their coproduction of knowledge whether through specialized small-scale workshops, translation of reports into local languages, or production of audiovisual materials.