Geographies of Global Issues

Empirically, Dr. Ansell's research has explored the impacts of education and of the AIDS pandemic in southern African countries, notably Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Her research on schooling has demonstrated the limited value of secondary education for many rural girls. Findings are reported in journals including Geoforum (''Of course we mustbe equal, but ...': imagining gendered futures in two rural Southern African secondary schools') and Youth and Society ('Secondary schooling and rural youth transitions in Lesotho and Zimbabwe'). She has drawn attention to the ways in which AIDS has led to children's migration, and the impacts of such migration on children's lives, in articles published in Environment and Planning D ('Children's experiences of migration in Southern Africa: moving in the wake of AIDS') and The Professional Geographer ('Fluid households, complex families: the impacts of children's migration as a response to HIV/AIDS in southern Africa'). She has also revealed the (limited) impacts of AIDS on young people's rural livelihoods articles in Transitions of the Institute of British Geographers and Children's Geographies ('Reconceptualising temporality in young lives: exploring young people's current and future livelihoods in AIDS-affected southern Africa') and Environment and Planning A ('Spaces, times and critical moments: a relational time-space analysis of the impacts of AIDS on rural youth in Malawi and Lesotho'). This research has not only mapped young people's experiences in contemporary southern Africa, but has sought to theorise both spatial and temporal aspects of these experiences.

 Dr. Ansell is currently running two collaborative research projects. The first explores the impacts of social cash transfers (such as child grants and old age pensions) on young people in Malawi and Lesotho. Such transfers are likely to shape relations of age, gender and generation, and as a consequence to affect young people's experiences of poverty. The second project investigates the relationship between schooling and aspiration in remote rural areas of India, Laos and Lesotho. Organisations such as the World Bank increasingly see raising aspiration as a means of encouraging young people to engage more effectively with schooling. Yet there is widespread evidence that young people globally have high aspirations that cannot be fulfilled. The research seeks to develop a more nuanced understanding of aspiration.






Dr. Natascha Klocker is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Dr Klocker has published widely in the field of children and young people's geographies, particularly on the topic of child domestic work. Her research has sought to question western assumptions that childhoods should appropriately be work-free. This work has been published in international journals including Children's Geographies (including papers titled: 'Struggling with child domestic work: what can a postcolonial perspective offer?' and 'Negotiating change: working with children and their employers to transform child domestic work in Iringa, Tanzania') and Geoforum ('Conducting sensitive research in th