The child-friendly city advocates for children's 'right to the city'. Much of this advocacy focuses on the independent child, with little attention paid to the accompanied experiences of younger children, such as those travelling in prams. This paper draws on a material feminist perspective to help address this gap. We offer the concept of mother-child-pram assemblage to bring to the fore the corporeal dimensions of everyday pram journeys. By analysing sensory ethnographic materials collected with mothers and young children living in Wollongong, Australia, this paper highlights how the 'affective affordances' and 'affective atmospheres' of pram mobilities shape urban experience by reference to how motherhood and childhood are achieved on-the-move. We conclude with policy-relevant insights for the child-friendly city. Disciplines Disciplines Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences Publication Details Publication Details Clement, S. & Waitt, G. (2018). Pram mobilities: affordances and atmospheres that assemble childhood and motherhood on-the-move. Children's Geographies, 16 (3), 252-265.
Gender is a key lens for interpreting meanings and practices of drinking. In response to the overwhelming amount of social and medical alcohol studies that focus on what extent people conform to norms of healthy drinking, this article extends critical feminist geographical engagement with assemblage thinking to explore how the technologies of biopower covertly materialised as bodily habits may be preserved and challenged. We suggest an embodied engagement with alcohol to help think through the gendered practices and spatial imaginaries of rural drinking life. Our account draws on interviews with women of different cohort generations with Anglo-Celtic ancestry living in a country town in Victoria, Australia. Three vignettes based around emergent themes of maternal, domicile and socialising bodies help shed light on the contradictory ways gender is lived through the dynamics of alcohol consumption which help constitute everyday life in a country town.
Over the last two decades 'climate emergency' has grown from a little-known term to a mainstream public issue. In Australia, the term gained traction during the 2019-2020 'Black Summer' bushfires. The (un)natural disaster prompted local governments, industries, peak bodies and academic collectives to 'declare' a climate emergency and call for immediate action on climate change. We note, however, that there has been no declaration from geographers in Australia. As a discipline whose members are embedded in research, teaching and advocacy about climate changeand the interlinked crises of biodiversity loss and environmental and social justicewe found this surprising. It is self-evident that climate change matters to geographers. So, is a declaration of a climate emergency from the discipline necessary? In writing this piece we reflect on our experiences of the 2019-2020 summer and conversations with fellow geographers, to consider what a declaration of an emergency does, who it is for and what actions it might mobilise. In conclusion, we call on geographers in Australia to declare an emergency which foregrounds the interlinked crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and social (in)justice. The detail of what this declaration says and means in practice is open for discussion. We ask many questions throughout this paper as a way to invite youour fellow geographersto join us in this conversation.
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