Call for papers - RGS-IBG 2018: "Geographies of Institutionalised Childhood"
Session Organisers: Tom Disney (University of Birmingham, Northumbria University) and Anna Schliehe (University of Cambridge)
The everyday micro-scale worlds, materialities, subjectivities and mobilities of childhood and youth have long been of interest to geographers (Horton and Kraftl 2006), yet, extant research in this area has often focussed on somewhat ‘mainstream’ childhoods from minority world contexts. What of those children deemed ‘problematic’ or in need of care and correction? Many children and young people are subject to institutional interventions that seek to ‘‘design’ and ‘produce’ particular and improved versions’ (Philo and Parr 2000: 513) of their everyday, which is markedly different from the ‘mainstream’. For example, in England last year over 50,000 children were subject to child protection plans, over 70,000 were in residential care (DfE 2016) and over 1000 were experiencing Young Offenders Institutes (MoJ 2017). Such significant interventions see children and young people’s worlds shaped and remade by statutory services. These attempts and techniques can be traced to the ‘traditional’ institutions that seek to alter problematic behaviour, such as prisons, asylums and orphanages, but also ‘institutions’ now operating in a more ‘dispersed spatial form’ that have yet to be addressed. Examples of which might be young people receiving care from children’s services or mental health care at home and in the community. In short, there is a geography of institutionalised childhoods that requires our attention.
In this session we want to focus on children and young people as an under-researched subgroup within carceral geography while also building on research from other disciplines. This CfP seeks to shed light on the everyday worlds of children experiencing significant interventions, both in ‘traditional’ institutions and those that might be understood to be operating in a ‘dispersed spatial form’.
We invite papers from all disciplinary backgrounds that seek to engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics and areas:
- Young people’s experiences of confinement
- More dispersed forms of institutional interventions
- Experiences of residential care
- Young people’s carceral mobilities
- Health environments like hospitals and mental health care
- The family/home as an institutional environment
- Children’s services
- School as an institutional setting
Please send abstracts of max 200 words, giving names, institutional affiliation and contact details for authors/presenters, to Anna ([log in to unmask]) or Tom ([log in to unmask]) by no later than Friday the 9th of February 2018.
This session is sponsored by the Carceral Geography Working Group.
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