Light, connectivity, and place: young people living in a post-industrial town

Thomas, Gareth M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4959-2337, Elliott, Eva ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1583-2603, Exley, Eve, Ivinson, Gabrielle and Renold, Emma ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6472-0224 2018. Light, connectivity, and place: young people living in a post-industrial town. cultural geographies 25 (4) , pp. 537-551. 10.1177/1474474018762811

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Abstract

This article reports on a study of how young people in a post-industrial UK town reflect on their sense of health, place, and identity. Drawing on fifty-six qualitative interviews with 14-15 year olds, we explore how young people negotiate public space and how public lighting and darkness affect interactions with their surroundings. The young people provide an insight into how dark places ignite strong feelings of anxiety and danger, deeply fuelled by the environment itself together with rumours, lived knowledge of the locale, and symbolic boundaries shaping identities of belonging and exclusion in a context of structural inequality. Young people’s understandings of place are configured and energised by multiple sources, such as personal experiences and social locations, material landscapes, and powerful discourses – historical and contemporary – conveyed via stories, cautionary tales, and stigmatising media representations. We describe how the young people organised a public campaign to, among other things, install streetlights in a dark location. Their activism demonstrates how street-lighting, or its absence, is both emblematic of the importance of connectivity and place in their lives, and a manifestation of material (political) abandonment and (class) devaluation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Publisher:	SAGE
ISSN:	1474-4740
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 January 2018
Date of Acceptance:	17 January 2018
Last Modified:	12 Nov 2024 21:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/108003

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