Stuart C Aitken
Biographic Data
| ID | 215634 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stuart C Aitken |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stuart C |
| FAMILY NAME | Aitken |
| SIGNATURE | AITKEN S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | San Diego State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 398 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Media geographies over 40 years
With this essay, I look at the role of media geographies over the last 40 years and note the precipitous changes wrought by overwhelming technological advances and concomitant declines in traditional media and seemingly catastrophic societal and cultural upheavals. I offer some hope in local places and the changing attitudes of some young people
Film Landscapes of Global Youth: Imagining Young Lives
Children's territorialities in a Brazilian right-to-housing movement
This paper discusses children's experiences in the context of a social phenomenon of a Brazilian right-to-housing movement known as urban occupation. Our discussions are focused more specifically on the Rosa Leão occupation, located in the Izidora Region, in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. Based on a research developed between June 2019 and April 2021 with a group of about 19 children (2–14 years old), this paper sought to identify the children's t…
Living in psychic ellipses … mutual aid amongst evictees in central Bucharest
Housing evictions are understudied from a psychogeographic perspective. With this paper, we use Lauren Berlant’s idea of living in ellipses and Donald W. Winnicott’s object relations theory of potential spaces to help understand the pushing out, dissociations, leaps and abridgements that categorize housing evictions. There is something impulsive, capricious and fickle about the idiosyncratic and inconsistent violence of evictions. We argue that t…
They Think We’re Just Ghetto, But Nah!”: Re‐Working Young People’s Presence
With this paper, we document aspects of a year‐long project with 11th‐grade students from a high school in City Heights, San Diego. The students chose to become present, to share their experiences, explore others' understandings of their neighborhood, and collaborate to create an online multi‐media narrative that reflected them and their relations to the neighborhood. Theoretically, we involve a transversal politics that embrace young people's mu…
Pandemic and protest: Young people at the forefront of US Pandemonium
The USA continues with the largest number of Covid-19 confirmed cases and associated deaths worldwide. It is clear that health, recreation, political and education systems will not be the same in a post-Covid context. It is also clear that there are ongoing devastating effects on the rights and well-being of children and young people. Systemic racial, economic and political inequalities that existed before the pandemic are highlighted in stark re…
Affect and Emotion with A World at Stake
This article focuses on young people’s embodied experiences of the museum exhibition A World at Stake and the ways it offers affective and emotional encounters with “poor others.” Although representations of global poverty and inequality are sensitive to disengaged notions of care, they are not self-evident, and representational analyses often miss the myriads of ways that young people in particular engage in meaning making, which is not just abo…
Erasure, activism and Slovenian fathers on the edge in times of political madness
Today, it seems, spatial identities (nation, border, place) are tied intimately to political identities (adult, student, child, family, minority, refugee), and these identities are complexly interwoven. This paper looks at how differential citizenship shows up as an emotional practice for fathers and children who lost their legal status as Slovenians during the years of the ‘erasure’. For over a decade after Slovenia gained its independence, many…
Development and Sustainable Ethics in Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve, China
In March 2013, several thousand delegates at China’s National People’s Congress voted to approve the environmentally sensitive and authoritarian Xi Jinping as president. This portended dramatic changes in environmental policies, not least of which was an offsetting of top-down development-at-all-costs dogma with a new official orthodoxy focused on a sustainable and circular economy, with inclusive and more rounded growth. This article is part of …
Young People, Rights and Place: Erasure, Neoliberal Politics and Postchild Ethics
Concern is growing about children’s rights and the curtailment of those rights through the excesses of neoliberal governance. This book discusses children’s spatial and citizenship rights, and the ways young people and their families push against diminished rights. Armed initially with theoretical concerns about the construction of children through the political status quo and the ways youth rights are spatially segregated, the book begins with a…
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children
Alison Gopnik. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. x and 302 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $17.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-374-22970-2).Geographers have been interested in child development
What happened to adventurous young people and their cool places
The essay is about ‘youth full’ change, the content of which is always partial and incomplete but it is always playful in the sense that it is generative and creative. That revolutionary playfulness emanates from young people suggests an important harbinger of change that is often dismissed or feared by adults. As the world moves along dystopian axes, we ignore this palpable energy and its potential at great cost
Children's Geographies: Tracing The Evolution and Involution of a Concept
Stuart C. Aitkenaa Department of Geography, San Diego State University, Stuart C. Aitken Department of Geography, San Diego State University
Rethinking Child Rights Through Post-Child Ethics
Direitos infantis universais não funcionam. Há umatrajetória clara de agendas baseadas em direitos, desde oIluminismo, que deixam os jovens sem espaço e fora dolugar. Com este artigo, concentro-me explicitamente na vida precária da juventude: sua situação dentro decenários de transformação política e econômica queenfraquecem as instituições sociais tradicionais de cuidadoe cidadania. Como a vida dos jovens são feitas ou desfeitasenquanto sofrimen…
Without Space: The Politics of Precarity and Dispossession in Postsocialist Bucharest
The eviction of families from historically nationalized and recently restituted houses in Romania is tied in complicated ways to postsocialist transitional justice policies. Delayed enactment of restitution legislation and inconsistent application leave families, and neglected houses, in a precarious state. As families remain in place, they create a politics that pushes against dispossession. Evidence of this push comes from a study of Roma famil…
Global/local' research on children and childhood in a 'global society
Movies and Films, Analysis of
The uses of film as a means to understand our place in the world and produce meaning are provocative and long‐standing interests of geographers. Early studies focused on place‐based meanings, but the interrelations between movies and films on the one hand, and the politics of social and cultural representations on the other, became increasingly important to the discipline from the early 1990s onwards. Recent work focuses on poststructural interpr…
A doubly articulated cartography of children and media as affective networks-at-play
With increasing concerns surrounding children's agency and questions of the impacts of globalizing media, it is imperative to critically explore how interactions with media objects become part of children's social lives. Working through Deleuzian-Guattarian ideas of what bodies are and do, we approach child–media interactions as horizontal components of becoming. Through this, we argue that media objects can be important social elements of the em…
Locked in Place: Young People's Immobilities and the Slovenian Erasure
The case of Slovenia's erased minority populations (Izbrisani) is cited as one of the worst human rights abuses in contemporary Europe. While engaging debates on the nation-state and neoliberalism, this article discusses the struggles of Izbrisani youth from 1992 to the present day through a consideration of the spatial effects of erasure, including trauma to families forced apart and young people locked in place. Theoretical insights are drawn f…
A Brief History of Mediated, Sensational and Virtual Geographies
Young people, borders and well-being: Multi-disciplinary and international perspectives
On 12–15 January 2015, the Department of Geography and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Youth and Space (ISYS) at San Diego State University (SDSU) hosted the 4th International Conferenc
The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation: Young People’s Engagement, Activism and Aesthetics
Change is inevitable, we are told. A job is lost, a couple falls in love, children leave home, an addict joins Narcotics Anonymous, two nations go to war, a family member's health deteriorates, a baby is born, a universal health care bill is voted into law. Life comprises events over which we have considerable, partial, or little or no control. The distance between the event and our daily lives suggests a quirky spatial politics. Our lives move f…
Geographical Review
Street kids: Homeless youth, outreach, and policing New York's street
Young men's violence and spaces of addiction: Opening Up the Locker Room
With this essay, I take to task the relations between young men, addiction and spaces of violence with a particular focus on combat zones. Geographic theories of affect help elaborate the complex relations between young men's emotions, their addictive propensities and how that benefits the governance unities that create war machines. Deleuze's notion of the fold complicates those benefits by suggesting why some young men no longer fit the so-call…
A Preliminary Study of the Self-Directed Photography of Middle-Class, Homeless, and Mobility-Impaired Children∗
Understanding the ways in which children with different life experiences come to terms with day-to-day contexts and constraints has become an important topic of social science research. This study applies the technique of auto-photography to the study of children-environment transactions. How children apprehend their environments is described through a leitmotif analysis and an interpretation of photographs taken by children from middle-class fam…
For not limiting emotional and affectual geographies: A collective critique of Steve Pile’s ‘Emotions and affect in recent human geography
Gender, Power and Crib Geography: Transitional spaces and potential places
D. W. Winnicott's notion of 'transitional space' is noted as a potentially important contribution to post-Englightenment thinking because it decenters reason and logic in favor of playing with and making use of as the qualities most characteristic of human being. Winnicott is also, perhaps, the one child development theorist whose speculations parallel most closely contemporary post-modern interests of geographers. His principal concerns are how …
Global crises of childhood: Rights, justice and the unchildlike child
This paper traces how the notion of childhood changes as part of other social transformations. Globalization and the disillusion of public and private spheres are related to contemporary crises of childhood. Visible working children and child violence are highlighted as examples of unchildlike behaviour that suggests indeterminacy in the constitution of the global child. Issues of children's rights and new forms of justice are raised as potential…
Fathering and Faltering: Sorry, but You Don't Have the Necessary Accoutrements
The institution of the family is changing in complex and inscrutable ways. Ideally, it continues as a space of intimacy, love, and morality within which young children may find care and nurturing. This mythic conception of the institution belies the complex gendered realities of parenting. This paper focuses on the institution of fatherhood and the work of fathering. Much of our understanding of what it is to be a father hinges on an 'idea' that …
Children's Geographies: Tracing The Evolution and Involution of a Concept
Stuart C. Aitkenaa Department of Geography, San Diego State University, Stuart C. Aitken Department of Geography, San Diego State University
Why Children? Why Now
In asking the questions why children? why now? we want to set stage for a discussion on the import of the global contexts of children and young people. There is significant discussion in the academic literature on this topic, and yet we feel that this discussion either does not go far enough in highlighting the role of young people in local and global processes or it is suffused with platitudes about children purported as our future. What we do h…
Family Fantasies and Community Space
Journal Article Family Fantasies and Community Space. By Stuart C. Aitken. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xiv, 241 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-8135-2461-X. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-8135-2462-8.) Get access Jennifer Speights-Binet Jennifer Speights-Binet Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 4, March 1999,…
A Transactional Geography of the Image-Event: The Films of Scottish Director, Bill Forsyth
Global/local' research on children and childhood in a 'global society
Family Fantasies and Community Space
Desarrollo Integral y Fronteras/Integral Development and Borderspaces
This paper is about the work of young people and the boundaries of capitalism. I theorize consciousness and identities from the Deluezian perspective of ‘I-do’ and ‘I-am’, focusing on the doing/the working (the I-do's) of young people as part of the ghoulishly indirect discourses of globalization on la frontera (the I-am's). Put simply, I am concerned that the work of young people and its relations to their identity is lost in larger global disco…
I'd rather watch the movie than read the book
Geographers have been using film as a pedagogic device for some time, but it is not until recently that the full power of this medium has been recognised within the discipline as a forceful determinant of cultural norms. When using film in the classroom, I argue that there is not only a need to consider carefully the narrative of conventions followed by film‐makers but also a need for awareness of the possibility subtexts within the film which ma…
Playing with Children: Immediacy Was Their Cry
Mothers, communities and the scale of difference
Only recently did geographic concern turn to why and how, and when and where political identities are reproduced but, as yet, our understanding of the political relations between families and communities remains understudied. This lack of attention is attributable, in part, to the complexities of families and communities but, this aside, all societies regulate reproduction and there are always claims for legitimization of particular views of fami…
Women and children in a neighborhood advocacy group: Engaging community and refashioning citizenship at the United States–Mexico border
This article looks at the community participation of recent Latina immigrant mothers and their children in a neighborhood advocacy group near the US–Mexico border. It documents the work that women and children do as they struggle to become involved in their new community and improve their quality of life – despite legal, social, economic and cultural obstacles. Local context, family and ethnic networks, gendered patterns of women's experiences as…
Local Evaluations of Neighborhood Change
Questions arise concerning the nature and organization of residents' perceptual responses to neighborhood change. Transactionalism, with its focus on context and change, provides a theoretical basis for an empirical study that attempts to identify and evaluate the human dimensions of change within the context of an inner-city neighborhood of San Diego, California. Using quasi-nonmetric weighted multi-dimensional scaling (WMDS), I analyzed similar…
Street fighting: Placing the crisis of masculinity in David Fincher's Fight Club
Schoolyard Shootings: Racism, Sexism, and Moral Panics over Teen Violence
Person-environment theories in contemporary perceptual and behavioural geography I: Personality, attitudinal and spatial choice theories
Overturning assumptions about young people, border spaces and revolutions
With this essay, we set the stage for a discussion about young people and borders that is local in its context and global in its implications. Young people's bounded, bordered and embodied contexts are framed by issues of exclusion and inclusion where identity and development are negotiated, acquiesced, moved and migrated. We offer insight into the literal and metaphorically bordered lives of young people and the revolutionary imaginations that t…
Not bad for a little migrant working kid’
Contemporary wisdom on young masculinities suggests discursive flexibility through which maleness is constituted and contested in the diverse tensions that make up the practices of everyday life. This essay follows the story of Quixote, a child migrant laborer, and the evolving truth of his journey into diaspora and how that influences his ideas of manhood. It comprises a voyage that involves a continuous re-situation of boundaries and the comple…
Poetic child realism: Scottish film and the construction of childhood
With this essay I suggest a move towards poetic realism in the representation of children in Scottish movies. After a brief discussion of the landscape context of film geographies I turn to the roots of Scottish film realism in British Free Cinema, with specific reference to filmmakers’ use of landscape and place‐characters. I then argue that Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay moves most fully towards the context of poetic child realism. Ramsay fram…
Without Space: The Politics of Precarity and Dispossession in Postsocialist Bucharest
The eviction of families from historically nationalized and recently restituted houses in Romania is tied in complicated ways to postsocialist transitional justice policies. Delayed enactment of restitution legislation and inconsistent application leave families, and neglected houses, in a precarious state. As families remain in place, they create a politics that pushes against dispossession. Evidence of this push comes from a study of Roma famil…
Fielding Diversity and Moral Integrity
This paper outlines some of the moral issues I faced when working in the field with homeless children and children with cerebral palsy. Bill Bunge argues that the 'immediacy' of fieldwork requires that we divest ourselves of theoretical and philosophical pretensions to attend the urgency of our participants' context. I use personal examples of powerful and contradictory experiences from working with young people in the field to highlight the impo…
Evaluative Criteria and Social Distinctions in Renters' Residential Search Procedures
There are, as yet, no pragmatic or fully acceptable behavioural models of the housing search process. It is suggested that past studies lack concern for the functionally discrete nature of an individual's active and passive search procedures. Further, contemporary residential search and choice studies often mask social differences essential to understanding relocation decisions. The present study is an empirical investigation of renters' resident…
The daily journey to work and choice of residence
The commuter's daily journey to work is a principal factor determining where he or she lives. The aggregation of thousands or millions of these decisions shapes the geography of the modern city. This study adapts Hägerstrand's space-time autonomy framework to investigate the role of transportation in choosing a residence. It then pretests an original index on a small sample of transit users in Tucson, Arizona
Local Evaluations of Neighborhood Change
Questions arise concerning the nature and organization of residents' perceptual responses to neighborhood change. Transactionalism, with its focus on context and change, provides a theoretical basis for an empirical study that attempts to identify and evaluate the human dimensions of change within the context of an inner-city neighborhood of San Diego, California. Using quasi-nonmetric weighted multi-dimensional scaling (WMDS), I analyzed similar…
Person-environment theories in contemporary perceptual and behavioural geography I: Personality, attitudinal and spatial choice theories
A Transactional Geography of the Image-Event: The Films of Scottish Director, Bill Forsyth
Person-environment theories in contemporary perceptual and behavioural geography II: The influence of ecological, environmental learning, societal/structural, transactional and transformational theori…
Perceptual and behavioural theory in practice
A Preliminary Study of the Self-Directed Photography of Middle-Class, Homeless, and Mobility-Impaired Children∗
Understanding the ways in which children with different life experiences come to terms with day-to-day contexts and constraints has become an important topic of social science research. This study applies the technique of auto-photography to the study of children-environment transactions. How children apprehend their environments is described through a leitmotif analysis and an interpretation of photographs taken by children from middle-class fam…
Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film
Using contemporary film theory and elements of socio-cultural and political discourse, fourteen geographers examine the effects of cinematic representation of place and space on perceptions of self and societies in the world.
I'd rather watch the movie than read the book
Geographers have been using film as a pedagogic device for some time, but it is not until recently that the full power of this medium has been recognised within the discipline as a forceful determinant of cultural norms. When using film in the classroom, I argue that there is not only a need to consider carefully the narrative of conventions followed by film‐makers but also a need for awareness of the possibility subtexts within the film which ma…
Pride in the jungle: Community and everyday life in back of the yards Chicago
Gender, Power and Crib Geography: Transitional spaces and potential places
D. W. Winnicott's notion of 'transitional space' is noted as a potentially important contribution to post-Englightenment thinking because it decenters reason and logic in favor of playing with and making use of as the qualities most characteristic of human being. Winnicott is also, perhaps, the one child development theorist whose speculations parallel most closely contemporary post-modern interests of geographers. His principal concerns are how …
Family Fantasies and Community Space
Journal Article Family Fantasies and Community Space. By Stuart C. Aitken. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xiv, 241 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-8135-2461-X. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-8135-2462-8.) Get access Jennifer Speights-Binet Jennifer Speights-Binet Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 4, March 1999,…
Family Fantasies and Community Space
Fathering and Faltering: Sorry, but You Don't Have the Necessary Accoutrements
The institution of the family is changing in complex and inscrutable ways. Ideally, it continues as a space of intimacy, love, and morality within which young children may find care and nurturing. This mythic conception of the institution belies the complex gendered realities of parenting. This paper focuses on the institution of fatherhood and the work of fathering. Much of our understanding of what it is to be a father hinges on an 'idea' that …
Mothers, communities and the scale of difference
Only recently did geographic concern turn to why and how, and when and where political identities are reproduced but, as yet, our understanding of the political relations between families and communities remains understudied. This lack of attention is attributable, in part, to the complexities of families and communities but, this aside, all societies regulate reproduction and there are always claims for legitimization of particular views of fami…
Fielding Diversity and Moral Integrity
This paper outlines some of the moral issues I faced when working in the field with homeless children and children with cerebral palsy. Bill Bunge argues that the 'immediacy' of fieldwork requires that we divest ourselves of theoretical and philosophical pretensions to attend the urgency of our participants' context. I use personal examples of powerful and contradictory experiences from working with young people in the field to highlight the impo…
Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity
The Geographies of Young People traces the changing scientific and societal notions of what it is to be a young person, and argues that there is a need to rethink how we view childhood spaces, child development and the politics of growing up.This book brings coherency to the growing field of children's geographies by arguing that although most of it does not prescribe solutions to the moral assault against young people, it nonetheless offers appr…
Fielding Diversity and Moral Integrity
This paper outlines some of the moral issues I faced when working in the field with homeless children and children with cerebral palsy. Bill Bunge argues that the 'immediacy' of fieldwork requires that we divest ourselves of theoretical and philosophical pretensions to attend the urgency of our participants' context. I use personal examples of powerful and contradictory experiences from working with young people in the field to highlight the impo…
Schoolyard Shootings: Racism, Sexism, and Moral Panics over Teen Violence
Global crises of childhood: Rights, justice and the unchildlike child
This paper traces how the notion of childhood changes as part of other social transformations. Globalization and the disillusion of public and private spheres are related to contemporary crises of childhood. Visible working children and child violence are highlighted as examples of unchildlike behaviour that suggests indeterminacy in the constitution of the global child. Issues of children's rights and new forms of justice are raised as potential…
Playing with Children: Immediacy Was Their Cry
Memories and Miscreants: Teenage Tales of Terror
With this paper, we address the culture of fear around youth violence in the US, and the way it is manifest in news media. We elaborate on the sexist, classist and racist biases in reporting and the ways violence is unequally commemorated and dismissed. We argue that place and, in particular, the myth of Middle America is a large player in selective memory
Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity
Key Words: critical studiesfilmidentitymobilitypedagogy
Street fighting: Placing the crisis of masculinity in David Fincher's Fight Club
Sociology (48 works) · Political science (37 works) · Law (29 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Art (22 works) · Geography (22 works) · Aesthetics (19 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (17 works)