Sarah Holloway

Loughborough University | Lough · Department of Geography

Geographies of Children, Youth and Families is flourishing, but its founding conceptions require critical reflection. This paper considers one key conceptual orthodoxy: the notion that children are competent social actors. In a field founded upon liberal notions of agency, we identify a conceptual elision between the benefits of studying agency and...

Education researchers have explored the marketisation of schools resulting from neoliberal education policy, but little attention has been paid to supplementary education markets. Supplementary education services, such as private tuition, are delivered outside of school but designed to improve performance within it. A small body of research demonst...

Geographic research on neoliberalism has explored the restructuring of educational landscapes wrought through marketisation of preschool, school and higher‐education provision and considered the responsibilisation of parents and children for educational outcomes. This study develops understanding of the contingent emergence of neoliberal educationa...

Entrepreneurship is regarded by policy makers and politicians as an accelerant for economic development. Economic geography demonstrates that rather than stimulating entrepreneurship in general, policy makers should support specific forms of entrepreneurship that fuel wider growth. The paper's original contribution is to insist that entrepreneurshi...

This paper rethinks geographical approaches to children's play in the Global North. One narrowly conceived strand of past research considered the erosion of outdoor free play, but overlooked children's views of alternative play environments (e.g., out‐of‐school activities). A separate thread examined the feminisation of employment and growth in chi...

This paper makes two contributions to knowledge. First, it broadens geographies of education's focal reach by concentrating attention on the consumption of supplementary education. Supplementary education markets are booming as parents seek to ensure their children have the qualifications required to succeed in knowledge economies. The paper elucid...

AZUSA KURIBAYASHI´s Japanese translation for the journal Geographical Sciences of the original article KUČEROVÁ, S. R., HOLLOWAY, S., JAHNKE, H. (2020): The institutionalization of the geography of education: An international perspective. Journal of Pedagogy, 11(1), 13–34, https://doi.org/10.2478/jped-2020-0002

This paper provides a critical overview of scholarship on the geographies of education. The article explores some of the key roots, linguistic traditions and conceptual underpinnings of what has become a burgeoning and diverse area of scholarship. It emphasises the different subdisciplinary areas to which research on geographies of education has co...

The geography of education is a young field of research. This article makes two innovative contributions to knowledge about the evolution of this body of work. First, it presents a threefold history of the field, delineating distinct phases in its development. Second, it draws out both linkages across, and disparities between, geographies of educat...

Neoliberal educational discourse across the Global North is marked by an increasing homogeneity, but this masks significant socio-spatial differences in the enactment of policy. The authors focus on four facets of roll-out neoliberalism in English education policy that have expanded the function of primary schools, and redrawn the boundary between...

Contemporary economic, political and social shifts in the Global North are reconfiguring the resolution of productive and reproductive labour. This paper explores how the emergence of the New Economy, the rolling out of the neoliberal state, and the professionalisation of parenting are transforming: (i) the landscape in which mothers with primary-s...

Contemporary economic, political and social shifts in the Global North are reconfiguring the resolution of productive and reproductive labour. This paper explores how the emergence of the New Economy, the rolling out of the neoliberal state, and the professionalisation of parenting are transforming: (i) the landscape in which mothers with primary-s...

This keynote explores the changing nature of children's geographies as an academic project. It proceeds in four parts. Part 1 considers the shift away from research on children's spatial cognition which envisaged the child in largely biological terms, and contemplates contemporary efforts to rework the nature/culture dualism. Part 2 traces the inco...

Geographical research on children, youth, and families has done much to highlight the ways in which children’s lives have changed over the last twenty-five years. A key strand of research concerns children’s play and traces, in the Global North, a decline in children’s independent access to, and mobility through, public space. This article shifts t...

Geographers have shown considerable interest in neoliberal educational restructuring as states across the Global North have sought to respond to the challenges of economic change through the development of a skilled population. Existing research provides a wide-ranging analysis of the ways neoliberal states seek to shape individual citizens through...

Nation states across the global North are restructuring their education systems. This process has changed the relationship between school and home, with an increasing onus being placed on parents to involve themselves in their children's education. The article explores what mothers with different social class positions think about state attempts to...

Debate about neoliberalism has been a significant feature of twenty-first century geography. Appreciation of the contingent nature of neoliberalisation has promoted interest in the localisation of policy, and this paper furthers debate in three ways. First, it highlights the importance of the peopling of the state and more specifically the importan...

International student mobility from East to West has grown rapidly as the middle classes have sought to reproduce their advantage in the context of changing socioeconomic circumstances. Existing research shows that middle-class students and their parents are increasingly using overseas educational qualifications—an institutionalised form of cultura...

This paper interrogates the multiple spatialities bound up with the consumption of units as the dominant means of diagnosing “health-related” alcohol problems and measuring “drunkenness” in international alcohol policy and research. In order to question the power afforded to units, we work at the intersection of theoretical debates concerning biopo...

Geographical research on education has grown rapidly in both volume and scope during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and one relatively new theme to emerge from this growing literature is that of education and aspiration. Much of the nascent interest in aspiration concerns access to quality schooling and University education. In this...

While disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, politics, social policy and the health and medical sciences have a tradition of exploring the centrality of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness to people's lives, geographers have only previously addressed these topics as a peripheral concern. Over the past few years, however, this view has begun to...

This paper develops dialogue between geographers’ engagement with emotion, embodiment and affect, and geographical research on alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. In doing so, we focus on the long-running ‘moral panic’ relating to alcohol-related violence, disorder and drunken behaviour in urban public space. We argue there has been an ontological a...

In most contemporary western societies there is growing concern about rising levels of alcohol consumption, particularly by young people, even in countries, such as France, which have previously been assumed to have 'sensible' drinking cultures. Recent popular and policy debates about British drinking cultures have hinted at a shift in generational...

This paper engages with Hanson Thiem’s (2009) critique of geographies of education. Accepting the premise that education warrants fuller attention by geographers, the paper nonetheless argues that engaging with research on children, youth and families reshapes understanding of what has been, and might be, achieved. Foregrounding young people as the...

This paper draws on original empirical work with the British Pakistani community to explore Muslim attitudes to alcohol and alcohol-related practices, before considering how the Pakistani Muslim community’s culture of abstention shapes its members’ access to, and use of, public space in the nighttime economy. We foreground the active role played by...

Geographers have been slow to address issues about abstinence, drinking and drunkenness, but the importance of alcohol on the social and political agenda has underpinned recent growth in this field. Explorations of the gendered geographies of drinking are one important strand in this emerging field, but there is currently a paucity of research on w...

This paper considers how geographies of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness have been considered within and beyond the discipline of geography. We argue that while there has been a large amount of relevant, detailed and rich research considering ‘geographical’ issues, alcohol studies has tended to under-theorize the role of space and place. While geo...

Drinking in England is an issue of public and policy concern. The Government has focused on the city centre in pursuing its twin policy aims of urban regeneration and public order and health. This paper challenges the silences in such debate by focusing on the domestic drinking practices in two case-study locations. Drawing on insights from wider g...

During the past few years, debate surrounding depictions of a ‘British disease’ of binge drinking in contrast to civil European drinking cultures has been a central feature of popular and political debate in the UK. This paper investigates the ways in which these drinking categories have been constructed and identifies how they have become key elem...

This paper explores geographical contributions to the study of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. We argue that where alcohol studies have engaged with geographical issues research has been dominated by a case study approach that has undertheorized the relationship between practices and processes relating to alcohol, drinking and drunkenness and th...

This paper focuses on the contemporary British moral panic about young people and the consumption of alcohol in public space. Most of this public debate has focused on binge drinking in urban areas as a social problem. Here, we consider instead the role of alcohol in rural communities, and in particular alcohol consumption in domestic and informal...

In the past decade geographers have critiqued the exclusivity of idyllic representations of rurality and sought to explore the diverse experiences of Other social groups in the countryside. This paper builds upon that small but significant strand of research which has highlighted the whiteness of representations of rurality and the consequences of...

This paper shows that, despite receiving significant attention, the relationship between alcohol, drunkenness and public space has been undertheorized. We show that where drinking has been considered it has generally been as a peripheral concern of political-economy accounts that have sought to conceptualize the development of the modern city, or m...

This special edition emerged from a day-long conference session held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Colorado, in March 2005. The special edition, like the conference session, is inspired by collective endeavours to critique dominant conceptualisations of the ubiquitous, normally developing, middle-class, white, ch...

This paper combines insights from geographical research on the racialization of ethnic minority groups with more recent interest in whiteness in an exploration of the ways white rural residents racialize Gypsy-Travellers. Focusing on the white rural residents of Appleby, Cumbria, and their racialization of and relations with Gypsy-Travellers who at...

The notion that Gypsies, in an idealised form, have a place in the rural idyll has been sufficiently influential within Geography that it currently features in our undergraduate texts concerned with the meaning of place. The position of real Gypsy-Travellers in the countryside is of course more complex, and this paper seeks to move the debate forwa...

In this paper I explore what Little (1999 Progress in Human Geography 23 page 438) terms "the complexity and fluidity of rural otherness" through an examination of the racialisation of Gypsy-Travellers in late-19th-century and early-20th century England. Drawing on social-constructionist and psychoanalytic accounts of difference, I explore both the...

In this paper I explore what Little (1999 Progress in Human Geography 23 page 438) terms "the complexity and fluidity of rural otherness" through an examination of the racialisation of Gypsy-Travellers in late-19th-century and early-20th century England. Drawing on social-constructionist and psychoanalytic accounts of difference, I explore both the...

In the first rush of academic and popular commentaries on cyberspace, a stark opposition has been drawn between off-line and on-line worlds—the “real” and “virtual.” Such understandings of the relationship between these spaces are now increasingly subject to critique, yet relatively little is known about how people actually employ information and c...

In this paper we explore the potentially inclusionary and exclusionary implications of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for children through an examination of ICT policies and practices within UK schools. We begin by outlining the rhetoric of inclusion evident in UK government policy and by reflecting on how these discourses are mobilis...

The possibilities which information and communication technologies (ICT) offer people (or groups) to overcome the friction of distance and the constraints of materiality mean that these technologies are seen to have particular relevance in rural areas which have been historically characterised in terms of their economic and social perpheriality. In...

This paper is concerned with two developments which place questions about the home center-stage in urban geography, namely the growth of new information and communications technologies (ICT) and the rise of “critical geographies.” The paper draws on an empirical investigation into British children's domestic use of ICT to move beyond Utopian and dy...

This paper counters the notion that cyberspace is a placeless electronic sphere through an analysis of British children's use of the Internet. It demonstrates that rather than being accessible from everywhere but existing nowhere, cyberspace is shaped through place-routed cultures, and in particular through processes of Americanization.

Children are considered particularly important in debates about the possibilities and dangers of information and communication technologies (ICT). Discourses on ICT contain paradoxical representations of childhood. On the one hand, unlike most other understandings of child/adult relations, these discourses assume children to be equally, if not more...

Contemporary discourses about children's use of information and communication technologies (ICT)—which both celebrate children's command of a technology which is seen to be our future, and raise fears that this technology is putting children's emotional well-being at risk—are problematic, resting as they do on essentialist ideas about children, and...

The past two decades have seen rapid changes in the ways in which sociologists think about children, and a growing cross-fertilisation of ideas between researchers in a variety of social science disciplines. This paper builds upon these developments by exploring what three inter-related ways of thinking about spatiality might contribute to the new...

This article contributes to the developing literature on childhood and national identity by considering the ways in which children imagine other nations. Focusing in particular on on-line interactions between children in 12 British and 12 New Zealand schools, the article explores their imaginative geographies of each other, and assesses the ways th...

Geographers' renewed interest in institutions reflects traditional concerns with the way institutions can shape geographies and a more recent interest in the ways geographies are important in shaping institutions. In this paper the authors build on this second strand of work and are specifically concerned with children's use of new information and...

In the late 1990s, use of either of the words 'childhood' or 'Internet' is enough to signify at a stroke many of society's contemporary hopes and fears about what it means to be modern. By providing a critical review of the burgeoning (popular, policy, and academic) literature that is emerging as debates about 'childhood' and 'the Internet' take ce...

In this paper we begin by outlining the Government's vision of ICT and education, arguing that this is a deeply determinist vision which severs technology from the context of social practice. For example, it ignores the importance of the specificities of time and place, how ICT is promoted and made sense of in different contexts, the intentions of...

Geographers have shown considerable interest in the geographies of working mothers and childcare; however, the question “Why do some mothers with young children work outside the home and others do not?” has received less attention. This paper provides an analysis of how, within two urban neighborhoods, some mothers come to care for their preschool-...

Summary This paper focuses on the need for relief care and its provision through babysitting and crèches in Sheffield. The analysis demonstrates the importance of this previously neglected form of care, and highlights the role played by women's networks in shaping a class-differentiated geography of relief care.

Child-rearing has not been a major focus of research in geography despite the fact that its organisation is both spatially and temporally variable. Geographical work on pre-school childcare provision in the 1970s and 1980s tended to focus on the implementation and implications of government policy; more recently there has been a growth of feminist...

During the 1990s geographers of diverse philosophical orientations have shown a renewed interest in questions of justice. The author draws on empirical work on childcare provision in Sheffield, England, in order to evaluate two different approaches to the geography of justice and hence the theories of social justice which lie behind these; in parti...

About the book: There has been a notable upsurge of interest in the body, both in terms of empirical and theoretical study and debate. Contributions to this book move these debates forward by considering a range of bodies as active in their own construction in social and economic processes. Authors consider the body as a site of agency, resistance...