Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home

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 childrena€?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.

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 childrena€?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 Jachimiaka€?s current work explores, on one hand, a€?children, spectralities, and ghost culturesa€?, and, on the other, a€?utopia, dystopia, and science fiction aimed at children and young adultsa€?.