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Small acts, kind words and 'not too much fuss' 2 Small acts, kind words and "not too much fuss": implicit activisms AbstractIn this paper, we suggest that social scientists' accounts of 'activism' have too-often tended to foreground and romanticise the grandiose, the iconic, and the unquestionably meaning-ful, to the exclusion of different kinds of 'activism'. Thus, while there is a rich social-scientific literature chronicling a social history of insurrectionary protests and key figures/thinkers, we suggest that there is more to 'activism' (and there are more kinds of 'activism') than this. In short, we argue that much can be learnt from what we term implicit activisms which -being small-scale, personal, quotidian and proceeding with little fanfare -have typically gone uncharted in social-scientific understanding of 'activism'. This paper will reflect upon one example of this kind of 'implicit' activism, by representing findings from interviews undertaken with 150 parents/carers, during an evaluation of a 'Sure Start' Centre in the East Midlands, UK. From these interviews emerged a sense of how the Centre (and the parents/carers, staff and material facilities therein) had come to matter profoundly to these parents/carers. We suggest that these interviews extend and unsettle many social-scientific accounts of 'activism' in three key senses. First: in evoking the specific kinds of everyday, personal, affective bonds which lead people to care. Second: in evoking the kinds of small acts, words and gestures which can instigate and reciprocate/reproduce such care. And third: in suggesting how such everyday, affective bonds and acts can ultimately constitute political activism and commitment, albeit of a kind which seeks to proceed with 'not too much fuss'.

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In this paper I argue that a significant proportion of research on children's emotional geographies has been deployed to reinforce the importance of children's 'voices', their (independent) 'agency', and the various ways in which voice/agency maybe deemed 'political'. Without wishing to dismiss or dispense with such approaches, I explore potential ways to go 'beyond' concerns with voice/agency/politics. Initially, I review studies of children's participation (and participatory methods), activism and everyday lives that mobilise emotion and affect in productive ways. I contrast such studies with important questions raised by a reinvigoration of interest in the need for children to be able to represent themselves. I then explore the possibilities raised by so-called 'hybrid' conceptions of childhood -which go beyond biosocial dualisms -to enable further strides beyond voice/agency. Drawing on examples from alternative education and contemporary attachment theories, I explore some potential implications for children's emotional geographies and relational geographies of age of what I term 'more-than-social' emotional relations. Yet I do not offer an unequivocal endorsement of these hybrid emotions. Thus, I end the paper by issuing some words of caution -both in terms of the critical questions raised by more-thansocial emotional relations, specifically, and in terms of engendering broader debate about how and why scholars do (children's) emotional geographies. KeywordsChildren's geographies; emotion and affect; biosocial dualism; alternative education; attachment theory; family and intergenerational relations 2

This paper explores how ideas and ideals are constructed. More specifically, it follows how ideas and ideals of ‘childhood’ are constructed. Still more specifically, it attends to the ways in which idea(l)s of childhood are literally and materially constructed, in, through and as part of practices such as the building and maintenance of architectural forms. I argue that most studies of childhood largely ignore the importance of local, banal, ephemeral, mundane, material practices – often involved in the very constitution and performance of spaces – which are hugely significant to the construction of idea(l)s like childhood. By adopting a ‘critical geographical’ approach to the daily life of an alternative school in Pembrokeshire, in the United Kingdom, I demonstrate how particular arrays of usually un‐noticed practices are involved in the construction, constitution and evocation of idea(l)s like childhood.

Social scientists often use the notion of 'transition' to denote diverse trajectories of change in different types of bodies: from individuals, to communities, to nation-states. Yet little work has theorised how transition might occur across, between or beyond these bodies. The aim of this paper is to sketch out a multiple, synthetic and generative (but by no means universal) theory of transition.Primarily drawing on the British context, we explore and exemplify two contentions. Firstly, that the notion of transition is being increasingly deployed to frame and combine discourses in terms of community development, responses to environmental change and the individual lifecourse.Specifically framed as transition, such discourses are gaining increasing purchase in imagining futures that reconfigure, but do not transform, assumed neoliberal futures. Our second contention is that these discourses and policies must try to 'hold the future together' in one or more senses. They must wrestle with a tension between imminent threats (climate change, economic non-productivity) which weigh heavily on the present and its possible futures, and the precarious act of redirecting those futures in ways that might better hold together diverse social groups, communities and places.

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This collection emerges from the intersection of two vibrant, dynamic and expanding academic endeavours. The papers are situated within 'new' social-scientific studies of childhood and youth and also draw upon a burgeoning interest in mobility (for which this journal is clearly a cornerstone). This editorial essay provides an introduction to extant and prospective work at the intersection of these lines of enquiry, and has a twofold structure. First, we provide a sketch-map of recent social-scientific studiesespecially those which have emerged from the academic sub-discipline that has come to be termed 'Children's Geographies' -which have interrogated some of the manifold mobilities fundamental to younger people's lives. We argue, though, that much of this extant research concerning children's and young people's mobilities remains limitedboth theoretically and empirically. So, second, we elaborate a number of ways in which intersections of mobilities and (young) age ought to pose significant questions for future research and enquiry regarding 'mobility', 'childhood' and 'youth', and perhaps those very terms themselves. In so doing, we provide an introduction to the papers in this collection which -though dealing with diverse mobilities and locales, and though showcasing various conceptual and methodological inclinations and new directions -share a concern to take the road less travelled by attending to, and beginning to open out, such challenging, and potentially fruitful, questions. Social-scientific Studies of Childhood and Children's GeographiesOver the past decade, children and young people -and indeed the contested, culturally-specific notions of 'childhood' and 'youth' themselves 1 -have become increasingly important foci for the social sciences, but especially for sociologists,