Play and Recreation, Health and Wellbeing

Geographies of children and young people is a rapidly emerging sub-discipline within human geography. There is now a critical mass of established academic work, key names within academia, growing numbers of graduate students and expanding numbers of university level taught courses. There are also professional training programmes at national scales and in international contexts that work specifically with children and young people. In addition to a productive journal of Children’s Geographies, there’s a range of monographs, textbooks and edited collections focusing on children and young people published by all the major academic presses then there is a substantive body of work on younger people within human geography and active authors and researchers working within international contexts to warrant a specific Major Reference Work on children’s and young people’s geographies.
The volumes and sections are structured by themes, which then reflect the broader geographical locations of the research.

Dr. Bethan Evans is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool, UK. She is a Feminist Geographer whose research specialisms lie at the intersection of embodied geographies, critical geographies of health and illness, and geographies of children and young people. Bethan’s research has been funded by research councils including the British Academy and ESRC. Bethan’s main research interests relate to the development of critical geographies of fatness through work with fat activists, and to work on the (bio)politics of health and education policy. Bethan completed a BSc and PhD in the Department of Geography at University of Liverpool before taking up posts as Research Associate and Lecturer there. She then worked as Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and Lecturer in human geography and medical humanities at Durham University before returning to the University of Liverpool in 2011.

Dr. John Horton is Associate Professor in Human Geography and Research Leader in Social Sciences at the University of Northampton, UK. He is a Cultural Geographer with a research specialism in relation to children and young people’s geographies. He is Editor of two international academic journals: Children’s Geographies, and Social and Cultural Geography. He is co-author of the book Cultural Geographies (Routledge, 2013), and Series Editor of a new major book series on Spaces of Childhood and Youth (Routledge, 2015-20). John has been Principal or Co-Investigator on more than thirty funded research projects with children, young people and families in the UK. For example, he has been Co-Investigator on major, interdisciplinary research projects funded by ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) and AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council). John’s major research interests relate to children and young people’s play and popular culture, spaces of care and service-provision, and everyday geographies of sustainable urbanism. Before moving to the University of Northampton, John completed a BSc and ESRC-funded MSc/Doctorate in the School for Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Tracey Skelton is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She was previously Professor of Critical Geographies at the University of Loughborough in the UK. The essential elements of her research career focus on people who are socially, politically, and intellectually excluded. Her early work focused on the Caribbean and issues of gender and racial inequality, feminist geographies, and methodological analysis. She has contributed to culture and development debates, particularly through her longitudinal research on the island of Montserrat. Recently, A/P Skelton returned to this field of scholarship through research with volunteers and host organizations in Cambodia as part of a major comparative and collaborative project on development partnerships. She was the principal investigator of a major comparative urbanism research project on the livability, sustainability, and diversity of four Asian cities: Busan in South Korea, Hyderabad in India, Kunming in China, and Singapore.

A/P Skelton is a recognized international leader in the subdiscipline of children’s and young people’s geographies. In particular, her work has served to challenge the invisibility and marginalization of young people from geographic academic research at the same time as it has demonstrated the rich and varied ways in which young people live their lives both spatially and temporally alongside, but differently from, adults. Her research work has been funded by key research institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK; the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Academic Research Fund and the Global Asia Institute, both of the National Universityof Singapore; the Australian Research Council; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

A/P Skelton was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Children’s Geographies and has been the Viewpoints Editor since 2005 and became the Commissioning Editor for Asia in 2010. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Geoforum, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Geography Compass, and ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies (open access). She has coauthored 2 books, edited 3 collections, guest-edited 2 special journal issues, and published more than 70 journal articles and chapters. She is a passionate teacher and graduate supervisor. She is committed to the politics of research dissemination in accessible formats, in particular to enable the participants in her research projects to understand and recognize their coproduction of knowledge whether through specialized small-scale workshops, translation of reports into local languages, or production of audiovisual materials.