I’ve set up this blog as a space in which to share my thoughts, as they emerge, about a small research project I am currently working on. The project is called ‘The Place of Aspirations: emotional geographies of young people’s ambitions for their adult lives‘. The work is funded by a Small Research Grant from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
The main objectives of this project are:
- to analyse how policy discourses about young people’s ‘aspirations’ explicitly or implicity relate to space and place
- to examine how aspiration and ambition are expressed as spatial practices.
- to explore what other emotions and affects attach themselves to thinking about (and doing) ‘aspiration’
The project involves a critical evaluation of the policy documents driving widening participation policy (and related interventions in young people’s lives) in a UK context; as well as interviews with widening participation practitioners working in local education sectors in inner London and the East Midlands. A small number of focus group workshops will also be carried out with school age young people, and current undergraduates, who have participated in ‘aspiration raising’ activities organised by their schools, universities and local Aimhigher partnerships.
The research seeks to broaden understandings of the emotional consequences of widening partcipation policy interventions. As a result, I hope this work will contribute to, and extend, theoretical debates at the intersections of geographies of education, geographies of childhood, and emotional/affective geographies. In carrying out this project, I will explore how these discrete research agendas can be pushed further theoretically, in dialogue with each other, whilst also producing findings that can make a contribution to policy development and widening participation practice.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.