Children's Geographies

Abstract

Children’s geographies is a large and vibrant subdiscipline in human geography, which focuses on children and young people from birth to age twenty-five. The foundations of the subdiscipline are diverse, encompassing early studies of children’s play, identity and environmental cognition, and feminist studies of the family. The subdiscipline developed a distinct identity from the late 1990s onward, and research in this area has increased dramatically. Children’s geographers routinely draw on the central tenets of childhood studies: that childhood is a social construction, and that children are agents whose voices should be heard in research and societal decision making. The uniqueness of children’s geographies, however, lies in the centrality of space and place. Conceptually, this has meant attention to how social constructions of childhood are also spatial constructions. In other words, depending on context, certain spaces (schools, the home) may be constructed as being “for” children, whereas in others (such as the street), children may be deemed “out of place.” Similarly, children’s geographers argue that it is impossible to understand children’s agency without interrogating their experiences of place. Scholarship has tended to focus on the smaller scale and, particularly, the ways in which children negotiate their local neighborhoods. Thus, there are several recurring themes within the subdiscipline: how children often feel excluded from public spaces by adults yet seek to find niches in which to express themselves; how children negotiate rules and physical boundaries set by parents and other adults; how children hold important knowledge about their local spaces, often overlooked by adults; how children’s experiences of and access to particular places may be crosscut by identity categories (especially gender, ethnicity, dis/ability, and class); how children may participate (or not) in planning or design programs that affect their lives. Building on these central tenets and themes, scholars within the subdiscipline have developed a range of conceptual approaches to children’s emotions, embodiment, intergenerational relations, political agency, scale, and their interactions with environmental and nonhuman) processes and materialities. In turn, such work has informed developments in wider disciplines (particularly human geography and interdisciplinary childhood studies), ensuring that children’s geographies has become increasingly visible beyond the subdiscipline. It is also important to note that children’s geographies has always been an interdisciplinary endeavor, drawing scholars from a range of disciplinary, conceptual, and methodological backgrounds (most evident when examining tables of contents for the journal Children’s Geographies, cited under Journals).