Geographies of Children, Young People and Education

Our research sub-theme brings together scholars working on the geographies of children, young people and education.  We work with and for children and young people across diverse communities.  Our work addresses the most pressing concerns facing today’s (and tomorrow’s) children – including social justice, environmental change, wellbeing, housing, play and education.  

Geographers have for several decades been interested in how societies create spatial rules for children. In particular, the young are deemed ‘out of place’ in public places whereas societies create other institutions – like schools – where children are ‘in place’. Similarly, there has been significant attention to the geographical aspects of childhood experience – how children move around, understand and feel about their (local) environments. Often, both of these phenomena are cross-cut by other factors, such as gender, class, ethnicity and disability, and so children’s geographers have sought to understand the complex, dynamic and contingent ways in which children engage with places.

A key concern underpinning our research on children, young people and education has been with the development of innovative conceptual and methodological approaches. Geographers at Birmingham have been at the forefront of nonrepresentational, new materialist, posthuman and neuro-geographical theories of childhood and education. They have also developed creative, participatory,  interdisciplinary and digital methods – from apps to arts-based interventions and from biological sampling to social media analyses – that have opened out new possibilities for exploring children’s voice, agency and participation about issues that matter to them.

Our work critically examines and impacts upon some of the most pressing questions facing today’s (and tomorrow’s) children. In the UK, India and Peru, we explore children and young people’s experiences of living in urban places, and especially new urban forms like masterplanned towns. Our work in this area continues to impact local, national and international policies and practices for urban planning, education, health and wellbeing. In Brazil and South Africa we have been working on young people’s experiences of and adaptations to Covid. Across communities we have also been researching young people’s experiences of and learning about environmental challenges (from environmental resources to plastics and trees), resource insecurity and disaster risk reduction.  In Spain we are using participatory arts-based methods to explore young people’s emotional responses to climate change.

Over the last few years we have had PhD students work on diverse topics related to childhood and youth - including informal and outdoor forms of education; the mobilities associated with living in separated families; the emotions and aspirations of expectant fathers; identity, belonging and education in partition experienced communities in India; and young people’s experience of platform urbanism and smart cities in China.