The Space and Power of Young People's Social Relationships

"In this wonderful engagement with the ways young people are immersed and engaged in the world, Louise Holt brings together research, ideas and musings about schools and schooling at a time when those institutions, spaces and practices are under siege. With an ironic focus on the futurity of young people she wonders why they are side-lined and ignored when they have so much to say and do. Louise’s passion is to transform what is broken in our world by giving young people more consideration and care, more agency and power. The book is meant as an emotional and social challenge, and yet throughout there is a sense of joy and hope. Young people can change the world and our job as older people is to let them."

-Dr. Stuart C. Aitken, Albert W. Johnson Distinguished Professor, Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Member, June Burnett Endowed Chair, Director - Center for Research on Youth, Environment, Society and Space (YESS), Fellow of Aemula Lauri - the Royal Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Fellow of the American Association of Geographers.

"Building from over twenty years of in-depth field-based research, Louise Holt offers a fresh, invigorating and inspiring exploration of young people in their school life-worlds. Attending to the stories and experiences of particular individuals – with different attributes and aptitudes; from differing backgrounds and often in complex intersectional conjunctions – she carefully uncovers achievement and struggle, joy and sadness, fun and boredom, friendship and animosity, care and control, inclusion and exclusion. Deploying the novel concept of ‘immersion’, she shows the importance of varying time-space contexts within which social relationships and power dynamics arise and become consequential: as young people acquire and deploy stocks of social, emotional and embodied ‘capital’, sometimes to reinforce enduring patterns of discrimination, other times to create exciting new possibilities from which ‘we’ all should learn. This book is a major new resource and provocation for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, educationalists and indeed anyone interested in what makes for ‘liveable’ or ‘unliveable lives’ for young people."

- Professor Christopher Philo, University of Glasgow