Abstract
Geographies of Children, Youth and Families is flourishing, but its founding conceptions require critical reflection. This paper considers one key conceptual orthodoxy: the notion that children are competent social actors. In a field founded upon liberal notions of agency, we identify a conceptual elision between the benefits of studying agency and the beneficial nature of agency. Embracing post-structuralist feminist challenges, we propose a politically-progressive conceptual framework centred on embodied human agency which emerges within power. We contend this can be achieved though intensive/extensive analyses of space, and a focus on ‘biosocial beings and becomings' within dynamic notions of individual/intergenerational time.
Highlights
The emergence of conceptual orthodoxiesAn explicit discussion of human social agency might seem surprising and somewhat old-fashioned
This subdisciplinary field was founded on the notion that children and youth are competent social actors, a conceptual framing motivated by the political imperative to make visible a group who were relatively absent from academic accounts, and whose views were often overlooked in politics and society
This paper draws on our individual research and collective reading of the wider literature across the globalizing world to ask timely and provocative questions about one of the field’s founding conceptions, namely the notion that children are competent social actors
Summary
GCYF, the field of work which is our central concern, flourished from humble beginnings in the later decades of the 20th century (Robson et al, 2013). Its origins are multi-stranded, incorporating: psychologically-inspired research on children’s spatial cognition; social research on children’s lives in different times and places; and feminist research on parenting and family life (Holloway, 2014) The second of these three strands – which concentrates on understanding children’s experiences as social actors in a diversity of times and places – blossomed in the early 21st century. NSSC sought to counter linear, biological models of child development in psychology and adultcentred approaches to socialization in sociology (James et al, 1998) This new paradigm was based upon: agreement, first, that children could – and should – be regarded as social actors, second, that childhood, as a biological moment in the life course, should be understood as a social construction; and there was methodological agreement about the need to access children’s views first hand. We set out our conceptual framework for research in the phase of GCYF, and reflect on the ongoing tension between theory and politics in sub-disciplinary practice
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