Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies

1-3 July 2013 at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Session: Children’s Emotional Geographies: Practical and Policy Matters?
Session Organisers: Matej Blazek (Loughborough University, UK) and Peter Kraftl (University of Leicester, UK)

CALL FOR PAPERS:
A range of recent research by geographers and others has sought to foreground the emotional and affective geographies of children’s and young people’s lives. Often, this work has highlighted how emotion and affect provide a sense of ‘what matters’ to children and young people in ways that both resonate with, and extend beyond, other concerns (from emotions involved in participatory processes, to hopes and fears expressed with/in particular geo-political contexts). This session seeks to provide a forum in which scholars can expand thought, debate and practice about the ways in which children’s emotional geographies might matter. It begins with an assumption that emotional geographies do matter in policy and practice with children in a very wide range of geographical, historical and (non-)institutional contexts. It also seeks to question the ways in which emotions and affects are written-into particular policies and practices that are, implicitly or explicitly, produced and enacted on behalf of young people, including the modes of expression that research can use for communicating emotional geographies of children and young people. This session will provide a space for further and deeper conceptual, methodological as well as empirical engagement with emotions in relation to the policies and practices that actively shape children’s spatialities.


The session organisers invite papers on the following topics/themes, but this list is not exhaustive:
· methods, formats and strategies for communicating children’s emotional geographies to policy-makers and practitioners;

· the potential role of diverse media (e.g. Web 2.0 technologies) and techniques for communicating and representing the vibrancy of children’s emotional geographies to diverse audiences;

· critical reflections upon how, where and when children’s emotional or affective geographies might (or might not always) ‘matter’;

· the role of children’s emotional geographies in extending what is meant by the (public) ‘impact’ of academic research;

· the potential for collaborations between young people, academics, policy-makers and practitioners around emotions/affects that ‘matter’;

· (relational) emotions involved in professional work with young people (e.g. in youth work, (non)formal education contexts);

· emotions and affects in non-formal or ‘alternative’ spaces and institutions (e.g. alternative and informal education, activism, protest, intentional communities);the governance of children’s and young people’s emotional geographies, and articulations of emotion in and through discourses about young people (e.g. policy documents, websites, mass media, social networking sites);

· the conceptual differences between emotional geographies of children and adults and their practical implications in relation to policy and practice.

Please send an abstract of your paper or any other inquiries to Matej Blazek (m.blazek@lboro.ac.uk) and Peter Kraftl (pk123@leicester.ac.uk) beforeJanuary 11th, 2013. We are happy to consider alternative formats of contribution (e.g. short critical reflections). There will be videoconferencing facilities at the conference – feel free to get in touch should you be interested.

http://www.rug.nl/frw/onderzoek/emospa/index