Apologies for cross-posting.

 

Final call for papers:

 

“Children and young people's health geographies: new perspectives, approaches and admissible knowledges”

 

Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference: 26^th-28^th August 2009, Manchester.

 

Session co-sponsored by the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Working Group and the Geographies of Health Research Group

 

Session convenors: Natalie Beale (Durham University) and Jo Pike (University of Hull)

 

Over recent years, children’s bodies have become increasingly subjected to medical and policy gazes with a myriad of interventions aimed at averting potential public health crises. Reflecting some of these current priorities, health geographers have engaged with concepts such as obesogenic environments to suggest how space is implicated in the production and maintenance of ‘health’. Moreover, the concomitant emergence of children’s geographies as a distinct sub-disciplinary area indicates a broader geographical interest in issues relating to children and young people. Yet, despite the huge media and policy interest in children and young people’s health and well-being, there has generally been little crossover between children’s geographies and health geographies.  Whilst a small number of geographers have begun to explore children’s and young people’s health in connection with specific issues such as school meals, exercise and obesity (Colls and Evans 2007; Pike 2008; Rawlins 2008) there is often a lack of dialogue across sub-disciplinary divides in relation to this theme.

 

This session aims to bring together work undertaken in different areas of the discipline to explore issues relating to the geographies of children and young people’s health and well-being.  Of additional interest are epistemological questions about the kinds of knowledge which do (not) ‘count’ when considering children and young people’s health, including the ways such knowledges are generated and represented, who they count for and how this affects their ‘admissibility’.  We welcome papers which address the following themes:

• Children and young people’s lived experiences and ways these impact upon physical and mental health and well-being.
• Relationships between environment (physical, material or social) and children and young people’s health and well-being.
• Ways of conceptualising or researching spatial and place-based aspects of children and young people’s health and well-being.
• The spaces through which children and young people’s beliefs and understandings about health are shaped, for example in relation to family life or education.
• Issues relating to belonging and identity and their impact upon children and young people’s health-related beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.
• The forms of knowledge which are admissible in medical, health and children’s geographies and the distinct contributions which geography as a discipline can make to knowledge about children and young people’s health and well-being.

 

Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent to both Natalie Beale ([log in to unmask]) and Jo Pike ([log in to unmask]) by 3^rd February 2009.