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This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

In 2019, the Higher Education Research Group (HERG) formally became the Geography and Education Research Group (GeogEd). What may appear as a simple change in name masks a renewed understanding of the synergies between geography education (at all levels) and the geographies of education. In this paper we contextualise that change through the relationships between the two inter-related fields. We suggest that these fields are integrally linked, iteratively and reciprocally, and that research across both is vital for a truly holistic understanding of each. We reflect on the discussions and process of forming the new Geography and Education Research Group, which we trust is sensitive to the historic remit of HERG while being inclusive to those working in geography and education beyond higher education. We conclude by looking ahead to a renewed, inclusive, and progressive Research Group, aspiring to be more diverse and enabling fruitful discussions across the geography and education nexus.

As part of the special issue marking the transition of the Higher Education Research Group to the Geography and Education Research Group, in this final paper we argue that the reformed group has a key role to play in promoting spaces of exchange between the communities of practice that have a stake in the shared endeavours of geography and education. We draw on structured conversations from the group’s launch event, existing literature, and our particular vantage points to identify a range of influences – both heritages that we work with and challenges that we face – that shape the interplay of geography and education in our pedagogical contexts. We argue that the GeogEd Research Group can create spaces of productive exchange between three communities of practice: geographies of education research, geography education research, and pedagogic research. As the research group brings these communities of practice together, it facilitates dialogue, creates new avenues for research, and connects and enhances geography teaching practice across education levels.

Matt FinnGeographical research makes change visible. This is a powerful aspect of what geography offers society. Being able to describe change in the world, and visualise it, helps us understand it...

This chapter explores the spatial imaginaries at work in Bernstein’s model of the pedagogic device and considers the implications for accounts of recontextualisation. I argue that the fields of production, recontextualisation and reproduction are becoming more blurred than implied by Bernstein’s model, with actors taking on hybrid, boundary-crossing roles. I consider what might be gained by conceiving of the relationships between these fields, and their actors, in less hierarchal or horizontal (planar) ways – and what networked, relational spatialities might offer. By exploring alternative ways of thinking about the relationships between the fields, I draw out implications for how we understand the relationships between the academic discipline of geography and school geography. The effect is to consider how we might better value the teaching and communication of geography in and across all spaces of learning. This opens up new questions, and avenues for research, about the connections, collaborations and exchanges between academic geographer, teacher educator/researcher and school communities.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Edward Elgar Publishing via the DOI in this record.

In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.

Although the relationship between religions and state-funded schooling has a long history there is a relative dearth of academic writing, based on empirical study, which explores the contested spac...

This essay highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo) colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalized European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000). The essay reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty's critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is ...

This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations.

Southwest Florida mangrove forest vegetation was successfully transplanted into a mesocosm within Biosphere 2. Dense stands of mangroves with characteristics comparable to natural Florida mangrove forests developed from the small seedlings and saplings initially installed in the mesocosm. Mangrove overstory was evaluated by leaf area index which ranged from 2.16 to 4.02 m2/m2. Mangrove understory decrease was monitored as the mangrove overstory developed. The Biosphere 2 mesocosm is compared with a similarly planted mesocosm at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. The performance of these mesocosms is used to evaluate existing theories on natural mangrove forest species composition.

During the 2-year closure experiment (1991–1993) inside Biosphere 2, a two-stage system comprising primary treatment in anaerobic holding tanks followed by circulation in constructed wetlands treated all human habitat and domestic animal barn wastewater, as well as effluent from workshops, /medical and analytic laboratories. The system had an estimated hydraulic loading of 0.9–1.1 m3 day−1 (240–290 gal d−1). Plant production in the wetland treatment system was light-limited, but over the two years 720 kg dry weight of emergent wetland vegetation and 490 kg dry weight of floating aquatic plants were harvested from the 41 m2 wetlands and used as fodder. The wastewater treatment system was part of overall strategy for nutrient recycling inside Biosphere 2 and effluent from the system was routed to the irrigation supply for the agricultural crops. The constructed wetlands enhanced habitat diversity, supported 14 species of vascular plants and provided aesthetic pleasure. Operation was batch loading, using both pumps and gravity feed.

Biosphere 2 is a specially constructed, 1.25 ha, greenhouse in southern Arizona, USA that is atmospherically and materially isolated from Biosphere 1, the Earth. Housed inside are living recreations of five natural ecosystems and an agricultural zone. Techniques were developed for the transplantation, maintenance and establishment of a diverse neotropical estuarine ecosystem model (referred to here as the mangrove mesocosm). Technical systems were designed for the simulation and control of environmental conditions including rain (0–3 1 s −1 ), wind (0–11 km h −1 ), air (5–50°C) and water temperature (15–35°C), water circulation (0–20 1 s −1 ), salinity (0–45 ppt), relative humidity (10–85% RH) and nutrient removal (up to 20 g-N d −1 ). In or near the mangrove mesocosm permanent sensors monitored and recorded at 15-min intervals the following ranges: light above (5–35.5 E m −2 d −1 and 1600 μE m −2 s −1 maximum) and below (0.5–5 E m −2 d − 1 ) the mangrove canopy; air (18–42°C) and water (16–27°C) temperature; salinity (25–35 ppt); relative humidity (50–80% RH); pH (7.6–8.1); dissolved oxygen (3.8–5.5 mg 1 −1 ); and several biogenic gasses including oxygen (20.5-14.5 ppm), CO 2 (500–4500 ppm), methane (0–50 ppm), nitrous oxide (0–80 ppm) and hydrogen sulfide (0–0.1 ppm). From November 1990 to December 1993, mangrove height increased approximately 250%v for each of the three mangrove species: Rhizophora triangle (red mangrove), Avicennia germinans (black mangrove) and Laguncularia racemosa (white mangrove). The spreading mangrove average canopy area increased by 374, 533 and 647% for the red, black and white mangroves, respectively. The mangroves organized into a closed canopy, maturing forest under the unique set of conditions found inside of Biosphere 2. Concurrent litterfall and decomposition monitoring experiments were initiated in October 1992 in the mesocosm and at Florida-based analog research sites. Reproductive litterfall and total litter-fall approximated the seasonal patterns found at the field sites. Both total and reproductive litterfall production in the mesocosm exceeded field levels (except for white mangrove) but fall within reported rates for Southwest Florida. Total litterfall and total reproductive litterfall for the mesocosm red (1281.1 g m −2 yr −1 ; 178.3 g m −2 yr −1 ) and black (635.2 g m −2 y −1 ; 64.6 g m −2 yr −1 ) mangroves exceed the Florida field site red (948.3 g m −2 yr −1 ; 89.2 g m −2 yr −1 ) and black (461.7 g m −2 yr −1 ; 16.3 g m −2 yr −1 ) mangrove rates. The field white mangrove total litterfall and total reproductive litterfall (766.3 g m −2 yr −1 ; 215.9 g m −2 yr −1 ) rates were greater than that produced by the mesocosm white mangroves (654.8 g m −2 yr −1 ; 67.6 g m −2 yr −1 ). In addition to being a useful system for mangrove ecology, the mesocosm is on display for public education and awareness of the need to conserve wetland areas.

Constructing functioning ecosystem models allows us to research the potential effects of degradation and fragmentation in ecosystems under pressure from human encroachment and points optimistically toward the potential for restoring degraded ecosystems. During 1987-1988, a complex, greenhouse-scale Mesocosm of a 50 km long transect of the Southwest Florida Everglades estuarine ecosystem (Gulf of Mexico shore to full fresh water) was constructed in Washington, DC, USA. At various times, a partial census that included the populations of vascular plants, macroalgae, protists, aquatic macroinvertebrates and fish was taken. This paper, based on a partial census of 369 species taken from November 1994 through January 1995, describes the self-organization of community structure, species populations and food webs that has occurred in the past 4 years of virtually complete isolation. Although many original species were lost as a result of smaller scale effects and a slightly skewed physical environment, the key vascular plants, algae and protists, as well as many secondary species, have largely maintained populations, provided community structuring elements and developed the base of a complex of food webs. Macro-invertebrate and fish populations have adjusted to the new environment with the basic character of their parent ecosystems intact. However, some significant species losses have occurred that clearly relate to the partial use of impeller pumps, and the consequent control of swimming larvae, the inability of the small system to support higher predators, and in some cases specifically suspect physical factors such as humidity and temperature. Methodologies of scaling, as it relates to different communities, and the degree and motivation for human intervention are discussed.