Geographies of children, youth and families: an international perspective

This edited collection brings together international experts from the vibrant and growing field of geographies of children, youth and families. The book provides an overview of current conceptual and theoretical debates, and gives a wide range of examples of cutting-edge research from a variety of national contexts across the globe. The theme of 'disentangling the socio-spatial contexts of young people and/or their families' advances debates in geographies and social studies of young people and families by emphasising the context of young people's social agency. The book is designed to provide an introduction to the topic of geographies of children, youth and families and is an invaluable course text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of geography and the social sciences. This interdisciplinary text is also of likely interest to students and practitioners of education, youth work, social policy and social work.

Youth/youth cultures

Youth is an embodied social construct attached to people who are too young to be classified as fully adult, and yet older than children. It is a term whose meaning is sociospatially specific and shifting. Youth and young people are often perceived as troubling to society, and the earliest studies of youth were tied to attempts to control unruly young people. Studies of youth cultures often utilized ethnographic research to explore the perspectives of young people. Early youth cultural studies inadvertently reproduced some dominant representations of youth, as male and troubling to society, by focusing upon subcultural groupings, such as Punks and Mods, and by excluding accounts of those other than white, heterosexual males. Recent studies have moved beyond these accounts to consider how youth cultures are porous, differentiated rather than holistic, connected to broader sociospatial processes, and can reproduce powerful social relationships, such as gender, along with teasing out how youth cultures are played out differently in various geographical contexts.

Global trends and factors associated with the illegal killing of elephants: a hierarchical bayesian analysis of carcass encounter data

Elephant poaching and the ivory trade remain high on the agenda at meetings of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Well-informed debates require robust estimates of trends, the spatial distribution of poaching, and drivers of poaching. We present an analysis of trends and drivers of an indicator of elephant poaching of all elephant species. The site-based monitoring system known as Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE), set up by the 10th Conference of the Parties of CITES in 1997, produces carcass encounter data reported mainly by anti-poaching patrols. Data analyzed were site by year totals of 6,337 carcasses from 66 sites in Africa and Asia from 2002–2009. Analysis of these observational data is a serious challenge to traditional statistical methods because of the opportunistic and non-random nature of patrols, and the heterogeneity across sites. Adopting a Bayesian hierarchical modeling approach, we used the proportion of carcasses that were illegally killed (PIKE) as a poaching index, to estimate the trend and the effects of site- and country-level factors associated with poaching. Important drivers of illegal killing that emerged at country level were poor governance and low levels of human development, and at site level, forest cover and area of the site in regions where human population density is low. After a drop from 2002, PIKE remained fairly constant from 2003 until 2006, after which it increased until 2008. The results for 2009 indicate a decline. Sites with PIKE ranging from the lowest to the highest were identified. The results of the analysis provide a sound information base for scientific evidence-based decision making in the CITES process.