Placing blame: Making sense of Beslan

Tuathail, Gearóid Ó

doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.01.007

Cited by 24 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Jones, 2004;Campbell, 2007;Ó Tuathail, 2009;Hyndman, 2010). Yet, it would be unjust to propose that political theory has totally evaded children's lived worlds.…”

Section: Tracing Childhoods In Political Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Are There Politics in Childhood?

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:This paper sets out to explore children's worlds as potential fields of political action. Children are approached as competent political agents whose mundane lives are permeated by politics in which they have their own positions and roles. The paper discusses how children can be found to act politically in their everyday lives and, to some extent, also practice their own political geographies. The main objective is to propose a theoretical basis for recognizing the political aspects of children's agency and studying political geographies embedded in children's lived worlds.Keywords: children, politics, politicization, the political, political geography, childhood studies Are there politics in childhood?In the past twenty years interest towards children and young people's geographies has grown steadily in cultural studies and social sciences. Spaces and sites such as the home, the school, urban neighborhoods and virtual communities have been explored as significant contexts of children's everyday agency with and alongside other people. As part of this scholarship also power relations embedded in children's lived worlds have been acknowledged. Dynamics and power struggles maintained and produced by the children themselves, the imbalances and hierarchies concerning child-adult relations, and the society's pressures bearing upon childhood have been explored in various contexts (e.g. Morris-Roberts, 2004;Gallacher, 2005;Forsberg & Strandell, 2007;Gallagher, 2008;Thomas, 2009).However, the political geographies consequential in children's everyday lives are rarely positioned at the centre of these explorations. Children's worlds are typically approached as social and cultural environments, but not as political arenas -i.e. spaces where the presence of human relations is organized by power (Brown 2002:.569). Even studies that explicitly focus on power or empowerment tend to overlook the political dynamisms that direct and transform the power relations embedded in children's lived worlds. The scholarship foregrounding children's involvement or participation in political processes usually deals with issues readily known as belonging to the sphere of 'the political', be that civic activism, urban planning or policy making in schools. Hence, what politics means in each case is not derived from children's experiences and lived worlds but determined on the basis of policies and politics pertinent to adult communities and societies. This sustains the perception of children's mundane lives as not determined by webs of power relations forming around matters of importance to children themselves. Yet, if we accept that children are active members of their communities and societies (beings), and not merely objects of top-down socialization processes (becomings), we should reverse our thinking concerning children's political lives (see Arneil, 2002;Skelton, 2007;Kallio & Häkli, 2010).In this paper we propose that power relations acknowledged and constituted by children themselves form the basis of their political lives. T...

show abstract

“…Jones, 2004;Campbell, 2007;Ó Tuathail, 2009;Hyndman, 2010). Yet, it would be unjust to propose that political theory has totally evaded children's lived worlds.…”

Section: Tracing Childhoods In Political Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Are There Politics in Childhood?

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Under-age people are recognized as agents in politically significant events, as implicated in geopolitical conflicts, as objects of policy making, and as empowered participants in civic activities and political practices (e.g. Jones 2004;Campbell 2007;Hörschelmann 2008;Hammett 2008;Ó Tuathail 2009). Given the importance of children in the building of future societies this interest is to be applauded.…”

Section: Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli University Of Tampere /mentioning

confidence: 99%

Political geography in childhood

Kallio

Häkli

2010

Political Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The crisis demanded the life of 334 hostages, more than half of whom were children who were attending a ceremony with their parents to mark the beginning of the school year. Ó Tuathail (2009a) examines the event from three perspectives: "the terrorist's Beslan", "the Kremlin's Beslan" and "Beslan among Ossetians and others in the North Caucasus" (p.4). Echoing Taylor's (1989) concerns about "children's deaths [as] an unfortunate side effect" of the ways in which our system works, the paper aptly introduces children as victims of the tragedy: as members of the community under siege by terrorists, as hostages whose release was negotiated by the President of Ingushetia, and as human beings who suffered injuries or died in the incident.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite their focal role in both the public media reporting the events and Ó Tuathail's (2009a) assessment of the incident, children remain surprisingly invisible in the subsequent discussions on the paper. In their commentaries Bakke (2009) and Nickley (2009) refrain from any child-related terminology, whereas Gorenburg (2009) refers to the terrorists as "child killers" (citing Vladimir Putin) and recalls that the attack targeted "innocent schoolchildren".…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet he does not follow this line of thought and, as yet, the dialogue has not prompted further discussion on the Beslan case in the journal or elsewhere within the subdiscipline. Ó Tuathail's (2009a) analysis of the events that violently drew hundreds of children into the core of a troubled geopolitics is an adept treatment of a complex and multilayered conflict. Yet, it is also an apt example of just how remote the idea of children's agency has been and largely still is to political geographical research, including its critical dimensions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation