Children's Spatialities: Embodiment, Emotion and Agency by Abigail Hackett, Lisa Procter, and Julie Seymour

Abstract

 2016 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 26(1), 2016 Book Reviews Children’s Spatialities: Embodiment, Emotion and Agency Abigail Hackett, Lisa Procter, and Julie Seymour, editors (2015). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 216 pages. $100 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-137-46498-9 This book highlights the importance of a focus on space and place when considering human interactions and the processes of being. Drawing on numerous interrelated theories of space related to the individual, to groups and to society this volume brings them together into focused discussion of children’s spatialities—in particular, with regard to senses and embodiment (part one), emotion and relationships (part two) and spatial agency (part three). The editors carefully curate the three sections to provide a full discussion of theory related to place, space and children’s lives. The authors orient the theories to these topics and where their provenance derives from geography, social sciences and childhood studies, weave them into an integrated layering of insights where new possibilities for understanding children’s life worlds become available. Section one in this volume focuses on children’s embodiment and experience of space and place through the senses. Using sensory-ethnographic methodology combined with digital technologies to elicit meaning, the first chapter discusses the child’s lived experience in the here and now, and the ways in which they engage with the bodily sensations, with the mundane or routine place engagement and with the ephemeral. The ways in which children create new knowledge over time and are emplaced in living interaction through these experiences is in focus also in chapter two where temporalities of space are discussed. This chapter explores how children experience, understand and create histories in relation to the places they inhabit through their embodied knowledge of the temporality of spaces. Drawing on Bourdieu’s habitus (1977), Ingold’s notion of wayfaring (2007) and Tilley’s phenomenological approach (2004) to archaeological interpretation, the author shows how children develop relationships with the past by experiencing it through their bodies in the present. The haptics involved in the digging and feeling of the pottery shards and the interaction with the standing stones are a good example of the way in which social constructivism can be experienced and developed through the body. The final chapters in this section highlight the differences between adults’ and children’s perception and construction of meaning making, highlighting the child’s predisposition toward rhizomatic (Deluez) engagement with space, lines of flight (MacRae, 2011), and multimodal engagement with, and creation of, space. The ways in which adults make meaning, in contrast, is more linear and proscribed by social conventions and rules, as in the example of children in a museum. Book Reviews 196 Section two presents a deep discussion of the relevance of understanding children’s experience of space through their emotions. Chapter 5 begins with a useful tracing of the emergence of children’s emotional geographies as the intersection between Cartesian-oriented notions of space and children’s geographies and studies of childhood. Drawing a clear distinction between children as social actors and social agents—the former being children acting in space and the latter, children affecting changes in space—the author relates emotions as something children have in social dimensions in space rather than as individuals. This research has ramifications for all social services that involve children, particularly early childhood settings, and it is here the policy debate really matters. The author expands this idea to show how emotions, socially situated in space, reflect power relationships and reveal embedded social structures on local, community, international and global scales. The two additional chapters in this section focus on the ways in which emotions are place-oriented and connected to moods and children’s play. These chapters highlight the ways in which play practices, which are already place-contingent, create mood, further interacting with the space to become experiences of sociospatial emotional encounters that are entangled within space and place. Section three offers new insights into children’s agency by focusing on the ways in which children are direct advocates and agents in broader society—beyond the agency they conduct in their personal lives. The varying scales in which this agency is...