Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People

Tracey Skelton is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She was previously Professor of Critical Geographies at the University of Loughborough in the UK. The essential elements of her research career focus on people who are socially, politically, and intellectually excluded. Her early work focused on the Caribbean and issues of gender and racial inequality, feminist geographies, and methodological analysis. She has contributed to culture and development debates, particularly through her longitudinal research on the island of Montserrat. Recently, A/P Skelton returned to this field of scholarship through research with volunteers and host organizations in Cambodia as part of a major comparative and collaborative project on development partnerships. She was the principal investigator of a major comparative urbanism research project on the livability, sustainability, and diversity of four Asian cities: Busan in South Korea, Hyderabad in India, Kunming in China, and Singapore. A/P Skelton is a recognized international leader in the subdiscipline of children’s and young people’s geographies. In particular, her work has served to challenge the invisibility and marginalization of young people from geographic academic research at the same time as it has demonstrated the rich and varied ways in which young people live their lives both spatially and temporally alongside, but differently from, adults. Her research work has been funded by key research institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK; the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Academic Research Fund and the Global Asia Institute, both of the National University of Singapore; the Australian Research Council; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A/P Skelton was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Children’s Geographies and has been the Viewpoints Editor since 2005 and became the Commissioning Editor for Asia in 2010. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Geoforum; the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography; and Geography Compass. She has coauthored 2 books, edited 5 collections, guest-edited 2 special issues, and 2 special sections, and published more than 95 journal articles and chapters. She is a passionate teacher and graduate supervisor. She is committed to the politics of research dissemination in accessible formats, in particular to enable the participants in her research projects to understand and recognize their coproduction of knowledge whether through specialized small-scale workshops, translation of reports into local languages, or production of audiovisual materials.Dr. Stuart C. Aitken is June Burnett Chair and Distinguished Professor of Geography at San Diego State University, and Director of the research center Youth, Environment, Society and Space (YESS). His research interests include critical social theory, qualitative methods, film, children, families and communities, child rights, and youth activism. Stuart has worked with the UN on qualitative methods, child rights, and labor and migration issues. His previous books include Young People, Rights and Place (Routledge, 2018), The Ethnopoetics of Space: Young People’s Engagement, Activism and Aesthetics (Ashgate, 2016), The Fight to Stay Put (Steiner Verlag, 2013), Young People, Border Spaces and Revolutionary Imaginations (Routledge, 2011), Qualitative Geographies (Sage, 2010), The Awkward Spaces of Fathering (Ashgate, 2009), Global Childhoods (Routledge, 2008), Geographies of Young People (Routledge, 2001), Family Fantasies and Community Space (Rutgers University Press, 1998), and Place, Space, Situation and Spectacle (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994). He has published over 250 research papers, essays, and reviews in academic journals as well as in various edited book collections and encyclopedias. Stuart is past coeditor of The Professional Geographer and Children’s Geographies.

• Affective geo-visualization and children: Representing the embodied and emotional geographies of children.- An Aporia to Theory.- Approaching Child and Youth Geographies through Darwin.- Babies and their Spacialities: Contributions to Studies of Babies.- Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era.- Children’s Emotional and Affective Geographies.- Engaging with Bourdieu: A Review of the Utilisation of Bourdieu within Children’s Geographies.- Foucault, Mischievous Children and Unruly Geographies.- Geographies of Architecture, Children’s Geographies and Nonrepresentational Theory.- Geographies of Child Labour and Children's Work.- Geographies of Education: Context, Case and Future Directions.-     Geographies of Youth Religiosity and Spirituality.- Illustration, Challenge or Alternative Perspective: Global South Research and the New Social Studies of Childhood.- Intergenerational Geographies in Theory and Practice.-     Internationalization of Education: Key Developments and Debates.- Living in the Space Between: Object-Relations Psychoanalysis and the Geography of Subjective Experience.- Paradoxes of Young People's Political Participation.- Play and Playgrounds in Children's Geographies.- Social Reproduction and the Shifting Geographies of Children and Childhood.-       Spinoza and the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect.- Taking Seriously Everyday Life Inquiry : Youth Participatory Action Research & Theory.- The Political Geography of the ‘Best Interest of the Child’.- Theorizing Children's Political Agency.- Zero Tolerance for Millennials: Care, Violence and the Development of Young People’s and Children’s Geographies.