This paper examines how preschool children and teachers engage in environmental noticings of mundane phenomena (e.g., bird, spider web) during group walks outdoors. Drawing on over 100 hours of audiovisual recordings from preschools in Sweden and Japan, it uses multimodal conversation analysis to examine how such noticings are accomplished through talk, gesture, and movement. Rather than treating noticing as an internal cognitive process, we conceptualize it as a publicly organized practice through which participants draw one another's attention to features of their surroundings. The analysis shows that environmental noticings involve several interactional practices, including descriptive elaboration, confirming that others perceive the same features, and extending the interaction beyond the immediate scene. Through these practices, children and teachers attend to, characterize, and make sense of both human and non-human elements of their surroundings. We argue that environmental noticings constitute an important interactional vehicle through which children's social and emotional engagement with the environment is accomplished in everyday pedagogical mobility. By foregrounding the interactional organization of noticing during preschool walks, the study contributes to children's geographies by demonstrating how relations to environments are produced in situ through embodied, mobile interaction.
Neoliberal globalisation has extended its influence to interior regions as new sites for Capital accumulation, yet youth studies have largely overlooked the experiences and subjective formation of young migrants who relocate from metropolitan centres to these areas. This paper addresses this gap by examining Chinese rural young adults who first migrate from their home village to major cities for education and employment, and later move to a smaller interior city for settlement. Drawing on ethnographic research in Xiaogan, a prefecture-level city in interior China, the study explores how the interplay between familism, neoliberal discourse of subjectivity, and socioeconomic restructuring - driven by the increased investments in peripheral areas - shapes young people's aspirations and migration strategies. The findings reveal that well-educated rural migrants' transition to adulthood and subjectivity formation involve ongoing migration to construct their future selves in relation to urban middle-class ideals and family expectations. While rapid urbanisation and improved public services in smaller cities facilitate smoother transitions to adulthood, these cities' subordinate positions within China's spatial hierarchy present dilemmas in migratory decision-making. The analysis highlights the ambivalent status of interior cities within neoliberal investment politics and their influence on mobile youth's subjectivity and adulthood transitions in the globalised economy.
Research has examined the role of national parks in rural areas under colonial conditions and explored their role as mechanisms for masking territorial control, displacement, and dispossession. This article aims to shift the focus to urban green spaces. It investigates the proliferation of playgrounds as infrastructural tools of settler-colonial urbanism through a genealogical approach. Focusing on Jaffa - a historically Palestinian city within Israel currently undergoing neoliberal urban regeneration - the article traces the histories and developments of the playgrounds' spaces. The findings show that they not only obscure past processes of dispossession and displacement but also function as biop instruments in the present and toward a settler-colonial future. These playgrounds inscribe socio-political distinctions into the urban fabric, delineating whose lives are to be nurtured, whose future is to be envisioned, and whose presence is taken as superfluous.
This paper examines how poo unsettles pedagogical logics and reconfigures more-than-human relations in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Based on multispecies ethnography in a forest kindergarten in Guangzhou, China, it follows three fragments where ducklings and children became entangled through excrement. First, the smell of duck poo-oriented children's movements and naming. Calling the animals 'poopoo-ducklings', they turned excrement into a sensory marker of both duckness and place. Second, feeding practices linked children, teachers, grass, bowls, and ducklings' bodies, yet poo reappeared as diarrhoea, exposing care as uncertain. Third, the death of a duckling made poo a material witness to the limits of care, generating uneven responses among children, teachers, and researcher. Together, these fragments show that poo is not marginal waste but an active participant in children's geographies. It interrupts teaching, reshapes place, and challenges the assumption that care is always benevolent or successful. Centring excrement as both bodily product and spatial marker, the article expands children's geographies of poo by foregrounding how everyday materials shape sensory experience, care, and ethics in ECEC.
This article introduces the special issue on collaboratories. Collaboratories create spaces for collaborative experimentation with children, generating vital opportunities not only for exchange and networking but also for speculation and inquiry as we compose and nurture conditions that respond to the question of what it means to live ethically in situated common worlds. Drawing on our work within the Common Worlds Research Collective, this introduction outlines three key assumptions that inform collaboratories' practices.
The dominant narratives of family restructuring often privilege the voice of the remarried parents. This study shifts the focus to young adult children, exploring how they employ spatial and relational tactics to navigate everyday tensions with stepparents and reconfigure their senses of home. Conducted over twelve weeks with twenty-three participants aged 17-22, the research adopted a three-phase qualitative design that combined biographical interviews, visual mapping and photo-elicitation. Findings reveal that participants create distributed 'homescapes', which refer to assemblages of places, relationships, objects and practices (e.g. friends' rooms, grandparents' homes, malls, temporary hotel stays) to sustain psychological well-being and manage emotional strain within restructured families. These tactics, encompassing acts of relocating, affiliating and returning, illustrate how home is reconfigured across multiple spatial and relational sites. By foregrounding children's voices, this study offers a psycho-spatial perspective on homemaking that highlights agency, care and cultural values of rukun (harmony) and berbakti (filial devotion) in navigating the complexities of remarried family life.
This article examines the media representation of state violence against children in Ecuador, focusing on the Malvinas case in which four minors were executed by the armed forces in 2024. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of major national newspapers (El Comercio, El Universo, El Mercurio, La Hora, Primicias, GK, Extra and Expreso), the study investigates how childhood was discursively constructed in news coverage and how narratives framed the abuse of military power. Findings reveal that the press oscillated between two competing logics: a securitized discourse that depicted the victims as collateral damage within a 'war on crime,' and a human rights - oriented discourse that foregrounded children as rights-bearing subjects and denounced the military's actions as crimes against humanity. Across outlets, children's lives and identities often remained invisible, with coverage emphasizing their deaths over their existence as individuals with families, aspirations and social belonging. This selective visibility contributed to the symbolic marginalization of childhood. The article argues that media discourse is not neutral: it either legitimizes state violence through euphemism or challenges impunity by naming abuse of power. By analyzing these dynamics, the study highlights the ethical responsibility of journalism in protecting children's dignity in contexts of structural violence.
This paper documents the analysis of qualitative data, collected from focus groups and interviews with diverse young people ages 18-24 from across Canada. It analyzes the spectrum of emotions surrounding their perceptions and experiences of what constitutes youth-led climate activism and their understanding of participatory involvement in climate activism. Findings from the qualitative data reveal the complexities associated with the intersectional realities of youth-led climate activism across Canada. The participants' insights prompt nuanced discussions about the influence of individual, interpersonal, and structural contexts on their understandings of voice, participation, and engagement within youth climate activism. They also contribute to a critical examination of how youth-led activism is represented within the wider landscape of news and social media. The activists' viewpoints unveil the importance of understanding the impact of identities on activism to uncover a range of challenges associated with activism engagement, portrayal, representation, and with navigating the climate crisis. These sentiments reflect global contributions regarding: (1) the eclectic and diverse nature of youth-led climate activism, (2) the intersectionality of climate activism and youth's viewpoints/ experiences about activism, and (3) how adults can support this work.
Youth, embedded in street life in African cities, experience multiple daily and longer-term stressors which impact their socio-economic circumstances and capacities to meet their basic needs. Urban contexts of high unemployment, inequality, and poverty result in homeless youth, often with incomplete schooling, unable to secure a decent living through hustling in the informal economy, access safe spaces to sleep, nutritious food, and subject to violence or arrest. Yet, street youth are resilient, employing creative tactics to overcome challenges and build strategies for life endurance. This paper draws on 18 focus groups with 199 young people living on the streets in three diverse African cities to explore the nuances of their resilience. When exposed to significant stress, street youth mobilise relational, institutional, and contextual resources to be resilient. The paper, therefore, conceptualises resilience as a lived process that goes beyond traditional understandings of personal resilience, over space and time. Street youth 'lived resiliencies' are grounded in the social and economic fabric of cities and are deployed to overcome multiple difficulties. The paper concludes by translating co-responsibility for street youth lived resiliencies towards policy and practice communities.
In this article, we examine how children and youth reclaim space in adult-centered and adult-constructed settings. Using a spatial reclamation framework, this research explores how children and youth use their awareness of power dynamics to assert themselves to gain visibility. Using nexus analysis and narrative inquiry, we analyze embodied action and storytelling across children's actions on a public housing playground and youth's protesting practices at a rural community protest to show how children and youth disrupt discourses in place. Through this study, we encourage researchers to recognize how students are co-constructing social and spatial realities and problematize how our framing often centers adults.
