This article shares a postqualitative, new materialist approach to memory work and storytelling, foregrounding the entangled colonial histories embedded in water and landscape. With its life-giving properties, water is a vital matter through which we can rethink histories to connect with the more-than-human and decolonise ourselves. Using new materialism, we create a watery assemblage (images and text) to challenge our thinking around the colonial histories embedded in the waterscapes. We consider situated epistemologies that emerge through thinking with water, waterways, landscapes, humans, and the more-than-human. Vital materialism enables engagement with the shame, violence, and humiliation of colonisation and invasion. We trouble the histories of our childhoods to rewrite memories of the landscape. This post-qualitative convergence, read through childhood memory, enables us to consider the tensions of First Nations, colonial and postcolonial imprints on place and how we, as researchers, are transformed by this encounter. The initial recall of memory often carries a perspective of childhood innocence. Engagement with childhood memories, evoked through visual imagery, memory drawings, objects, and photographs, opens up tangible spaces to critically amplify ethical encounters with human and beyond human connections.
This article explores the connections between place, care and resilience through the everyday geographies of 'caregiving youth' (young carers) in Florida, USA. We draw from a multi-method, multi-year study of 48 caregiving youth, who support family or kin due to chronic illness, disability, age-related decline, and other conditions. Bringing together mapping and interview data on young people's experiences of place and emotion, we contribute a geographical, strengths-based approach to understanding caregiving youth resilience. Our study underscores resilience as spatial practice and process, and the ways young people control and construct spaces and places for rest and self-care. We find that caregiving youth navigate materialized spaces of recognition across daily routines, experiencing disparate places, such as home, school, and work, that can either support resilience or undermine it.
Research within interdisciplinary social sciences has recently focused on temporalities of contemporary lived experiences. This paper extends work in this field through exploring plural modes of routine, intense and interconnected everyday experiences of waiting within a national study of teenage wheelchair users in England. We consider ways in which waiting - whether in relation to things, materialities, mobilities or permission - is occasioned and intensified by intersecting ableisms. Through an exploration of teenage wheelchair users' articulations of waiting, we argue that many important conceptualisations of growing up and lifecourse transitions implicitly centre normative subjectivities. Teenage wheelchair users' diverse accounts of waiting challenge normative/ableist sub/disciplinary assumptions about growing up and lifecourse transitions. Their accounts demand recognition of, and reckoning with, diverse forms of youthful experiences and temporalities which have too often been absent or marginalised through previous studies and normative ways of working.
Risky play is important for children's health and development, but little is known about the prevalence of risky play among children in Canada. This study investigated the prevalence of total risky play and seven types of risky play at public playgrounds in Ontario, Canada. Naturalistic observations were conducted for 180 children between the ages of 18 months and 12 years old. Quantitative analysis indicated that risky play occurred in approximately 40% of observation intervals. Naturalized playgrounds were associated with a higher prevalence of total risky play, play with great height, and play near dangerous elements compared to traditional playgrounds. Caregiver supervision levels, neighborhood income, and children's age and gender were not statistically significant predictors of risky play prevalence.
