Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of life

Abstract

Global transformations are rapidly altering people’s experiences of growing up. This report offers a comparative perspective on some of the challenges facing young children and youth across the world, focusing especially on young people’s practices in the fields of education and employment. The paper discusses conceptual frameworks for analyzing young people and evaluates these theoretical ideas through attention to interdisciplinary writing on educational restructuring, the privatization of school curricula, children’s work, and youth unemployment. The common predicaments or ‘vital conjunctures’ (Johnson-Hanks, 2002) of children and youth — for example, their inability to remain in formal schooling or experience of unemployment after leaving education — offers a basis for a globally comparative human geography attuned to the relationship between structural change and sociospatial marginalization.