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Deadline extend to Friday February 13th
CFP Emotional Geographies Conference
University of Edinburgh
10-12th June 2015
Affecting transitions: intergenerationality, place and emotions
Dr Lisa Procter, University of Sheffield
Dr Elizabeth Gagen, Aberystwyth University
These sessions seek to examine the intersections between intergenerational relationships, place and emotion during children and young people’s transitions. The sessions respond to growing attention to the effects of transitions
into, through, and out of, education across the social sciences (Ecclestone, Biesta and Hughes, 2009). An increasingly significant feature of policy is an assumption that transitions are likely to produce psycho-emotional vulnerability and therefore represent
a threat to young people’s wellbeing and development (see Ecclestone and Goodley 2014). In these sessions we hope to extend understandings of transition beyond the rhetoric of crisis points which suggest danger and vulnerability. Rather, building on life course
research in combination with recent insights on affect and emotions, our aim here is to examine transitions not as a problem to be solved, but as an entrance point into understanding children and young people’s embodied biographies. How can we draw on geographies
of affective states which might complicate linear time to rethink transitions as both continual
and staged? What role does geography play in mediating transitions – what kinds of places and sites mediate the emotional geographies of transitions? How is young people’s experience of transitioning constituted by their relationships with others? How
can these insights potentially inform the way we support young people’s experience of transitioning in all its variegated forms?
We welcome contributions on or beyond the following questions and concerns:
Locating transitions: where are the emotional geographies of transitions felt? How is transitioning experienced through different sites – classroom, corridor, dining room, street, youth
club, church, swimming pool, changing room, sports field, track, bedroom, bathroom, retail sites, food outlets? How do these locations affect the experience of transition?
Registering transition: how is transitioning experienced at the scale of the body? How do affective states constitute the experience of transition, and how are these states managed and
supported by institutions and families?
Continuities and discontinuities: how is the process of transitioning dispersed across the lifecourse? How do the temporal geographies which frequently narrate discussions of transition
affect the way young people perceive their biographies? Are there more fitting ways to capture the experience of transitioning?
Accumulation: How do the cumulative effects of everyday transitions and more momentous ruptures affect future transitions? What does one transition bring to another?
Please send enquiries to Elizabeth Gagen ([log in to unmask]) and/or Lisa Procter ([log in to unmask]) and abstracts by
Friday February 13th 2015
References
Ecclestone, K., Biesta, G. and Hughes, M. (2009) Transitions and Learning Through the Lifecourse. London: Routledge.
Ecclestone, K. and Goodley, D. 2014 (on-line) ‘Political and educational springboard or straitjacket?: theorising post/humanist subjects in an age of vulnerability’.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education