5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies

5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies
10-12 June 2015, Edinburgh (UK)
http://emotionalgeographiesconference.wordpress.com/

Session: Relational geographies of emotions/affects, childhood and youth

Convenors: Matej Blazek (Loughborough University, UK), John Horton (University of Northampton, UK), Peter Kraftl (University of Leicester, UK)

Abstracts are invited for a session exploring intersections between emotional/affective geographies and geographies of childhood and youth, with a focus upon theorising and exemplifying the multiple forms of relationality that might characterise those intersections.

Geographers working with children and young people have often researched and written about emotions and/or affects. Indeed, many ‘children’s geographers’ have also contributed significantly to the burgeoning transdisciplinary field of ‘emotional geographies’. For example, the work of children’s geographers has often been characterised by: an empirical focus upon children and young people’s emotional experiences of diverse everyday spaces; a sustained commitment to extending feminist, psychological, participatory, critical, hybrid, or nonrepresentational modes of thinking-writing-researching emotions and affects; and a critical concern with normative, emotive constructs of childhood and youth (as loved (‘angels’) or despised (‘devils’); as feared or feared-for; as cared-for or cared about; as loci for contemporary societal hopes and panics).

In this session, we seek to develop the focus on relationality in emotional and affective geographies of children and youth, building on Bondi’s (2005) seminal paper and later work on geographies of emotions and affect, within and outside the sub-field of children’s geographies (Blazek and Windram-Geddes 2013). In this context, we would welcome proposals for papers (15 minutes duration) from diverse conceptual positions and international contexts, which address one or more of the following themes and explore intersections between emotions/affect and childhood/youth and between work on ‘children’s’ and ‘emotional’ geographies:

·       Relationalities of emotions/affects, cognition and practices (e.g. Blazek 2013);

·       More-than-human and more-than-social relationalities of emotions/affects (e.g. Kraftl 2013);

·       Adults’ emotions towards children, and/or vice versa (e.g. Philo 2011);

·       The articulation of emotions and/or affective atmospheres in the design, control and manipulation of spaces of/for childhood (e.g. Kraftl and Adey 2008);

·       The importance of emotions/affects in constituting (bio)politics of/for childhood (e.g. Lee 2013);

·       The deployment of emotions/affects in attempts to oppose, subvert, twist or produce childhoods ‘other’ to perceived mainstreams (with particular emphasis upon child-adult affiliations);

·       The processual and sociotechnical constitution of emotions/affects;

·       Emotions/affects and power relations, exclusions, regulations and governmentality in children’s and young people’s lives (e.g. Gagen 2014);

·       Ways of relating: methodological and conceptual innovation in articulating relational emotions/affects (including cross-disciplinary collaborations);

·       Temporality and ongoingness of emotions/affects in relation to growing up, young (age)ing, family or intergenerationality (e.g. Horton and Kraftl 2006);

·       Emotional geographies of familial relations (e.g. Harker and Martin 2012), friendships (Bunnell et al 2012) or popular (sub-)cultural identities (Horton 2012);

·       Relational dynamics of emotional and/or affecting experiences of fieldwork relating to childhood and youth (e.g. Horton 2008, Hadfield-Hill and Horton 2014).

Please send abstracts (300 words max) by 11^th November 2014 to all three convenors:

Matej Blazek: m.blazek@lboro.ac.uk

John Horton: john.horton@northampton.ac.uk

Peter Kraftl: pk123@leicester.ac.uk

References:

Blazek, M (2013) Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking–doing children's emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 24-32.

Blazek, M and Windram-Geddes, M (2013) Editorial: Thinking and doing children's emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 1-3

Bondi, L. (2005) Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(4), 433-448.

Bunnell, T., Yea, S., Peake, L., Skelton, T., Smith (2012) Geographies of friendships. Progress in Human Geography 30(4), 490-507.

Gagen, E.A. (2014) Governing emotions: citizenship, neuroscience and the education of youth. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, early view.

Hadfield-Hill, S., Horton, J. (2013) Children’s experiences of participating in research: emotional moments together. Children’s Geographies, 12(2), 135-153.

Harker, C., Martin, L. L. (2012) Familial relations: spaces, subjects, and politics. Environment and Planning A, 44(4), 768-775.

Horton, J. (2008) A ‘sense of failure’? Everydayness and research ethics. Children’s Geographies 6(4), 363-383.

Horton, J. (2012) ‘Got my shoes, got my Pokémon': spaces of children's popular culture. Geoforum 43(1), 4-13.

Horton, J., Kraftl, P. (2006) Not just growing up, but going on: children’s geographies as becomings; materials, spacings, bodies, situations. Children’s Geographies, 4(3), 259-276.

Kraftl, P. (2013) Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 13-23.

Kraftl, P., Adey, P. (2008) Architecture/affect/dwelling.  Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 98(1), 213-231.

Lee, N. (2013) Childhood and Biopolitics: Climate Change, Life Processes and Human Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Philo, C. (2011) Foucault, sexuality and when not to listen to children. Children’s Geographies, 9(2), 123-127.