Staff Profile

My work has spanned social and political geography with separate but inter-connected interests in geographies of childhood, emotions and marginalised migration. What brings these themes together is the focus on agency and commitment to critical collaborative praxis with partners from within and outside academia.

As a pedagogue, I am particularly interested in the interrelated themes of mental health and inequalities in higher education. 

Before coming to Newcastle in 2017, I was a lecturer at the Loughborough University (2012-2016) and a researcher for the International Organization for migration (2012-2013).

I am Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Children's Geographies.

Google Scholar

SCOPUS

My main interest is in how people too often found to lack capacities to act can transform their lives, their communities, and the world far beyond. Thematically, my research has evolved around two areas - childhood and marginalised migrants - and I am open to collaborations with academics and non-academics interested in these topics. I am also particularly interested in emotional geographies. Also very happy to hear from students (postgraduate and undergraduate) looking for supervision on these themes. I tend to work collaboratively and my commitment is to mutually beneficial and fair engagement with partners from outside academia.

(Some publications linked below should be freely accessible via Newcastle University depository or my ResearchGate profile. If they are not, I am happy to share them directly.)

The work on children and young people has addressed the following themes:

• My biggest academic passion is in children's agency, understood as the capacity to act and make a difference. A monograph Rematerialising Children's Agency published with Policy Press considered how children's actions emerge from a variety of factors, from material objects through everyday routines to notions of social identity, and how taking these seriously can reshape adult politics of childhood. More recently, I explored how an extended notion of agency can help us better understand process of human trafficking. 
• My second big interest in children's and young people's emotional geographies. The work in this area includes a co-edited special issue of Emotion, Space and Society on theories and methodologies of children's emotional geographies, and a co-edited book Children's Emotions in Policy and Practice with Palgrave that took these debates into the sphere of policy and professional practice. Elsewhere I reflected on the potential of psychoanalysis in children's emotional geographies, emotional lens of adult politics of childhood, and wrote a couple of review essays (here and here).
• I am interested in geographies of youth work, having undertaken research in a dual role of researcher and practitioner. Publications include writings on youth mentoring, detached youth work and methodologies of ethnographic research in a youth worker role.
• I have interest in methodologies of research with children and young people, including ethnography, psychoanalytic and participatory approaches. In writing I have most widely focused on participatory video (here, here and here).
• A theme present through my research with children is geographies of gender, particularly in the context of friendship and care.
• At present, I am engaged in work considering transnational youth (im)mobilities.

A more recent area of my work has regarded migrants and marginalisation. More specifically:

• I took part in a nation-wide study of migrants' experience with violence,abuse and exploitation in Slovakia which shifted attention to areas not traditionally seen as immigration countries and highlighted factors behind susceptibility to multiple forms of abuse and exploitation.
• More recently, I investigated processes of human trafficking between Slovakia and the United Kingdom, arguing that human trafficking needs to be seen as a social justice problem of inequality and structural marginalisation.

Currently, my research focus is on post-socialist geographies of race and racism.

These research themes have been surrounded by two additional interests that permeate much of my work:

One is the politics of academia, specifically in relation to ethics of care as a medium of academic impact, the role of emotions in producing and challenging academic spaces and practices, and on volunteering-practitioner modes of research and relationship-centred perspectives on ethics.

The other topic, given that much of my work is situated in Central Europe, has to do with conceptualising post-socialism, specifically through dialogic (rather than dialectic) thinking.

I am on research leave in the academic year 2022/23 and won't be involved in student-facing activities.

• Blazek M, Stenning A. Neoliberal subjectivities and the teaching and learning of emotional geographies. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 2022, Epub ahead of print.
• Blazek M. Children's right to be hostile: Emotions and agency through psychodynamic lens. Emotion, Space and Society 2021, 41, 100850.
• Hopkins P, Newcastle Social Geographies Collective, Pain R, Shaw R, Gao Q, Bonnett A, Jones C, Richardson M, Rzedzian S, Benwell MC, Lin W, McAreavey R, Stenning A, Blazek M, Pande R, Najib K, Finlay R, Nayak A, Ridley G, Mearns G, Bonner-Thompson C, McLaughlin J, Boussalem A, Iqbal N, Heslop J, Jarvis H, Burrows R, Bambra C, Copeland A, Tate S, Campbell E, Thompson M, James A, Raynor R, Cunningham N, Powells G, Herbert J, Hocknell S, ed. Social Geographies: An Introduction. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.
• Blazek M, Askins K. Volunteer-Practitioner Research, Relationships and Friendship-Liness: Re-Enacting Geographies of Care. In: Miggelbrink, J; Hörschelmann, K; Henn, S, ed. Research Ethics in Human Geography. Principles, Practices, and Perspectives. London, UK: Routledge, 2021. In Press.
• Holt L, Blazek M, Benwell MC, Van Blerk L. Editorial introduction to Children's Geographies sponsored lecture section: generational orderings and Geographies of Children and Youth. Children's Geographies 2020, 18(2), 125-127.
• Cheung Judge R, Blazek M, Esson J. Editorial: Transnational youth mobilities: Emotions, inequities, and temporalities. Population, Space and Place 2020, 26(6), e2307.
• Blazek M, Askins K. For a relationship perspective on geographical ethics. Area 2019, 52(3), 464-471.
• Blazek M, Esson J, Smith DP. Relational geographies of human trafficking: inequality, manoeuvring and im/mobility across space and time. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2019, 44(1), 63-78.
• Blazek M. Children and Young People's Emotional Geographies. In: Skelton, T; Aitken, S, ed. Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People. New York: Springer, 2018.
• Blazek M, Esson J. The absent presence: children’s place in narratives of human trafficking. Area 2018, 51(2), 324-331.
• Askins K, Blazek M. Feeling our way: academia, emotions and a politics of care. Social & Cultural Geography 2017, 18(8), 1086-1105.
• Blazek M. Participatory video with children and young people. In: Evans, Ruth; Holt, Louise; Skelton, Tracey, ed. Methodological Approaches. Singapore: Springer, 2017, pp.243-260.
• Smith FM, Blazek M, Brown DM, van Blerk L. The relational spaces of mentoring with young people 'at risk'. In: Jupp, Eleanor; Pykett, Jessica; Smith, Fiona M, ed. Emotional States: Sites and spaces of affective governance. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017.
• Blazek M, Suska P. Towards dialogic post-socialism: Relational geographies of Europe and the notion of community in urban activism in Bratislava . Political Geography 2017, 61, 46-56.
• Smith FM, Blazek M, Brown DM, van Blerk L. 'It's good but it's not enough': the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions. Social & Cultural Geography 2016, 17(7), 959-979.
• Blazek M, Kraftl P, ed. Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice: Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood. London: Palgrave, 2015.
• Blazek M. Children's emotional geographies: politics of difference and practices of engagement. In: Hackett, Abigail; Procter, Lisa; Seymour, Julie, ed. Children's Spatialities: Embodiment, Emotion and Agency. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.95-111.
• Blazek M, Smith FM, Lemešová M, Hricová P. Ethics of care across professional and everyday positionalities: The (un)expected impacts of participatory video with young female carers in Slovakia. Geoforum 2015, 61, 45-55.
• Blazek M, Kraftl P. Introduction: children's emotions in policy and practice. In: Blazek, M. and Kraft, P, ed. Children's Emotions in Policy and Practice: Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.1-16.
• Blazek M. Labour exploitation of non-EU migrants in Slovakia: patterns, implications and structural violence. In: Craig, G., Waite, L., Lewis, H., Skrivankova, K, ed. Vulnerability, Exploitation and Migrants: Insecure Work in a Globalised Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.72-85.
• Kraftl P, Blazek M. Mapping and making spaces of childhood. In: Kraftl, Peter, ed. Children's Emotions in Policy and Practice: Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.291-307.
• Blazek M. Rematerialising Children's Agency: Everyday Practices in a Post-Socialist Estate. Bristol: Policy Press, 2015.
• Blazek M, Hricová P. Understanding (how to be with) children's emotions: relationships, spaces and politics of reconnection in reflections from detached youth work. In: Kraftl, Peter, ed. Children's Emotions in Policy and Practice: Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.204-220.
• Blazek M. Migration, vulnerability and the complexity of violence: Experiences of documented non-EU migrants in Slovakia. Geoforum 2014, 56, 101-112.
• Blazek M, Windram-Geddes M. Editorial: Thinking and doing children's emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society 2013, 9, 1-3.
• Blazek M. Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking-doing children's emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society 2013, 9, 24-32.
• Blazek M, Hranova P. Emerging relationships and diverse motivations and benefits in participatory video with young people. Children's Geographies 2012, 10(2), 151-168.
• Blazek M. Place, children's friendships, and the formation of gender identities in a Slovak urban neighbourhood. Children's Geographies 2011, 9(3-4), 285-302.