Youth, relationality, and space: Conceptual resources for youth studies from critical human geography

Abstract

This chapter takes up a relational understanding of space (Massey 2005) to make sense of conceptual resources for research with young people from critical human geography. After a brief discussion of relationality, the second section begins with the understanding that relationality needs to be grounded, examining the concept of lived space. The chapter considers how space is integral to young people’s experiences, from the macro, how global changes interact with young people’s lived experiences (Hörschelmann and Schäfer 2005; Jeffrey and Dyson 2008), down to the micro, as Valentine (2003, p. 48) states, there is a need to explore the “importance of different life spaces and the interconnections between them (e.g., school and work, work and home)” while also exploring how young people are both actors in space and constrained by it. The third section picks up geographic work with timespace, considering the relationship of time to space in the lives of young people, highlighting critical work on temporalities and intergenerationality in geography (Thrift and May 2001; Dodgshon 2008; Vanderbeck 2007).