Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home / Edition 1

by Peter Hughes Jachimiak

Overview

Using an innovative auto-ethnographic approach to investigate the otherness of the places that make up the childhood home and its neighbourhood in relation to memory-derived and memory-imbued cultural geographies, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home is concerned with childhood spaces and children's perspectives of those spaces and, consequentially, with the personalised locations that make up the childhood family home and its immediate surroundings (such as the garden, the street, etc.). Whilst this book is primarily structured by the author's memories of living in his own Welsh childhood home during the 1970s - that is, the auto-ethnographic framework - it is as much about living anywhere amid the remembered cultural remnants of the past as it is immersing oneself in cultural geographies of the here-and-now. As a result, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home is part of the ongoing pursuit by cultural geographers to provide a personal exploration of the pluralities of shared landscapes, whereby such an engagement with space and place aid our construction of cognitive maps of meaning that, in turn, manifest themselves as both individual and collective cultural experiences. Furthermore, touching upon our co-habiting of ghost topologies, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home also encourages a critical exploration of children’s spirituality amid the haunted cultural and geographical spaces and places of a house and its neighbourhood: the cellar, hallway, parlour, stairs, bedroom, attic, shops, cemeteries, and so on.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781409448129
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/17/2014
Edition description:	Illustrate
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Peter Hughes Jachimiak is senior lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales, UK. His research interests are to do with children’s cultures of the 1970s and 1980s and the way in which the cultural artefacts of childhood, of those two decades, manifested themselves within the wider cultural geographies of the time. As such, Peter Hughes Jachimiak’s current work explores, on one hand, ’children, spectralities, and ghost cultures’, and, on the other, ’utopia, dystopia, and science fiction aimed at children and young adults’.

Table of Contents

Contents: House, rooms, cobwebs - an introduction; The childhood spaces of the house; The childhood spaces of the garden; The childhood spaces of the street; The childhood spaces of suburbia; Epilogue - the hauntology of childhood; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"The cultural context of Peter’s childhood is widely explored in this book taking up a large proportion of the content. The author gives a vivid and familiar (to those who remember) sense of media influences in the 1970s and evokes the layers of social change in play at the time, not least the haunting of earlier generations and the echoes of war time fears. The moments of autobiography in the book though are the most compelling for me since it is with these that the author captures the often unspoken aura of childhood imaginings and experience. These beautifully written excerpts from memory tell how a child’s way of being in the world emerges through sensual and feeling experience to cast an uncanny shadow over later life. Peter Hughes Jachimiak’s book expresses a haunting of smells, tastes, fears and wonderings that linger some-times benignly but at other times profoundly in our adult selves."

- Jane Franklin, Housing Studies

’This is a beautiful and heartfelt book which skilfully weaves together aspects of space, place, memory, emotional geographies of childhood, home and neighbourhood through lenses of auto-ethnography, cultural history and more besides.’ Owain Jones, Bath Spa University, UK ’A wonderful example of doing cultural geography: of evocative and resonant auto-ethnography. A kaleidoscopic view of the 1970s in which the places, experiences, beliefs and reveries of a childhood in South Wales and the books, comics, television programmes, films and popular pursuits of the period constantly shift to create new and provocative perceptions of the cultural fabric and transformations of that difficult decade. A valuable, creative and highly readable addition to the literature on geographies of childhood, and especially on the impact of media.’ Mike Pearson, Aberystwyth University, UK ’... this text is a welcome and a valuable example of autoethnography in practice. The methods employed in this work would likely be of particular interest to Children’s Geographers considering the boundaries of childhood and adulthood.’ Children’s Geographies

From the Publisher