A Politics of Scale in Research: The “Youth Making Place” Project and Sustainability Education Policy

• In Event: Spatial and Geographic Analysis in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

Social scientists including educational researchers, have increasingly been turning to theorists of space such as Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey and others, to help think through the ways in which the trialetic of space, time and the social can be understood as interwoven, and the implications of this for the possibilities of empirical research. Rather than space being understood as an unchanging container for time and action, this work explores the ways in which the realms of time, space and the social are mutually constitutive. Massey (1994), for example, outlines a four-dimensional concept of space-time in which 3-D space and 1-D time, while considered different, are viewed as inextricably interwoven with each other and with the social. This paper will engage the methodological implications of these considerations of the effects of time, space and the social on the modes of becoming and being as experienced by youth and in relation to the scaler implications for educational policy and practice. In particular, the paper draws on the example of a Saskatchewan-based study on Aboriginal and new immigrant youth orientations to place and sustainability.

“The Digital Media Project: Youth Making Place” developed as a collaboration among participating youth, community organizers, and researchers and ran as a pilot study in 2011. It has a central focus on the engagement and learning of local youth in developing their digital media skills, “having a voice on local-global community issues important to them,” and exploring their own identity in relation to place and sustainability. With a new mandate in the province of Saskatchewan for education for sustainable development (ESD), the study asks: what do the “local practices and knowledge” of the ESD Bonn Declaration (UNESCO, 2009) mean on Treaty Six territory and in a historical context of migration, displacement, assimilation, and strengthening of both neoliberal globalization, and local and translocal communities and traditions? In particular, what do they mean to contemporary youth, who live within and across these categories and circumstances, and who are or will be the targets of K-12 sustainability education policies and practices?

Concerned with the potential slippage and assumptions of ESD as educational policy in Saskatchewan and globally, we are gathering together thick description which we hope to piece together with work in other locations in ways that better enable critical policy analysis in sustainability education (Sassen, 2007). These research data include youth mappings, photos, and short films on places and sustainability issues important to them. They indicate, as Katz (2004) suggests, the “multiplicity of presences” in place/space – political, cultural, economic, and subjective – which are woven through youth identities and in relation to other places as well. The data from this participatory youth project will be used to examine and exemplify some of the possibilities of research undertaken from a spatial framework.

Author

• Marcia McKenzie, University of Saskatchewan