Search

The present paper interrogates the ways in which school is produced as a particular bounded place (or collection of places) where sexuality, and particularly non-heterosexuality, is carefully policed by these boundaries. Drawing upon data generated in primary schools during a nationwide action research project ("No Outsiders"), we focus on three very different school places: the classroom, the staffroom and a school-based after-school art club. Our analysis engages with the contingency of place-making to show that place is neither a unitary experience nor a neutral stage upon which social relations are enacted. The three vignettes analysed offer insights into the critical potential of consciously and persistently working across (apparently) boundaried spaces within and beyond schools. (Contains 5 notes.)

Contending that culture is one of the most potentially divisive signifiers of human activity, this paper probes some of the complexities that attend the (un)popular culture of illicit drug-using with which many young people in contemporary Britain are identified. Irvine Welsh's multi-media drugs narrative "Trainspotting" is drawn on to explore the politics embedded in Edinburgh's low- and high-cultural spaces and interrogate how lived culture is spatially constituted and expressed. Investigations focus on the micromappings of Scotland's drug-using "Other" which disorder official cartographies of the capital and illustrate the processes of marginalisation. The final part of the discussion argues that the academy's recent cultural turn can inform school geography by contributing to a cultural pedagogy which recognises that informal sites of learning can be used with young people to examine the multiple dimensions and dynamics of in/exclusion. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 7 notes.)

This paper explores the geographical constitution of the "dirty weekend" and teenage girls' sexuality by interrogating the cultural habitus of the seaside resort. It reidentifies the littoral pleasure zone as an active agent in sexual learning and disrupts taken-for-granted inscriptions of the seaside as an inert backdrop against which only traditional family holidays or hedonistic youthful activities take place. In the cultural imaginary of Britain, the seaside assumes centre-place as a site of normativity. At the same time, it indexes the social and spatial limits of disorder and connects coastal towns with diverse moral panics. While this place-image binary resists other interpretations, closure can be challenged by re"cognizing" the seaside as a cultural text that is to hold open the possibility of further re-readings and re-writings. In alignment with this broadening, two liminal sexual/textual topographies are narrated that cohere around the heterosexual carnivalesque of Brighton and the local experiences of adolescent girls in Margate. Issues are raised about the ways in which the specificity of place inflects sexual learning and how geographical insights can contribute to sex/sexuality education.