Geographies of Play: A Response to the Review of Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol 13, No.2 (2003) ISSN 1546-2250 Geographies of Play: A Response to the Review of Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity Stuart C. Aitken San Diego State University Citation: Aitken, Stuart C.. “Geographies of Play: A Response to the Reivew of Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity .” Children, Youth and Environments 13(2), 2003. I cannot now remember exactly what I wrote down as the working title for this book, but it read more like the subtitle than the emboldened large-font words that got printed on the cover. The managing editors at Routledge, with their wisdom about markets and selling books, wanted something with simplicity, currency and punch. A focus on “Geographies of Young People” sells, they told me, whereas “The Morally Contested Spaces of Young People” languishes with other abstract and impenetrable ideas. That the book is really about adults' principled constructions of young people and their spaces and young people's consequent resistances and remolding of identities and spaces is not lost to my reviewers. The book is not really about young people's geographies or I would have included young people's voices; rather, the book is about how children and their places in the world are theorized and created, often with woeful consequences. My reviewers nonetheless regret that I do not elaborate more fully on the ways that young people should be written about and included in this volume given the ways I have included them elsewhere in my work. They also suggest that I sidestep issues of “play,” and that my engagement with morality is, in places, “more romantic than weighty.” On all these counts I am guilty. And this, I argue, is the very stuff of play (at its most serious and potent) that I as an academic get to live with every day of my life. My notions of how I engage with young people are flights of fancy in the best possible sense of that 216 concept and they are also concrete and moving engagements. Nor can I pull apart my academic engagement from the immediacy of my fieldwork, even although this volume may seem that way. I recently reviewed a manuscript on play for Children's Geographies. It is an enticing paper that takes some thoughts on play by geographers (including myself) and elaborates them with some wonderful theorizing by Gilles Deleuze and William Connolly among others. It is a beautifully playful piece that highlights children's activities and mine in the context of a coherent and weighty appreciation of play. And I am taken on a flight of fancy by a work that is also playfully romantic. I feel as privileged to be able to write around and through this kind of work as I am to work with and play with children. That the managing editors at Routlege were insistent upon a title for my book that shouted loudly about “geographies” is perhaps a good thing after all. It is a worthwhile nod to what Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine (2000, 7) refer to as the achievement of a “critical mass” in the field. Geography today is current and punchy. The so-called critical mass of the children's geographies field enables me, today, to research, think, work and write in playful, romantic, and weighty ways and still have reviewers say nice things. Stuart C. Aitken is a Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. His past books include Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Space of Identity (Routledge, 2001), Family Fantasies and Community Space (Rutgers University Press, 1998), Place, Space, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film (co-editor with Leo Zonn, Rowman and Littlefield, 1994) and Putting Children in Their Place (1994, Washington DC: Association of American Geographers). Professor Aitken has also published widely in academic journals and edited collections on film, critical social theory, pedagogy, children and families. His research is cited in newspaper articles and magazines, including The Chronicle of Higher Education. Professor Aitken is an editor of Children's Geographies. ...