Children's Geographies Research Articles

Mapping Educational Opportunity: Spatial Analysis and School Choices

Mapping Educational Opportunity: Spatial Analysis and School Choices

Children's Geographies/Geographies of Children: Play, Work, Mobilities and Migration

AbstractGeographers play an important role in expanding our understanding of children's lives, socio‐spatial identities and material practices. As a sub‐discipline, Children's Geographies is experiencing exponential growth throughout the wider discipline of geography. There has been a tendency to corral Children's Geographies into special issues of journals and several of these are reviewed below. However, this article specifically draws upon geographical work cited in many places of the discipline and also highlights work from an extremely wide range of geographies across the globe. This paper provides a review of geographers’ investigations into a very well‐established theme of social science research connected with children, that of play. It considers the spatialities and geographies of children's play (and its counterpoint, work), playing and spaces for play. It also examines the newer and emerging themes of mobilities, children's use of outdoor, public spaces collectively grouped under the term ‘street’, and the role of children in migration and of migration in children's lives. Throughout it considers possibilities for future research with children.

‘If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young’: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia, Canada

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on children's geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors. This paper explores how Aboriginal peoples were doubly confined; firstly, by colonial constructions about children, childhood, and Othered (Aboriginal) peoples and then, secondly, within the material geographies of colonial residential schools.

‘Where’ ‘boys’ ‘are’: co-constructions of maturities-genders-bodies-spaces

This paper is concerned with maturities, genders, spaces, and bodies as historicizable co-constructs, pluralized rubrics and gradients that emerge and function as interdependent ideas. This view allows reflection on nuances between children, boys, men, boyhood, and masculinities as anchors for geographic inquiry. Diverse contexts are reviewed with an eye on mutual if mutable reciprocities between ideas of gender and maturity, and between gender/maturity and locality. The body of boys importantly figures in, and is figured by, these reciprocal significations which is explored in anthropological descriptions of ‘male transition’, and in contemporary historical observations in the West, and ‘America’ more specifically. A rigorous and cross-cultural intersectional focus is required to anchor children's geographies not just to ‘childhood’ as a site of entitlement, but more inclusively to local and interpenetrated ideas of becoming, belonging, and embodiment.

Challenging Adult Perspectives on Children's Geographies through Participatory Research Methods: Insights from a Service-Learning Course

In this paper, the author adopts the notion that working with children in some ways highlights the challenges of university-level pedagogy and research ethics; this is done by evaluating a service-learning course she conducted with undergraduate and graduate students that was based on children's urban geographies. In the course of this examination, she considers ways that aiming towards child-led, participatory approaches created several practical and ethical dilemmas but also stimulated critical reflection on positionality in research and teaching. A set of suggestions is offered for working with children in participatory qualitative research projects that emerged from insights gained in this endeavor, and the author also confronts a set of six attitudes she and her students had to engage with in order to move toward a less essentializing and more critically rigorous participatory research practice.

Us and them – children's identity work and social geography in a Swedish school yard

The article focusses on constructions of social identities in school and how children in their identity work (re-)construct common and segregated places in the school yard. Data were drawn from an ethnographic research in the daily lives of children aged 11–13. The fieldwork consisted of traditional ethnographic field work as well as children's own narratives in the form of photographs and maps. Children's agency and narratives are seen as identity performances and simple questions, like where children like to spend their time (or not), what their favourite places are, what activities they do and who they do them together with, have provided insight into the complexity of the processes of identity work as well as of segregation. The analyses focus on how the children use and refer to different places in their identity work, while constructing ‘we-in-our-class’ in the ‘King’ pitch, best friends, as well as ‘us’ in relation to ‘them’. The result shows how identity work is situated and takes place in places that invite participation in various activities, but is also constructed by the children and their agency.

Mapping Students' Lives: Children's Geographies, Teaching and Learning

The relatively new field of children's geographies builds on the theoretical foundations of human geography, critical geography, and spatial theories to examine the places and spaces children inhabit and create. This article reviews four major themes in children's geographies relevant to education: exclusion and agency, the social construction of childhood, children's geographies across the globe, and children's spaces beyond the classroom. Children's geographies' unique perspective on the spatial experiences of young people offers new ways to understand issues in education theory, pedagogy, and practice.

The challenges of ‘Children's Geographies’: a reaffirmation

The majority of papers published in this edition of Children's Geographies were first presented at the New Directions in Children's Geographies conference held at The University of Northampton, UK,...

Quantitative datasets and Children's Geographies: examples and reflections from migration research

In her article in Children's Geographies in 2006, Louise Holt drew our attention to the possibilities of analysing large-scale, secondary quantitative datasets when exploring ‘other’ childhoods. On...

‘In the best interests of the child’: juggling the geography of children's gardens (between adult agendas and children's needs)

This review paper presents literature, particularly in children's geographies, in support of the proposition that the rationales for the current children's garden movement flourishing particularly in the United States, albeit well-intentioned, continue to be dominated by adult discourses acting ‘in the best interests of the child’. The paper concludes that broadening the debate on ‘children and gardens’ through inclusion of research that focuses on children's competence and empowerment offers a different perspective of what children might want from these spaces. This highlights new directions for research on children's gardens which would focus this garden typology more on children's needs than adult agendas, and therefore contribute positively to development of these gardens as sustainable environments for children's learning and enjoyment of nature.

The body as research tool: embodied practice and children's geographies

Recently, attempts have been made to advance our ways of thinking and doing Children's Geographies. This paper contributes to that endeavour in two respects. Firstly it considers how the concept of heterogeneous (or hybrid) geographies may offer a new framework for the study of childhood. Secondly, and more substantively, it explores how ‘non-representational’ ideas and approaches – concerned with the non-cognitive and the profoundly practical – may be employed to inform our empirical engagements within this new theoretical framework.

Foucault, space and primary school dining rooms

This paper takes up recent debates within Children's Geographies as to the ‘usefulness’ of theory and its application to school dining rooms. The paper argues that in particular, Foucault's notions of governmentality have the potential to advance theoretical understandings of the spatiality of school dining rooms, the social relationships that occur within them and that in addition this can have relevant practical and policy implications that could impact upon the everyday lives of children that are both constituted by and constitutive of this space.

Geographies of Youth/Young People

AbstractFrom the early 1990s onwards, geographers have made significant contributions to work considering the spatialities of young people's lives. Children's geographies is a vibrant subdisciplinary area and geographical work on children and young people is making important contributions to academic and policy debates within and beyond the discipline of geography. There have recently been some concerns that within children's geographies, teenagers and young people have been marginalised through a focus mainly on children and childhoods. This article reviews the position of young people in geographical research through interrogating the definition of young people in relation to children and adults and reviewing recent work on youth as a transition; through providing an overview of recent work that questions the restrictions placed on young people's use of public space; and through signposting some recent debates about the future of geographical work on young people.

Winding paths in children's geographies

(2008). Winding paths in children's geographies. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography: Vol. 90, No. 3, pp. 299-303.

Childhood and the politics of scale: descaling children's geographies?

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in the geographies of children's lives, and particularly in engaging the voices and activities of young people in geographical research. Much of this growing body of scholarship is characterized by a very parochial locus of interest — the neighbourhood, playground, shopping mall or journey to school. In this paper I explore some of the roots of children's geographies' preoccupation with the micro-scale and argue that it limits the relevance of research, both politically and to other areas of geography. In order to widen the scope of children's geographies, some scholars have engaged with developments in the theorization of scale. I present these arguments but also point to their limitations. As an alternative, I propose that the notion of a flat ontology might help overcome some difficulties around scalar thinking, and provide a useful means of conceptualizing sociospatiality in material and non-hierarchical terms. Bringing together flat ontology and work in children's geographies on embodied subjectivity, I argue that it is important to examine the nature and limits of children's spaces of perception and action. While these spaces are not simply `local', they seldom afford children opportunities to comment on, or intervene in, the events, processes and decisions that shape their own lives. The implications for the substance and method of children's geographies and for geographical work on scale are considered.

Reaching critical mass? Theory, politics, and the culture of debate in children's geographies

A small but growing number of voices have begun to raise questions about the current direction of children's geographies as a subfield and its status within the wider discipline. This article intervenes in these emerging discussions to examine the status of debate itself within children's geographies. I argue that children's geographies over the past decade has operated primarily in a consensus‐based mode, with a number of potential tensions and differences between practitioners masked as a result. I develop the example of notions of children's competent social agency, a core theoretical assumption that is rarely interrogated in much depth. In closing, I pose questions regarding several contemporary political issues concerning children's agency about which geographers have had surprisingly little to say. I suggest that explicitly addressing some of these vexing issues would contribute to a richer state of debate within children's geographies.

‘It's well good sitting in the storecupboard just talking about what we do’: considering the spaces/places of research within children's geographies

The power imbalance between adults and young people in research relations has been well documented, including the necessity of adopting appropriate methods when working with young participants. However, the actual spaces and places in which research occurs remains relatively neglected within children's geographies, despite its methodological significance and the important ethical and spatial issues it raises. The purpose of this short article is to offer an intervention into the ways in which the spaces/places of research, even the very small, almost insignificant sites, have to be considered as integral to research planning and implementation. Drawing on recent school-based research with young teenagers, the paper will demonstrate how a storecupboard became constructed as an important research space/place within the school. As an alternative, liminal or ‘thirdspace’ the storecupboard allowed for a more nuanced understanding of teenage practices and performances than previous classroom-based research encounters.

Methodologies for change? A critique of applied research in children's geographies

Applied geography has a long, if contested, history in human geography. Recent debates in children's geographies have discussed the possibilities for conducting applied research with children. Drawing upon research exploring children's mobility in the UK, this paper discusses working with local transport planners as a way of conducting applied research in children's geographies. It identifies how decisions regarding who to work with (in this case local voluntary transport committees based in schools) impacts upon the possibilities for developing participatory approaches and for involving children in research. Also discussed are different methodological strategies for involving research partners in the research process. The paper contributes to wider debates within applied research by discussing how distinctions between applied, policy research and more radical, activist research are often unhelpful as research often combines elements of both.

‘True geography [ ] quickly forgotten, giving away to an adult-imagined universe’. Approaching the otherness of childhood

In this paper I seek to explore the idea of the otherness of childhood. I suggest that there are considerable differences between the becomings of children and the becomings of adults. In the face of these a number of questions need to be asked about adult–childhood relations in society and about academic approaches to children and childhood, particularly in terms of representing childhood and the implications of such representing. The paper sets out the idea of otherness, locates this within current debate about the crisis of childhood, and then argues that non-representational approaches might be particularly relevant to progressing children's geographies. These approaches stress modesty, practice, experimentation, messiness, creativity and openness. As we age, childhood becomes another country, a disputed territory of memory and meaning. Its true geography is quickly forgotten, giving away to an adult-imagined universe. The contemporary adult vision of childhood has become so distorted as to render it opaque, and this opacity is seriously affecting how children grow up today. (Brooks 2006, pp. 4–5)

Mixing qualitative research methods in children's geographies

Human geographers are increasingly employing mixed‐method approaches in their research, including in children's geographies, where ‘child‐centred’ methods are often used alongside participant observation and semi‐structured interviews to investigate children's perceptions and experiences. Mixing qualitative methods in this way raises a number of ethical and methodological issues, particularly regarding the changing power relationships between researchers and participants. This article considers the challenges and potential benefits of combining methods from participatory and interpretive approaches through triangulation or ‘crystallisation’. The issues are illustrated through an empirical case study on children, health and exercise in the everyday spaces of the primary school.