Christina Benninghaus

Bio: Christina Benninghaus is an academic researcher from Bielefeld University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Girl. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 31 citations.

‘An instruction in good citizenship’: scouting and the historical geographies of citizenship education

Abstract: This paper examines informal citizenship training for youth and the historical geographies of education over time through analysing the Scout Movement in Britain and its activities in the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, it highlights the complexity of youth citizenship and the significance of non-school spaces in civil society to our understandings of young people's positioning as citizen-subjects. Drawing on archival research, I demonstrate how a specific youth citizenship project was constructed and maintained through the Scout Movement. I argue that various processes, strategies and regulations were involved in envisioning 'citizen-scout' and developing both duty-bound, self-regulated individuals as well as a wider collective body of British youth. This analysis speaks to broader debates on citizenship, nationhood and youth, as well as highlighting how the historical geographies of citizenship education are an important area of study for geographers.

Scouting for girls? Gender and the Scout Movement in Britain

Abstract: This article brings a feminist geopolitics to bear upon an analysis of the Boy Scout Movement in Britain in order to illustrate how an emphasis upon seemingly banal, embodied practices such as dressing, writing and crafting can provide a counter-view to prevailing notions of the elite, organisational ‘scripting’ of individualised, geopolitical identities. Here, these practices undertaken by girls are understood not as subversive, or even transgressive, in the face of broader-scale constructions of the self and the collective body, but rather as related moments in the emergence of a complex, tension-ridden ‘movement’ that exceed specific attempts at fixity along the lines of gender. Using archival data, this article examines various embodied practices by ‘girl scouts’ that were made possible by such attempts at fixity but which also, in turn, opened up new spaces of engagement and negotiation. A cumulative shift from a determinedly masculine to a co-educational organisation over the course of the twentieth...

Youth organizations and the reproduction of nationalism in Britain: the role of Urdd Gobaith Cymru

Abstract: Youth organizations have long played significant roles in promoting particular forms of nationalism among young people in the UK. To date, however, academic studies of UK youth organizations have been Anglocentric, focusing on youth organizations associated with a hegemonic British state and imperial project. This paper seeks to show how youth organizations have also been used to promote alternative forms of nationalism in the UK, which have sought to challenge a British state and imperial project. Focusing explicitly on Wales, it examines how Urdd Gobaith Cymru – the Welsh League of Youth – has played a significant role over the past 90 years in promoting a Welsh and Welsh-speaking citizenship amongst Welsh youth. Drawing on documentary and archival research, the paper discusses how the organization has fostered particular practices and identities among its members and the way in which these have been challenged in recent years; most notably as a result of a decline in the numbers of Welsh speake...