At the turn of the twentieth century, urban reformers across the United States became preoccupied with providing recreation facilities for urban children. Municipal park departments, boards of education and local philanthropic associations established supervised playgrounds, recreation parks, and vacation schools, in order to energize America's youth and transform its fledgling bodies into healthy future citizens. In addition to the daily schedule of physical exercise and games, playground groups also organized a series of exhibitions, field days and parades to demonstrate the positive effects of physical education on the nation's young bodies. Such demonstrations were overtly patriotic spectacles, incorporating transparently nationalistic rituals and symbols. Rather than focus on the symbolic currency of these events, however, I argue that the scientific logic of physical education renders a symbolic reading quite incongruent. Playgrounds drew from the emerging fields of child psychology and popular theories of psychosocial disorder. From these, a new field of play and physical education theory constructed the development of child consciousness as a mechanical and, more importantly, muscular process. Aspects of character, including national identity, were increasingly sought directly through children's physicality. The paper therefore rejects the seemingly symbolic function of public spectacles of fitness. Likewise, while recent interventions by non-representational theory might appear to coincide with the psychological rationale of playgrounds, they too must be treated with caution or risk affirming the success of an explicitly nation-building project. Instead, this paper seeks to do justice to the logic of playground reform as a real and potent strategy to produce socially useful subjects without according that logic permanent and efficacious status.

Schools are one of many sites to incorporate emotional literacy into their institutional agenda in recent years. Alongside broader changes in social, economic and political practice, schools have welcomed emotional education as a necessary element in the training of young people. In 2007, the government introduced Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) to secondary schools across England and Wales. The aim of the programme is to integrate emotional literacy into the secondary school curriculum, following the successful implementation of SEAL at primary level. In this paper, I argue that rather than being about the encouragement of happy, content or well-adjusted individuals, it is, more crucially, about a new form of citizenship. Forms of self-government predicated on emotional management have been made possible since the widespread popularisation of neuroscientific understandings of emotions. By tracing the transposition of these ideas from popular brain science to education policy and finally to the curricula delivered via SEAL, I suggest that educating emotions has become central to the way citizenship is currently being defined for young people. By bringing together recent insights from geographies of education, emotion and citizenship, I suggest that the relationship between governmentality, education and youth requires closer critical attention.

At the turn of the 20th century, children's play came under new and heightened scrutiny by urban reformers. As conditions in US cities threatened traditional notions of order, reformers sought new ways to direct urban-social development. In this paper I explore playground reform as an institutional response that aimed to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children. Supervised summer playgrounds were established across the United States as a means of drawing children off the street and into a corrective environment. Drawing from literature published by the Playground Association of America and a case study of playground management in Cambridge, MA, I explore playground training as a means of constructing gender identities in and through public space. Playground reformers asserted, drawing from child development theory, that the child's body was a conduit through which ‘inner’ identity surfaced. The child's body became a site through which gender identities could be both monitored and produced, compelling reformers to locate playgrounds in public, visible settings. Reformers' conviction that exposing girls to public vision threatened their development motivated a series of spatial restrictions. Whereas boys were unambiguously displayed to public audiences, girls' playgrounds were organised to accommodate this fear. Playground reformers' shrewd spatial tactics exemplify the ways in which institutional authorities conceive of and deploy space toward the construction of identity.

No abstract

No abstract