5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

How do children and young people locate themselves in the world? What knowledge and which emotions do they associate with certain spaces? Such questions become particularly pressing in the context of the Anthropocene because it is increasingly being questioned which places will be habitable (in the future). Questions of self-localization also arise in the context of family migration experiences or images of distant places that are charged in a specific way. The ways children make sense of and construct different localities have been studied as “emotional geographies” (Blazek 2018). In this sense spaces are not understood as static entities, but as being produced, reinterpreted and adopted by subjects – including children and youths.

In this session, we would like to discuss the question of how the local and global self-positioning of adolescents can be methodically captured and methodologically justified. We welcome contributions from scholars who
• work with methods such as mapping tools (e.g., mental mapping or geographical mapping tools), interviews, pictures/visualizations or a combination thereof.
• discuss the appropriateness of such approaches for research with children.
• offer conceptualizations of “spaces”, “places” and “localities”.
• approach questions on the temporal (present and future) and geographical (near and far places) dimensions of young people’s self-positionings and/or on the affective dimension
(rejection of and attraction to certain places; danger zones; dream-places), as well as the knowledge about certain spaces.
• discuss questions of social (in)justice regarding young people’s temporal, geographical and affective self-positionings.