Call for Chapters – Deadline 4^th May 2019

Title: Introducing young people to ‘unfamiliar landscapes’

Editors: 

Dr Thomas Aneurin Smith, School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University: [log in to unmask]

Dr Hannah Pitt, Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University: [log in to unmask]  

Dr Ria Ann Dunkley, School of Education, University of Glasgow: [log in to unmask] 

This new edited collection will explore how young people are introduced to ‘unfamiliar landscapes’. It seeks to unpack notions of landscapes as ‘unfamiliar’ to young people, to explore how certain young people may be ‘unfamiliar’ to or in particular landscapes, and how ‘unfamiliarity’ is encountered and experienced. Through exploring landscape unfamiliarity, this collection seeks to critically reflect on presupposed relationships between young people and landscapes, be these ‘natural’, ‘outdoor’, or heritage landscapes. The notion of unfamiliar landscapes is left deliberately open and contestable to provoke questioning of assumptions about young people’s relationships to these places.

‘Unfamiliar landscapes’ may include places young people are introduced to, voluntarily or otherwise, by a range of actors, often in the name of outdoor, environmental, geographical or historical education. They may be ‘unfamiliar’ as defined by young people themselves. Some young people may be defined as ‘unfamiliar’ in particular landscapes. Unfamiliar landscapes include green and blue spaces (Pitt 2018) that many young people cannot experience independently, or are discouraged from doing so. Unfamiliar landscapes may also include ‘grey’ or ‘dark’ landscapes, for example, with reference to ‘dark tourism’ (Dunkley 2007; Dunkley et al. 2011). The reasons behind this may be physical, including accessibility issues, lack of skills, for example, in traversing mountains, hills, forests and waterways. Meanwhile, places that may be considered familiar to young people, become unfamiliar when refashioned by educators into sites for formal or informal learning, about ecology, heritage or wellbeing. 

Some argue such landscapes only recently became ‘unfamiliar’ to many young people. There has been considerable societal concern around young people’s access to nature, and their freedoms to roam independently (Smith and Dunkley 2017). This has led to various claims about possible negative effects of ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (Louv 2008) on their wellbeing (Witten et al. 2013). Much of this concern focuses on children, rather than the more ‘difficult’ category of ‘youth’. Equally, such concern neglects the plethora of services and organisations (schools, youth service providers, the outdoor education sector, heritage educators and interpreters) that have long been introducing youngsters to unfamiliar landscapes. In the age of austerity and accountability these services find themselves under increasing pressure, with likely consequences for whether, how and where young people are introduced to unfamiliar landscapes. 

This edited collection will explore how introductions to ‘unfamiliar landscapes’ are caught in a number of contemporary tensions between youth, society, the environment, history and geographies and how young people navigate this terrain. It seeks perspectives from a diversity of young people and those who work with them.  We welcome chapters on the following themes:

Defining and unpacking the ‘unfamiliar’:

• How certain landscapes have come to be defined discursively and practically as ‘unfamiliar’ – by organisations, adults, and young people themselves – in contemporary or historic contexts.
• The sanctioning of contemporary landscapes as appropriate or otherwise for youth to engage with ‘nature’, ‘the outdoors’ and heritage, including norms and narratives around moral values. 
• Unfamiliarity as both ‘extra-ordinary’ and iconic, versus ‘undesirable’ or ordinary forms of the ‘unfamiliar’, and youthful landscapes ‘unfamiliar’ to adults. 

Unfamiliar bodies, skills and experiences:

• How groups of young people, often defined as less-represented groups in outdoor education and recreation (by social background, ethnicity, or geographical marginality), are ‘unfamiliar’ bodies in certain landscapes. 
• The ways that young people understand and experience introductions to unfamiliar landscapes.
• The acquisition of skills and techniques for acting, roaming and navigating in unfamiliar landscapes.
• Youngsters’ boredom, displeasure, exhaustion and vulnerability when introduced to the unfamiliar.

The organisation of the Unfamiliar 

• The role of youth organisations, professionals and volunteers, including relationships between these organisations and young people, in introductions to the ‘unfamiliar’.
• Austerity’s impacts on youth provision, repercussions for youth access to, and enskilling in, unfamiliar landscapes.
• The culture of accountability, evidencing, evaluation, and metrification, and the implications for youth provision working with and in unfamiliar landscapes.
• The ‘experience economy’ and the place of ‘unfamiliar landscapes’ within it.
• Interactions between spectacular and everyday experiences, including the long-term impacts of escapes to the unfamiliar. 

This collection will also contain a number of practitioner response chapters, in which experienced outdoor education practitioners will contribute reflective responses to a number of the research-led chapters, focusing on the implications for practice in outdoor education and learning.

Abstract Submission: 

Please send a 300-word abstract to Tom Smith ([log in to unmask]) by the 4^th of May 2019. 

Abstracts will be reviewed by the editorial team and we will reply to all authors by 31^st May 2019 with our decision for inclusion in the text. 

Any questions please do not hesitate to contact Tom Smith or any of the editorial team. 

References:

Dunkley, R. (2007) A shot in the dark? Developing a new conceptual framework for thanatourism, Asian Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 1(1), 54-63.

Dunkley, R., Morgan, N. and Westwood, S. (2011) Visiting the trenches: Exploring meanings and motivations in battlefield tourism, Tourism Management, 32(4), 860 - 868.Louv, R. (2008) Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
Pitt, H. (2018) Muddying the waters: what urban waterways reveal about bluespaces and wellbeing. Geoforum, 92, 161-170.

Smith, T. A. and Dunkley, R. A. (2018) Technology-Nonhuman-Child Assemblages: Reconceptualising Rural Childhood Roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16(3), 304-318.

Witten, K., R. Kearns, P. Carroll, L. Asiasiga, and N. Tava’e. (2013) New Zealand Parents’ Understandings of the Intergenerational Decline in Children’s Independent Outdoor Play and Active Travel. Children’s Geographies, 11 (2): 215–229.