Youth, Relationality, and Space: Conceptual Resources for Youth Studies from Critical Human Geography

This chapter takes up a relational understanding of space (Massey, For space. Sage, London, 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, Children’s Geogr 3:219–242, 2005; Jeffrey and Dyson, Telling young lives: portraits of global youth. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2008), down to the micro, as Valentine (Children’s Geogr 1(1):37–52, 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, Timespace: geographies of temporality. Routledge, London, 2001; Dodgshon, Geogr Annaler Ser B-Human Geogr 90:1–15, 2008; Vanderbeck, Geogr Compass 1:200–221, 2007)).