Key Messages
Mental health and wellness are issues of growing concern on North American campuses.
A feminist geography perspective reveals that there are cultural, institutional, political, and intersectional factors that impede active engagement with mental health and wellness in the academy.
We encourage geographers to consider mental health and wellness as professional development issues of concern to us all.
Human-nature relations of home have been gaining more attention in geography, especially in the study of gardens. This article contributes to this growing literature, but in contrast to much research, it examines human -nature relations in the patios (garden) of homes in a marginalized barrio (slum) of Managua, Nicaragua. I suggest that the humannature relations in these patios need to be understood differently than those in North American and European gardens. Based on research carried out in Managua, I argue that such relations are at the centre of everyday domestic activities and are critical in producing home as a liveable space in the city. The article draws on feminist geographic understandings of home and current work around human-environment relations, and identifies three different sets of socio-ecological relations: corporeal, aesthetic and economic. It argues that these three different relations between humans and the plants and trees in their patios are critical in the imaginaries around home and in the production of habitable spaces in cities, as well as to our understanding of urban natures.
This article focuses on the material and discursive constructions of nature and chil dren in the city. While dominant representations and idealizations of nature and child hood depend on the binary logic of the nature/culture and rural/urban divide, there is also a simplification and romanticization of nature in children's geographies and a lack of chil dren and their spaces in urban political ecology. We argue that children and nature in cities need to be removed from a binary model of being and attended to in more nuanced ways in urban political ecology and children's geographies. In this regard, we suggest that both nature and children in cities need to be queered. We need to ask how the production of urban spaces (re)creates particular romantic and idealized relations with natures that reify the binaries between nature/culture, and male/female through a heteronormative framework. The purpose of this article is to bring the critical nature-society theories of urban political ecology into conversation with work in children's geographies that explores the 'nature' of childhood, and in doing so queer the relationship between children and nature. Drawing on research on queer ecologies, and queered childhoods, we aim to provide a framework to rethink and queer both nature and children in cities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.