Neon bright: Cool Places, youth cultures and hopeful political-theoretical futures

ABSTRACT

This article provides a reflection on Skelton and Valentine's (1998. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge.) book ‘Cool Places’. The article focuses upon the excitement, vitality and sense of challenge that the book afforded when the two authors first encountered it. From these personal memories, the article then offers two sets of wider considerations. In the first, and prompted by the authors’ use of the book in their teaching, it articulates how useful, relevant and engaging even contemporary students find the book, and how it offers a key point of reference within and beyond the teaching of ‘children's geographies'. In the second, the authors seek to re-engage the book's lively, hopeful, yet critically-political orientations, offering a series of challenges for future scholarship in the geographies of childhood and youth. Like the rest of the article, these orient around a sense of what ‘matters’ in and to geographical scholarship on childhood and youth.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• relevance
• youth cultures
• teaching children’s geographies
• growing up
• materialities

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Peter Kraftl is based at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham.

John Horton is based in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Northampton.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [grant number 15/50226-0]; ESRC [grant number ES/K00932X/1].