Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
30
result(s) for
"Kraftl, Peter"
Sort by:
Building an idea: the material construction of an ideal childhood
This paper explores how ideas and ideals are constructed. More specifically, it follows how ideas and ideals of 'childhood' are constructed. Still more specifically, it attends to the ways in which idea(l)s of childhood are literally and materially constructed, in, through and as part of practices such as the building and maintenance of architectural forms. I argue that most studies of childhood largely ignore the importance of local, banal, ephemeral, mundane, material practices - often involved in the very constitution and performance of spaces - which are hugely significant to the construction of idea(l)s like childhood. By adopting a 'critical geographical' approach to the daily life of an alternative school in Pembrokeshire, in the United Kingdom, I demonstrate how particular arrays of usually un-noticed practices are involved in the construction, constitution and evocation of idea(l)s like childhood.
Journal Article
Informal education, childhood and youth : geographies, histories, practices
This collection of original chapters brings together cutting-edge research on informal education - that is, learning practices that emphasise dialogue and learning through everyday life. For the first time, it highlights the way in which geography matters to informal education practices.
Book
Alter-Childhoods: Biopolitics and Childhoods in Alternative Education Spaces
In this article, I consider \"alter-childhoods\": explicit attempts to imagine, construct, talk about, and put into practice childhoods that differ from perceived mainstreams. I critically examine alter-childhoods at fifty-nine alternative education spaces in the United Kingdom. I analyze alternative education spaces through the lens of biopolitics, developing nascent work in children's geographies and childhood studies around hybridity and biopower. I focus on two key themes: materialities and (non)human bodies; intimacy, love, and the human scale. Throughout the analysis, I offer a limited endorsement of the concept of alter-childhoods. Although there exist many attempts to construct childhoods differently, the \"alternative\" nature of those childhoods is always muddied, complicated, and dynamic. Thus, the concept of alter-childhoods is useful for examining the biopolitics of childhood and for children's geographers more generally-but only when considered as a critical tool and questioning device.
Journal Article
Towards geographies of 'alternative' education: a case study of UK home schooling families
In this paper, I argue for the development of geographies of 'alternative' education. In light of growing geographical interest in education, I argue for a focus on sites that explicitly offer non-mainstream, non-state-sanctioned forms of learning in contexts where it is assumed that children will go to school. I exemplify my discussion through interviews with 30 UK-based homeschooling families. In seeking to advance geographical research on education, I make three key contributions. First, I exemplify how focusing on learning itself – and not just spatial contexts for learning – uncovers how spatial experiences and discourses are key to the constitution of alternative educational practices like homeschooling. Second, I consider the multiple and contradictory ways in which homeschooling constituted an 'alternative' educational space, discuss whether and how geographers should seek to affirm (all) such spaces and attend to some of the potential political/moral dilemmas that are provoked by the place of emotion in homeschoolers' accounts. Third, I outline briefly some implications of this paper for further research on geographies of education, and family/inter-generational relations.
Journal Article
Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings
Architectural design operates beyond symbolic and representational interpretation. Drawing on recent \"nonrepresentational\" geographies, we demonstrate how architectural space can be rethought through the concept of affect. We explore how individual buildings and their architects preconfigure, limit, and engender particular affects to accomplish very particular goals. Our analysis is based on two buildings in the United Kingdom: an ecological school and an airport. We demonstrate how affects both enable and constrain practices such as teaching, playing, and relaxing that render different buildings as uniquely meaningful places. The affects designated to and by these buildings are indispensable to the specification of particular styles of inhabitation, in ways not previously considered by architectural geographers.
Journal Article
Theorising cohortness: (Mis)Fitting into student geographies
This paper advances a theory of \"cohortness\" for understanding the experience and articulation of identities. Using a case study focusing on higher education students, we argue that thinking in terms of cohorts enables an alternative way to examine how people perform, feel, and express their subjectivities collectively, especially within institutional spaces. Our analysis is based on an ongoing research-education project, which ran over five years and involved over 250 undergraduate students at a post-1992 UK university. The project involved large groups of students engaging in an exercise on \"mis/fitting,\" which encouraged them to articulate (as individuals and groups) which identities it was \"easy\" to perform/hold/display as students, and which it was not. The project also involved a range of subsequent reflective discussions with each group. Our data provide striking insights into how year groups produce \"cohortness\" in different ways and across intersecting scales. In this paper, we focus on three key themes, which are underpinned by an often ambivalent articulation of contemporary neoliberal ideals: mixtures of deliberation and chance in the production of in-class, microspatial, intertextual dialogues; the intersection of norms and commonalities in the naming of some identity groups (such as sporting interests) and hiding of others (such as fandom); and the significance of personality, performative, and/or bodily traits compared with other aspects of identity.
Journal Article
Editorial introduction: Revisiting Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson's 'New directions in cultural geography'
This editorial introduction provides an overview of this 'Classics Revisited' section. The section focuses on a seminal paper by Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson (Area, 19, 95–101) that sought to bring social and cultural geographies into greater and more productive dialogue, in particular around ideas of landscape, resistance and social difference. This introductory piece explains the rationale behind choosing this paper as an Area 'Classic', provides an overview of the key arguments of the original articles and briefly summarises the five reflective pieces that follow.
Journal Article
What are alternative education spaces - and why do they matter?
This article examines alternative education spaces: schools and other sites that offer children an explicit alternative to attending mainstream school in the United Kingdom. It is situated within burgeoning, diverse work on 'geographies of education', key approaches to which are outlined in the article. Subsequently, research undertaken at 59 alternative education spaces is used to exemplify how geographers examine both what happens 'within' and 'beyond' the school walls, at different spatial scales. The article offers an overview of a range of geographical (and other) processes that make alternative education spaces 'alternative', which includes their financing and physical layout, as well as their ultimate social and educational aims. Brief case studies from two learning spaces are offered to bring these processes to life. In so doing, the article prompts consideration of why alternative education spaces might matter - both to geographers and to the wider world.
Journal Article
