Education, International Volunteering, and Citizenship: Young People’s Subjectivities and Geographies of Development

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

“…Centred on the teaching and learning of geography in Higher Education, the field of geography education practice and scholarship has a significant tradition of critical discussions about learning and teaching, ranging from more technical contributions around pedagogy (Revell and Wainwright, 2009), including responses to teaching amid COVID-19 (Bryson and Andres, 2020; Day et al, 2020), to questions about values and connections between teaching, learning and institutions (Williams and Love, 2021) and aims, purposes and representation (Dorling, 2019; Jordan et al, 2021). Highlighting how neoliberalism, marketisation and casualisation shape the context within which geography is practised, taught and learnt, geography education practice and scholarship foregrounds universities as sites of contestation: what is researched and taught in universities is important, not least to ‘young people’s ideas of their subjectivities and how this links to understandings of the role of a university degree’ (Baillie Smith et al, 2016: 191), and subsequently to the quality of public reasoning.…”

“…Research attention on the geographies of education has expanded rapidly in quantity and scope (Waters, 2016). Part of this expansion includes generative synergies across multiple diverse areas of research, including: critical geographies of education, radical youth work and participatory research (Dickens, 2017); shifting infrastructures, financial capital and geographies of schooling (Cohen and Rosenman, 2020); cultural and affective geographies (Ang and Ho, 2019); critical race theory (Hunter, 2020); children’s and young people’s geographies (Baillie Smith et al, 2016); and educational landscapes, neoliberalism and the ‘social reproduction of enduring regimes of power’ (Holloway and Kirby, 2019: 164), often understanding ‘schools as key sites at which issues such as power, identity, citizenship and participation are illuminated’ (Pini et al, 2017: 14). Holloway et al, (2010) draw attention to the ways in which unruly neoliberal logics, government policy and market responses from individuals and companies might be productively explored through the geographies of education, offering an example of Thiem’s (2009) argument that education is not a ‘discrete topical speciality’ but instead is a resource for decentred and outward-looking research, ‘one in which education systems, institutions, and practices are positioned as useful sites for a variety of theory-building projects’ (p.154).…”

South–South volunteering and development

“…North–South volunteer movements, for these scholars, take place within the uneven patterns of power we find in North–South development partnerships (Noxolo, ) and development more generally (Mawdsley, ). These critiques articulate with broader questionings of global North‐led aid and development, and its colonial contingencies, power asymmetries and neoliberal citizenships (Baillie Smith et al, ; Baillie Smith et al., ; Griffiths, ; Kothari, ; Lyons et al, ; McEwan & Mawdsley, ). Such geographies, thus, both critique and privilege particular types of volunteer and the institutions that facilitate their work, producing a narrow account of the local and transnational relationalities of volunteering and development (Laurie & Baillie Smith, ).…”