Geography and Social Justice in the Classroom

Todd W. Kenreich, Todd W. Kenreich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136196515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

The rise of critical discourses in the discipline of geography has opened up new avenues for social justice. Geography and Social Justice in the Classroom brings together contemporary research in geography and fresh thinking about geography's place in the social studies curriculum. The book's main purposes are to introduce teachers and teacher educators to new research in geography, and to provide theoretical and practical examples of geography in the curriculum.

The book begins with the premise that power and inequality often have spatial landscapes. With the tools and concepts of geography, students can develop a critical geographic literacy to explore the spatial expressions of power in their lives, communities, and the wider world. The first half of the book introduces new research in the field of geography on diverse topics including the social construction of maps as instruments of power and authority. The second half of the book turns the readers' attention to geography in the P-12 classroom, and it highlights how geography can enable teachers and students to explore issues of power and social justice in the classroom. Through critical geographic literacy, educators can boldly position themselves and their students as advocates for a more just world.

Part I

Contemporary Research in Geography

1 The Relational Turn and the Political Geographies of Youth

Fernando J. Bosco

Theoretical developments in human geography in the last three decades have led to new understandings of the relations between space and society. Drawing from feminist, post-structural, postcolonial, and nonrepresentational perspectives and from critical methodologies that highlight the importance of positionality and reflexivity, contemporary human geographers lay much emphasis on the relations and interconnections between geographical and social, cultural, political, and economic difference. In this chapter, I focus both on such relations and differences in order to approach the ways in which research in human geography theorizes and analyzes the geographical worlds of youth and the role that children and young adults play in the making of geographically differentiated worlds. My discussion draws from the literature in the now well-established sub-discipline of children’s geographies. Specifically, I pay attention to the ways in which children and young adults—through their play, their work, their doings, their agency—become active agents in political and social processes and to how they create space-society relations that bring about change.

I begin by describing human geography’s turn to relational thinking in terms of key concepts such as space and place. The relational turn has had important implications for geographic research, so I connect some of those ideas with geographers’ concerns with difference, specifically with the ways in which different types of social relations come together across space. My goal is to elaborate on the ways in which children and young adults, through their differences and their own competence, construct political and social geographies that until recently were not recognized or valued. I argue that it is because of the turn to relational thinking and because of geographers’ attention to (and recognition of) the value of difference that we can better understand how youth geographies are crucial to understanding and creating social change. To support these arguments, I draw from the contemporary literature on children’s geography and from some of my own empirical research on young people’s participation and civic involvement in Argentina and on children’s political activism with their families and communities along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Human Geography and the Relational Turn

The relational turn in conceptualizations of space-society relations does not have a single origin or theoretical orientation, but it has occupied an important place in geographic thinking in the last decades. Doreen Massey’s (1991) original formulation of an open sense of place and its associated “power geometries” was an important statement in early relational thinking. David Harvey’s (1996) argument about places being processes that are themselves the products of relations between various kinds of entities is another good example of thinking about geography in a relational manner. Doreen Massey’s work on relational thinking reached theoretical maturity in her most recent book (2005) in which she argued for the definitive importance of relational space as an organizing concept in human geography. Pushing relational thinking further, Massey comes to define places not just as constellations of differently positioned social relations but also as “integrations of space-time,” or “spatio-temporal events” that are persistently transgressed (p. 130). Similar relational understandings of place and space are also represented in the work of other human geographers such as Murdoch (2006), who draws from different post-structural theories to argue that geographers should pay attention to the geographies that emerge out of the interactions of different kinds of entities, but also to the “spaces that do not emerge, to the sets of relations that fail to gain any kind of spatial coherence” (p. 20). For geographers, space and place have become more fleeting and emergent but not less important to uncovering many different geographies.

By adopting such relational thinking, human geographers have been advancing open and dynamic understandings of traditional geographic concepts. Rather than seeing places as bounded locations or simply as points on a map as is often the case, human geographers today understand places as particular locales where a multitude of spatially diffused social networks come together; such social networks, in turn, are tied to political, economic, and cultural processes that can occur in different locations simultaneously, and often such processes have global reach. As a result of this view, places themselves retain unique characteristics that help localized geographical differences endure, but places are also very much connected to space-society relations that often transcend the local.

For example, a city like San Diego in California is still very different from a city like Columbus in Ohio, but in both places we can now find cityscapes that are increasingly characterized by Latino cultures—from the street foods available to spontaneous soccer games in public spaces, bilingual or Spanish-only advertisements in buses and billboards, and specialty stores and even whole neighborhoods that cater to Latino communities. Each city retains its own characteristics—San Diego is still associated with surf, sun, and laidback California lifestyles, and Columbus is a place still associated with some farming and the service industry—what many might call a typical Midwestern city—but the growing Latino landscapes in both places have made the experience of city life a bit more similar in these places. At the same time, the villages, towns, and cities in Mexico, Central America, and perhaps beyond—places that are the points of origin for the networks of Latino migrants that today crisscross the Americas—have also changed. In some way, those places are becoming more similar to San Diego or to Columbus. For example, as a result of remittances (money that migrants in the U.S. send back to their home places), new housing and housing styles have shown up next to more traditional homes in neighborhoods in Latin America, satellite antennas bring globalized media and global North television programs to the global South, and family members and friends on different points of the globe stay in touch on a daily basis through phone and Internet connections. Yet, these same villages, towns, and cities still retain unique characteristics that make them different from other places. What is happening, as Massey (1991) argues, is that “what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (p. 28). What we have, as Massey and others argue, is an open (and global) sense of place.

These are obvious, mundane things and characteristics about the landscapes of cities and the daily life of places we do not think about too much every day. We have all become used to them, and they are simple reminders of the ways in which some important relations between space and society achieve different geographical expression at different times and in different places. This is part of what the relational turn in human geography emphasizes. Places are still unique, but they are not bounded; they are open, dynamic, and the result of ongoing changes in the relations between space and society at large, of the stretching and reconfiguring of social relations across space. We can continue thinking in relational terms and imagine, for example, that neighborhoods are nodes in networks that gather cultural flows and juxtapose diversity. We can also think of cities as switching points in connected (and sometimes overlapping) larger urban and regional networks. We can think of places (neighborhoods, cities, and so on) as perforated entities with connections that stretch far back in time and space and that continually change composition, character, and reach. This way of thinking about place, then, is, as Massey (2005) puts it, “the event of place . . . the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing” (p. 141).

In sum, adopting a relational perspective allows us to see geography and spatiality as the products of different configurations of social relations and connections. The implications of thinking along these lines go beyond the redefinition of traditional geographic concepts. Recognizing that space and society constitute each other through a myriad of entanglement also invites new ways of critically thinking about the connections between geography, power, and difference (Sharp, Routledge, Philo, & Paddison, 2000). Focusing on entanglements of different places, of different actors, and of power allows for investigations of new geographies, because, as Murdoch (2006) argues, “relationalism opens up geography to dynamic and complex processes of change” (p. 4). One such way of thinking about processes of change is to consider how children and young adults are active agents in the creation of new geographies as they participate and get involved in broader networks of social relations in different places. Bringing youth geographies into the picture is another way to understand how different configurations of diverse social relations across space redefine and change our world, and it is a way to expand our understanding of the relational turn in human geography.

Children and Young Adults as Geographical Actors

Children’s geography emerged out of the need to consider the geographical experiences of those considered not yet adults. Earlier geographical work on children often documented spatial patterns of phenomena that related to children and youth or focused on children’s mapping or perceptual abilities (Aitken, 2006), but did not take children to be active agents in the construction of differentiated geographical worlds. Contemporary geographic work, conversely, places children “at the center of our understanding of consumption, production and reproduction, and at the heart of the inequities generated by globalization” (Aitken, 2004, p. 579). In other words, children’s geography today engages research on children and young adults with wider conceptual and intellectual concerns that enable constructive ways of understanding children’s lives and the world around them (Horton & Kraftl, 2006).

One of the key characteristics of work by contemporary children’s geographers is that it understands children and young adults as competent and influential social and geographic actors. For example, in research that analyzed the mutual constitution of children’s online and offline environments, geographers Valentine and Holloway (2002) demonstrate that in contemporary Western societies, children exert their own agency through their use of new information technologies such as the Internet and other connected or social video games. By mixing and blurring their virtual and concrete worlds into milieus that contribute to reconfigurations of their own identities, children construct and change their own social contexts; in turn, children also incorporate such reconfigured identities into the lived geographies they create in the world around them.

Moreover, geographers have shown that children and young adults often take on adult responsibilities and mix them with more “childlike” activities such as playing (see, for example, Aitken, 2001; Aitken, Estrada, Jennings, & Aguirre, 2006; Barker, 2003; Jeffrey & Dyson, 2008; Kallio, 2008; Robson & Ansell, 2000). In the process, children and young adults also obtain a growing sense of self-esteem. For example, geographer Cindi Katz (2004) explores the political dimensions and implications of children’s work and play through her comparative account of the disintegrative effects of contemporary economic development and restructuring in a village in Sudan and in New York City. Notable in her work are explanations of the ways in which children become social actors in that very same process of restructuring and development through their resilience, their reworking of adults’ activities, and their resistance. Katz (2004) analyzes the relations between children’s work and play to uncover the ways in which children play with things such as “power, control, symbol, gesture and routine while being absorbed by their creative projects, social interplay and imagination of mastery” (p. 97). Katz’s project is ultimately about unearthing the political dimensions and implications of some of the mundane tasks that children do in order to locate practices that under certain conditions might break down hegemony. These examples show that by finding similarities and commonalities between the work and play of different children in different places, or by looking at the ways in which relations formed in both virtual and lived worlds have tangible effects on the daily lives of children, geographers have been able to bring broader arguments regarding the relational characteristics of space and place to better understand the different ways in which children are competent social actors.

Other lines of research in children’s geography also look at young people’s competency in a variety of adult domains. Of particular importance is work that examines youth political participation and community and civic involvement. For example, some geographers have been critical of well-intended efforts to include young people in community planning and in community decision-making programs because such efforts are often planned by adults without considering young people as one of the main drivers for community and social change. As Matthews and Limb (2003) found out in their study of young people’s participation in youth councils in the United Kingdom, strategies to incorporate the voices of youth in community politics and policy often “end up se...