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This paper contributes to scholarship exploring the affective politics of environmental education. Building on Nixon's (2011) conception of slow violence, I argue that the slow violence of ecological destruction presents not only a representational challenge but also a pedagogical one: how to confront violent systems that degrade and harm particular people and places without reinscribing this damage? Drawing on qualitative research with youth-focused environmental organizations in Camden, New Jersey, I explore two very different responses to this challenge. In an effort to shield youth from the affective injuries of confronting slow violence, "pedagogies of immediacy" mobilize feelings of personal accomplishment through immediate action in the local environment. By contrast, "pedagogies of excavation" interrogate the historical and structural underpinnings of environmental injustices and channel associated affects into collective visions for more just futures. My analysis interrogates the racial, scalar, and affective politics at work in these pedagogies and considers the implications for feeling environmental (in)justice. While pedagogies of immediacy are framed as well-intentioned efforts to counter territorial stigma and generate good feelings through individual impact, I argue that such efforts ultimately reinscribe the very deficit perspectives they seek to challenge. These pedagogical differences have material implications in an inequitable and racialized funding landscape, where environmental organizations must compete for resources and may find themselves beholden to the very corporations that perpetuate ecological injuries.

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in "education" emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction "feminism" developed out of feminist interventions regarding the role of women's unpaid care-work in the reproduction of capitalism. In this paper, we suggest that the renewed energy surrounding social reproduction feminism provides an opportunity to revisit social reproduction theorizing in education. We review the fields' histories and ready the ground for an integrated framework. At the heart of this integration is a feminist analysis of reproductive labor in its contradictory relationship to capitalism. Expanding the analysis from the reproduction of capitalist "relations" to the reproduction of "life" under capitalism, this approach avoids the pitfalls of determinism and attends to students' participation and teachers' work in the contested labor of social reproduction.

In this reflective essay, five members of a research team involving graduate students and a faculty member offer individual "studies" of specific moments in the field in which lessons about methodology, the research context, and the researcher herself/himself crystallized. The article highlights the pedagogical possibilities of portraiture for introducing graduate students to qualitative research methodology. Each "study" illuminates how different kinds of boundaries are negotiated: whether it is the boundaries of access to a research site; the boundaries of personal or professional recognition; the boundaries of the body and physical space; the boundaries of racial identification; or the boundaries of the interior and exterior selves. These are not lessons that can be taught/learned within the constraints of a classroom, whether a lecture hall or the most progressive seminar. It is in the actual experience of negotiating these boundaries that the intricacies of the research process manifest, and in the process, the inquiry itself grows and moves through the necessary explorations that are the heart of qualitative research. (Contains 4 notes.)

In this essay, Kate Cairns considers the implications of assessing garden pedagogies, arguing that a rhetoric of effects assumes an essentialist conception of the child-as-educational-output and bolsters a neoliberal vision of social change rooted in personal transformation. Drawing from ethnographic research with youth gardens in Toronto, Ontario, and Camden, New Jersey, she highlights contextualized experiences of learning and labor that exceed the boundaries of an effects framework. Cairns argues that garden pedagogies must be understood in relation to specific dynamics of racial, economic, and ecological injustice. The essay closes with reflections on how feminist theories of social reproduction might reimagine pedagogies of the garden in a way that attends to young people's participation in life's work.

This article explores how conceptions of choice and visions of the future are constructed within the context of specialized arts programs in two Canadian public high schools. The authors consider how discourses of the arts are implicated in the way that possible futures are envisioned differently, delimiting the range of choices available to students. Their analysis shows how choices are unequally distributed and possible futures unequally constructed in ways that reinforce social class hierarchies. The discussion of the data is organized around the contrast in how three tropes--"the architect," "the fifth year," and "being lazy"--emerge in both school contexts in relationship to students' futures. By illustrating how the arts operate in this process, the authors challenge the common assumption that arts programs have the inherent ability to transcend social structures in general and social class processes in particular. The authors conclude by considering the implications of their analysis for how notions of choice are understood in relationship to specialized arts programs.

Girls' studies have made an important contribution to the literature on subjectivity and schooling in neoliberal times; however, girlhood studies within Western contexts remain predominantly urban in focus. This article brings an analysis of place to debates about gendered subjectivity formation by exploring gendered patterns within rural students' imagined futures. Drawing upon ethnographic research with grade 7/8 students in rural Ontario (Canada), the analysis demonstrates how girls construct contradictory future narratives envisioning urban femininities while insisting they will remain living in the country. I argue that this tension must be explored in relation to the gendered context of rural social space, as well as post-feminist discourses of "girl power". The analysis contributes to the fields of rural education and girlhood studies by foregrounding the significance of place within the gendered formation of student subjectivities and future aspirations.

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the "geography of ethnography". These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research "site"; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in "the field," the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.

This paper explores the concept of voice in relation to a research project, now in its developing stages, in which I examine how rural youth imagine their futures in the context of a career-based learning programme called "The Real Game". The paper enters into conversation with feminist post-structural scholars of education in order to situate the problematic of voice within broader epistemological and ethical questions regarding representation and responsibility in research. Exploring the limits and possibilities of the proposed study, and of critical feminist ethnographies more broadly, the paper is divided into three sections: speech, representation, and ethics. Questions of voice serve as an entry point into a larger interrogation of the interrelations of theory, epistemology, and ethics in research practice. The study's specific focus on "imagined futures" provokes questions about how relations of time shape the production of youth subjectivities and feminist scholarship. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper examines the heightened demands of social reproduction amidst the slow violence of environmental harm. In doing so, it contributes to feminist scholarship bridging environmental and reproductive justice. Through a case study of water provisioning in Camden, New Jersey, the analysis reveals the added burden of gendered care-work under racialized conditions of environmental insecurity, where many suspect threats to community health but are denied legitimacy for their claims. I show how residents contest official declarations of water quality through narratives of water insecurity, linking everyday injustices to histories of slow violence. Such insecurity intensifies the gendered and racialized labor required to care for children. As mothers mitigate risk through daily provisioning, many resort to buying bottled water in an effort to gain control over their reproductive labor. While it may seem that mothers are opting for privatized solutions, they frame this strategy as a necessary response to the state's failure to secure the conditions of social reproduction. Situating mothers' everyday care-work alongside activists' critiques of privatization, the paper advances a multi-scalar analysis of environmental justice that connects the intimate, embodied sphere of reproduction to the institutional terrain of neoliberal restructuring. Key to this struggle is combatting neoliberal logics of mother-blame that locate risk within the labor of caregiving. Ultimately, I argue, struggles to sustain reproductive labor against the threat of slow violence illuminate the need for collective infrastructures of care that prioritize life-making over profit-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The concept of “territorial stigmatisation” identifies the role of symbolic denigration in the production of marginalised places. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research with a food justice organisation in Camden, New Jersey, to examine youth's responses to territorial stigma. The analysis demonstrates how Black and Latinx youth rewrite the story of Camden in a way that locates the “good” within it, using narratives of the city's prosperous history and possible futures to recuperate value within a stigmatised place. I argue that the perspectives of youth illuminate the temporal dimensions of territorial stigma, situating the blemish of place in relation to conceptions of individual and social change. The article contributes to a growing literature examining the strategic responses of those who dwell in pathologised places. Because youth are uniquely situated within the production of place, their perspectives offer important insights in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]