Introduction

Over the many hours we (the chapter authors) have spent working together, we have shared and discussed difficult and vulnerable experiences through which our conversations and our shared interests have moved beyond the professional and into the realms of friendship. This period of change in our relationship has been shaped by our (at times clumsy) negotiation of many small and seemingly inconsequential decisions about how we relate to and interact with each other, shaped by our ideas of masculinity and what it means to be a man friend of another man. Despite the privilege of our positions as well- educated, white, middle- class males, there was, at times, a vulnerability in our navigation of male friendship. We draw on these personal and also critically informed ideas of what masculinities are and can be in this chapter to explore how precarious public space experiences are encountered and negotiated by young men in a particular urban context, and how their performances of masculinity are shaped by dominant discourses in relation to youth presence in public space.

The chapter draws on data collected through two ethnographic research projects conducted independently within half a square mile of each other. The two projects (one starting as the other drew to a close) collectively cover a period of eight years of in- depth data exploring young men's experiences in an inner London borough. Using differing theoretical framings, both researchers were broadly concerned to understand the everyday construction and performance of young masculinities in urban, public spaces with a specific focus on experiences of violence.

Rivers and their valleys have long been a source of contemplation and wonder. They are not only key geomorphic agents, but they are also economically important, acting as transportation arteries, sources of irrigation water and food, and as generators of hydropower. We also use rivers for drinking, waste disposal, and for a variety of recreational activities. Many geomorphologists consider running water to be the most dominant and important geomorphic process – shaping landscapes everywhere. Even in deserts, running water is often the most important and widespread geomorphic agent.

Most valleys have a stream or a river at their bottom. In ancient days, it was thought that water simply “found” its way into preexisting valleys, forming rivers there. Geomorphologists now know that most valleys were formed by the rivers currently within them, which moved sediment out and carved the valley over time.

Arches, hoodoos, buttes, mesas … these are the picturesque landforms that most tourists and landscape-lovers know about, and which are the focus of many parks and recreation areas. All of these landforms are bedrock-controlled, with rock at or immediately beneath the surface. This chapter introduces a wide array of bedrock-controlled landforms. Most have formed on sedimentary rock, the most common rock in Earth’s upper crust. Thus, much of the focus in this chapter will be on landforms developed on flat-lying bedrock strata (layers) that have experienced minimal tectonic disturbance throughout their history. Chapters 9 and 10 focus on bedrock-controlled landforms formed on much more tectonically active landscapes.

Weathering is central to geomorphology; without it, landforms would not exist. Weathering sculpts rocks and landscapes at all scales, from producing tiny pits on rock surfaces to forming large valleys. It is everywhere.

However, weathering does not work alone. Instead, it operates alongside other surficial processes to produce the landscapes we see around us. Weathering is often defined as the in situ (meaning “in position”) breakdown of rocks and minerals. It is distinct from erosion, which involves the removal and transport of material, usually downslope. Often, weathering preconditions rocks for erosion by making them weaker and less coherent. Together, weathering and erosion operate to form landforms via denudation – the overall lowering of the land surface.

This collection sets out to understand the way injustice features in young people's lives and how social justice might be achieved. Towards this, contributing authors have offered insights from research and practice contexts to understand the ways young people in a global context experience and navigate social (in)justices on the path to adulthood. Contributing authors have drawn on key areas of the sociology of youth, including education, employment, (sub)cultures, citizenship, ‘race’ and racism, and gender to bring a focus on the spaces young people inhabit as they navigate transitions. The collection is set out in two parts, both speaking across the key concepts of youth, transitions, space and social justice. The first section privileges a focus on space and place, with ideas of hauntings, liminality and waithoods, as well as opening up spaces of belonging, feeling safe and collective action. The second section brings a focus on research and practice methods and contexts that actively engage and involve young people, including participatory action research, youth work and the utility of international policy frameworks towards enacting spaces of social justice.

However, chapters in both sections focus on and across these key concepts, utilising them as appropriate to understand young people's experiences in particular contexts. With this, we have aimed to offer a global perspective on youth transitions through the ways different spaces are explored, and give examples of developing knowledge and practical ways of addressing young people's experiences of social change and inequalities. Transitions across these contexts happen at different times in young people's lives, and are constrained by the ways power demarcates and limits movements in and across space. However, contributors offer insights on the ways spaces are individually and collectively imagined, reappropriated and brought into existence.

Introduction

Research on the relationships between youth and public spaces has uncovered clear links between how public, open and enclosed spaces are structured and configured and the uses and effects on the physical and mental state of youth (Van Hecke et al, 2018; Manferdelli et al, 2019; Wallace et al, 2020; Prince et al, 2022). In decision- making processes about how to shape or how to use public spaces, there are overlapping dimensions of a very different nature that include both obvious physical aspects of space and less obvious ones of a sociocultural and governmental nature (Wesener, 2020). Given that public spaces are intended for all citizens, it is a matter of social justice to guarantee that their configuration and use truly achieve this universality and equity (Duncum, 2014; Mitchell, 2021). In this way, the influence of public space on people's lives goes beyond spatial issues and also involves issues of social relationships that connect social cohesion, neighbourhood and better mental health of youth (Breedvelt et al, 2022).

Along with this value of public spaces, we draw attention to the processes of youth participation in political decisions about them. The benefits of youth participation as citizens in decision making about the configuration of public spaces have been supported by social research (Sullivan et al, 2021). However, there is still a lack of visibility of comprehensive approaches to this phenomenon, where the voices of young people take centre stage and their participation is not just aesthetic or ad hoc.

G. K. Gilbert is considered one of the founders of modern geomorphology (see Chapter 2). In his 1877 report on the geology of the Henry Mountains of Utah, he wrote that (p. 109).

How old is the Grand Canyon? When did the glaciers last retreat from this area? How long does it take to form an inch of topsoil? When did the earthquake occur that formed these rock scarps? These are the questions that geomorphologists ponder. This chapter will outline the tools and approaches we use to answer such questions.

Establishing how old a landform might be, that is, when it formed, has always occupied the mindset of geomorphologists. If we know how OLD a landform is, then we can begin to understand how it is evolving, how fast it might be changing, and how it formed in the first place. Fortunately, various dating principles and techniques now exist to address these issues. These techniques require the ability to measure change in a system or a landform over time, with the (usual) goal of establishing the age of a sediment package or a landform.

Geomorphology is the study of landforms – their evolution, shape (morphology), and composition. The word comes from the Greek (geo, Earth, morphos, referring to form, and ology, a branch of knowledge). Landforms come in all types, shapes, sizes, compositions, and ages. There is a landform for everyone, and no two are exactly alike. Understanding Earth’s landforms – how they are formed, altered, destroyed, and/or buried by various geologic processes – is at the core of geomorphology. This textbook will teach you the language and concepts that will help you to understand the workings of many of Earth’s physical systems. Our goal is to equip you with the vocabulary and toolkit for understanding why Earth’s physical landscapes look the way they do. This knowledge will help us all to better manage our fragile natural resources.

As we move into a post- pandemic society, we see struggles to (re)solve familiar issues, with the lack of equitable access to knowledge, networks, support and power cementing a position disconnected from the mainstream for a significant population of young people in the UK. One of the notable consequences of COVID- 19 was that it intensified those entrenched and intractable challenges, further reducing access to impactful personal, social and skills development and education, and thereby limiting potential and defining life chances. This, in turn, exacerbated a challenging social situation for young people, reflecting predictable descriptors of ‘hard- to- reach’, ‘atrisk’ or ‘difficult- to- engage’ into the already widespread exclusion of certain communities as ‘deviant’ and or at risk (Cohen, 1972; Jeffs and Smith, 1999).

This chapter is concerned with two distinct types of exclusion facing young people, impacting how they understand, experience and access the social and digital dimensions of their lives. In a post- pandemic society, these are symbiotically tied to each other, a relationship and interaction which serve to further marginalize those who are already ‘left behind’. We will explore how an alternative to traditional education approaches, one rooted in the inclusion and empowerment of young people through nonformal educational approaches, might be able to offer an innovative solution through an evolution of Bourdieu's capital theory (1986).

Introduction

Youth workers work with young people who are on the cusp of adulthood and into young adulthood during their transition away from childhood. Since the 1950s, social justice has been frequently referenced as a foundational value informing the goals and methods of youth work. In this chapter, we compare two UN documents, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), to see how each contributes to social justice- based youth work theory and practice. British influenced professional youth work (Cooper, 2012) makes various claims about youth work values and purposes, including claims that youth work promotes social justice (Crooks, 1992; Corney, 2004) through commitments to anti- oppressive work, inclusive practice, youth empowerment and advocacy (Batsleer and Davies, 2010; Cooper, 2018), human rights and equity (Sapin, 2013; Corney et al, 2022). In the post- Second World War period of the mid- 20th century, these aspirations were accepted relatively uncritically because they aligned with the dominant political social democratic discourse in liberal democracies at this time. After the rise of neoliberalism in liberal democratic societies from the 1980s onwards and into the 21st century, the post- war social democratic consensus has been broken (Heywood, 2017), and social justice values have become more contested. Without further justification, social justice is no longer automatically accepted as a worthy goal for youth work.

Plants and animals are, unquestionably, important geomorphic agents. Nonetheless, their key roles in the geomorphic system have only recently been properly appreciated and studied. In fact, the term biogeomorphology was only introduced in 1988, by Professor Heather Viles, as an approach to geomorphology that explicitly considers the role of organisms.

Biogeomorphology focuses on the influence of plants, animals, and microorganisms on landforms and geomorphic processes, and vice versa. This chapter examines how the field of biogeomorphology has expanded since its formal definition in 1988. We will discuss the role of plants in geomorphology, usually simply referred to as phytogeomorphology, as well as the role of animals, whose role in landscape evolution is captured by the term zoogeomorphology. Despite the emphasis that researchers have placed on the role of macroorganisms in geomorphology, some more recent, pioneering work has also shown that microorganisms are also important.

Introduction

Within contemporary youth studies, there is a clear imperative to incorporate diverse youth voices, including those from the Global South (Cooper and Swartz, 2024), while advancing research with young people rather than about them (Howard et al, 2025). Youth studies scholars have risen to this challenge by, among other things, (re)engaging with social action theories and concepts such as intersectionality and social justice, as this edited collection shows. Located in this space, our chapter speaks to youth transitions and cultures research by (re)examining ‘raving’ – an enduringly popular global or ‘translocal’ leisure activity (Karkabi, 2020; Chakravarty and Bennett, 2024) – through the lens of intersectionality and youth social in/ justices. We use ‘raving’ instead of ‘clubbing’ to capture young people's own naming of the practice of attending electronic dance music (EDM) venues/ events (that is, ‘the rave’), where specific forms of illegal drug use are prevalent and best understood through the lens of ‘differentiated normalisation’ (Shildrick, 2002). We argue that for some young people, the practice of raving may, under certain structural and cultural conditions, create temporary yet intensely trans- formative spaces/ times relevant to the present and future pursuit of youth social justice. Specifically, for young Queer Trans People of Colour (QTPOC) in the UK on whom we focus, raving produces emergent meanings and practices which open new and different ways of being and belonging in the world (Jackson, 2004; Formby, 2017).

Exploration of planetary bodies beyond Earth is occurring at an ever-increasing rate. What used to be points of light in the night sky are now amazing, complicated, and intriguing objects of geologic study. For extraterrestrial bodies with solid surfaces – such as rocky planets, asteroids, and icy bodies – the study of planetary bodies as geologic objects includes careful scrutiny of their surfaces. Planetary exploration is an examination of geomorphology, as our interpretations of other planetary surfaces are largely guided by geomorphic studies done on Earth. At the same time, planetary landforms developed in different geologic conditions than on Earth – such as under different gravities, in different materials (like ice instead of rock), and beneath different atmospheric pressures or compositions.

This chapter illustrates that various geomorphic processes observed on Earth occur on other planets as well, and also how the resultant landforms contrast with those found on Earth.