Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People [1st ed.] 978-981-287-040-7;978-981-287-041-4

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Geographies of Children and Young People  1

Tracey Skelton Stuart C. Aitken  Editors Tracey Skelton  Editor-in-Chief

Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People

Geographies of Children and Young People Volume 1 Editor-in-Chief Tracey Skelton Department of Geography National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore

Geographies of Children and Young People is a Major Reference Work comprising 12 volumes that pulls together the best international reflective and innovative scholarship focusing on younger people. Volumes 1 and 2 establish and critically engage with the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological groundings of this geographical sub-discipline. Volumes 3–11 provide in depth thematic analysis of key topical areas pertinent to children’s and young people’s lives: space, place and environment; identities and subjectivities; families and peer groups; movement and mobilities; politics and citizenship; global issues and change; play and well-being; learning and labouring; conflict and peace. Volume 12 connects both academic, policy, and practitioner based work around protection and provision. Series Titles 1. Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People 2. Methodological Approaches 3. Space, Place, and Environment 4. Identities and Subjectivities 5. Families, Intergenerationality, and Peer Group Relations 6. Movement, Mobilities, and Journeys 7. Politics, Citizenship and Rights 8. Geographies of Global Issues: Change and Threat 9. Play and Recreation, Health and Wellbeing 10. Laboring and Learning 11. Conflict, Violence and Peace 12. Risk, Protection, Provision and Policy More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13414

Tracey Skelton • Stuart C. Aitken Editors

Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People With 25 Figures

Editors Tracey Skelton Department of Geography National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore

Stuart C. Aitken Department of Geography San Diego State University San Diego, CA, USA

ISBN 978-981-287-040-7 ISBN 978-981-287-041-4 (eBook) ISBN 978-981-287-042-1 (print and electronic bundle) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Series Preface

Geographies of Children and Young People now constitutes a major subdiscipline within Geography. This is a very exciting and influential time in its development. Hence, it is important to capture the dynamism, depth, and breadth of the subdiscipline within a Major Reference Work (MRW). Springer Major Reference Works are produced in such a way that updating and editing of the online version can be done every few years. This means that the publication does not fix the data, debates, and delivery but rather moves and evolves with the subdiscipline itself. The intention and expectation of this MRW is that this substantive collection will be the go-to resource for scholars, educators, and practitioners working with children and young people. While founding scholarship was published in the 1970s and 1980s, the dramatic expansion of research and publication in the field really began in the late 1990s and has continued exponentially. The last decade has witnessed a substantive increase in graduate student research projects and a surge in university-level teaching related to children’s and young people’s geographies. It is therefore extremely timely that this 12-volume major reference work has been produced. Together as Editor-in-Chief, Volume Editors, and Authors, we have developed the largest single collection of geographic work focusing on children and young people in the world. Intellectually, the work reaches beyond geography to the wider social and behavioral sciences; many of the authors in the series are not geographers, and so, the collection is healthily and engagingly transdisciplinary. Anyone working with children and young people will find chapters that connect very effectively with their own interests. Specialists as well as graduate and tertiary education students will find relevant work distributed throughout the MRW or locate everything they might need within one thematic volume. This Series was founded on certain key intellectual and political principles. Working with young people and children within the academy has not always been easy nor a straightforward pathway for academics. It has taken time for scholars to convince their colleagues of the following: that children and young people really matter; that they should not be marginalized by the academy; that they have competency and agency and play important roles in society; and that they should be taken seriously as people regardless of age or size. This 12-volume collection is material evidence of the academic importance of children and young people in our v

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world. The MRW is determinedly international in approach, in authorship, and in content. The huge diversity of nations and territories explored in the collection as well as the geographic locations of author contributors is a real testament to the commitment of the Editor-in-Chief and Volume Editors to be genuinely international. Children and young people are everywhere on the planet, hence it is imperative that this Series reflects that ubiquity. Drawing from scholars and scholarship from within and about the majority world has been a key achievement for each volume. Another aspect of inclusivity relates to authorship. Foundational, well established, and early career scholars are all well represented throughout the volumes. The 12 volumes work collectively as a series and also stand alone as single books. The volumes are lengthy and contain between 25 and 35 full chapters; each volume is an excellent resource of expertise, content, and analysis. Volume 1, Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, is designed to pull together some of the foundational work in the sub discipline; demonstrate the emergence and establishment of particular philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual themes; and capture the diversity of geographic work on children and young people as it connects with other sub- and disciplinary approaches. This volume presents the key founding elements of the sub discipline. Volume 2, Methodological Approaches, explores the grand array of methodological approaches and tools that children’s and young people’s geographers, and other social and behavioral scientists, have worked with, adapted, and invented. Chapters explore research practices, techniques, data analysis, and/or interpretation. Working with younger people in research demands different ways of doing research and hence addressing the complexities of power relations. Methodologically, innovation and experimentation have been very important. Space, Place, and Environment (Vol. 3) takes these three central geographic concepts and debates and extends them. The volume is structured around five subsections: Indigenous Youth – Space and Place; Children, Nature, and Environmental Education; Urban Spaces; Home Spaces and Homeless Spaces; and Border Spaces. Several of these themes are explored in fuller depth in subsequent specialized volumes. Volumes 1 and 3 will be particularly useful starting points for readers less familiar with geography as a discipline. Volume 4, Identities and Subjectivities, is designed to focus on the stuff of life and living for younger people. The chapters examine who young people and children are and what their social identities and subjectivities mean in the context of their spatial experiences. The volume explores identity formation and the spatial meaning of identities and subjectivities in relation to a broad range of social relations. The chapters explore how young people’s senses of selfhood and belonging emerge through complex processes of inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization and the important role played by representation, discourse, and creativity. In Vol. 5, Families, Intergenerationality, and Peer Group Relations, the focus is on the ways in which children and young people are relationally connected with others. Section I demonstrates that familial relationships and the spatiality of the home are extremely important in all children’s and young people’s lives, even though the patterns and structures of families and the spaces/places of home vary geographically and temporally. Section II innovatively examines the complexities

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and spatialities of extrafamilial intergenerational relationships and the complex meanings of age relationality. Section III emphasizes children’s and young people’s relationships with one another. This includes work on geographies of emotion and affect, bodies and embodiment. The mobility turn in geography has been highly influential in the social sciences. Children’s and young people’s geographers have been significant in the paradigmatic shift around mobilities and immobilities. In Vol. 6, Movement, Mobilities, and Journeys, contributors examine the role children and young people play in these “travels” in a range of diverse global contexts. The chapters collectively provide theoretical, empirical, and methodological insights and examples of actual movement combined with analysis of a range of complex contexts, spatialities, and temporalities that facilitate or hamper mobility. Volume 7 takes us into the realm of children and young people as political beings. Politics, Citizenship and Rights explores the political geographies of younger people in order to bring analytical attention to intricacies of the policies that specifically affect young people and children, alongside the politics at play in their everyday lives. Divided into four sections, the volume interrogates the spatialities of the rights of the child, children and young people’s agency in politics, youthful practices and political resistance, and active youth citizenship. Volume 8, Geographies of Global Issues: Change and Threat, unites three broad research themes that are often examined separately: economic globalization and cultural change; international development; and children and young people’s connections with climate change, natural hazards, and environmental issues. What pulls these themes together is the recognition that younger people are important actors and agents within these processes and that their engagement/disengagement is crucial for the planet’s future. In Vol. 9, Play and Recreation, Health and Wellbeing, important, well-established, but often contentious foci of children’s and young people’s lives are examined conceptually, temporally, spatially, in practice, and through representation. Many of the debates about children’s embodiment revolving around obesity, unfitness, wellness, and neglect are relatively new in the social sciences, and geographers have played important roles in their closer scrutiny. Volume 10, Laboring and Learning, provides an integrated and multidimensional approach to understanding what learning and laboring mean to children and young people. The two concepts are explored in depth and breadth in order to capture the variance of what work and education mean and how they are practiced in different places and at different times through childhood and youth. Key thematic areas for this volume include social reproduction, transitions, aspirations, and social and cultural capital. In Conflict, Violence, and Peace (Vol. 11), the emphasis is on the ways in which children are impacted and affected by, and involved with, highly problematic and fragile conditions of war, violence, conflict, and peace. As more and more younger people experience a range of conflicts and social, economic, and political violence, it is essential to examine what happens to them and what roles they play in processes such as asylum, child soldiering, terrorism, counterterrorism, ending conflict, and building peace. Volume 12, Risk, Protection, Provision and Policy, serves to connect academic research and policy and planning that affects children and young people. Policy, planning, and provision

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are often purportedly about reducing risk and offering protection but are also associated with the control and containment of younger people, particularly spatially. The chapters explore the ways in which policies at different scales affect children and young people in terms of their access to space and their life chances. This Series is an extremely rich, varied, and vibrant collection of work centered on geographies of children and young people. Just as children and young people bring vibrancy, diversity, and complexity to our worlds, so this MRW is designed to showcase, deepen, and develop the geographic scholarship that captures, albeit partially, the fascinating social heterogeneity and diverse spatialities of children’s and young people’s lives. National University of Singapore, Singapore May 20, 2015

Tracey Skelton M.A. Oxon, Ph.D. Editor-in-Chief

Preface

While this preface is a short introduction to Vol. 1 of the major reference series Geographies of Children and Young People it is actually the final volume of 12 to be published; an example of reverse chronology. This might seem rather strange, but it does provide the opportunity for hindsight and an overview of the whole series in relation to this volume which is about genealogies, foundations, starting points, groundings, pioneers, forerunners, creators. All of these terms, and there are more that could be added, tell the story of the whole series, which includes the 24 volume editors, hundreds of author contributors and their chapters, and in particular the purpose of this volume. Chapter 1, “Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People: Introduction,” provides a detailed overview of the whole volume. What is evident casting back and through the 12 volumes is the rich combination of established and emerging scholars, a genuine commitment to international reach and perspectives, and the intentional capturing of globally diverse insights into children’s and young people’s lives. The series of 12 volumes was designed to draw upon a worldwide collection of reflective and innovative scholarship focusing on children and young people through geographical lenses. In some ways, Vol. 1 is a microcosm of the whole series as it covers a broad range of academic work that is foundational and/or novel, eclectic and yet focused. Its remit, however, is to concentrate on philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual issues more broadly. While the other volumes are grounded and focused on more specific topics and engagements, this volume, as with the other 11, is determinedly international and transdisciplinary. Its title, Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, is somewhat ironic because the geographies of children and young people are without doubt already established in the research literature and academic teaching, and in practice and policy-making. What follows in this volume, perhaps more correctly, may be seen as a denouement that brings together and celebrates diverse strands of thinking and practice describing a chain of events that brings us to where we are today. It is not a denouement that offers closure, resolution, or a coda to a continuing and vibrant field, but rather the volume speaks to outcomes, consequences, and advancements. Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People is about capturing the ways in which children’s and young people’s geographies began, consolidated, and then became a global scholarly force with significant impacts within the discipline of ix

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geography as well as across the social sciences. This subdiscipline of geography has experienced an exponential growth that few of us working in the field from the 1990s onward could possibly have imagined. As stated in the series preface at the beginning of each volume written by the editor-in-chief, Tracey Skelton, the expansion of students, researchers, and academics focusing on younger people has been substantive. The intellectual activity and commitment have created various opportunities that have placed children’s and young people’s geographies firmly on academic, policy, planning, and practice maps. Examples include the establishment of the flagship journal Children’s Geographies in 2003 and the growing confidence from publishers to support the publication of a considerable number of monographs, coauthored and edited books, including a new book series, The Routledge Spaces of Childhood and Youth Series, edited by Peter Kraftl and John Horton. Through the twilight years of the twentieth century, breaking through into the new century, and continuing onward in the early decades of the twenty-first century, there has been an explosion of countless journal articles and book chapters, journal special issues and books, throughout geography and the wider social and behavioral sciences. All of them place children, young people, and families central within their analysis and/or make connections between these particular actors and wider geographical approaches and subdisciplinary scholarship. The selected list of books below provides an insight into the depth and variety of geographers’ work that has developed from the 1990s onward. We can add to this illustrious list Springer’s commissioning of 12 volumes for this series and their publication of the Handbook of Children and Youth Studies edited by Johanna Wyn and Helen Cahill (2015), which includes entries by geographers. We offer this “reading list” as both a starting point and also as a statement of establishment and commitment to an international perspective. For those new to the subdiscipline of Children’s and Young People’s Geographies, these books act as entries to a fresh approach in geography and wider social sciences. For others with longer engagement with this branch of geography, the listed books (and it is a selective list) can serve as specialist texts leading to deeper and focused scholarly work. So read, connect, and enjoy learning more about children, young people, and geography. Abebe, T., & Kjørholt, A. T. (2013). Childhood and local knowledge in Ethiopia: Livelihoods, rights and intergenerational relationships. Trondheim: Akademika forlag. Aitken, S. C. (1994). Putting children in their place. Washington, DC/Boston: Association of American Geographers Resource Publication Series/ Edwards Bros. Aitken, S. C. (2001). Geographies of young people: The morally contested spaces of identity. London/New York: Routledge. Aitken, S. C. (2014). The ethnopoetics of space and transformation: Young people’s engagement, activism and aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. Aitken, S. (2018). Young people, rights and place: Erasure, neoliberal politics and postchild ethics. New York/London: Routledge.

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Aitken, S. C., Lund, R., & Kjorholt, A. T. (Eds.). (2008). Global childhoods: Globalization, development and young people. London/New York: Routledge. Ansell, N. (2005). Children, youth and development. London: Routledge. Benwell, M. C., & Hopkins, P. (Eds.). (2016). Children, young people and critical geopolitics. Abingdon: Ashgate. Blazek, M., & Kraftl, P. (Eds.). (2015). Children’s emotions in policy and practice: Mapping and making spaces of childhood. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blundell, D. (2016). Rethinking children’s space and places. London/Oxford: Bloomsbury. Brown, G., & Yaffe, H. (2017). Youth activism and solidarity: The non-stop picket against Apartheid. London/New York: Routledge. Ennew, J., Abebe, T., Bangyai, R., Karapituk, P., Kjorholt, A. T., Noonsup, T., Beazley, H., Bessell, S., Daengchart-Kushanoglu, P., & Waterson, W. (2009). The right to be researched properly: How to do rights-based, scientific research with children. Bangkok: Black and White Publications, Knowing Children. Ergler, C. R., Kearns, R., & Witten, K. (Eds.) (2017). Children’s health and wellbeing in urban environments. New York/London: Routledge. Evans, R., & Holt, L. (Eds.). (2013). Diverse spaces of childhood and youth: Gender and other socio-cultural differences. London: Taylor and Francis. Freeman, C., & Tranter, P. (2011). Children and their urban environment: Changing worlds. London: Earthscan. Freeman, C., & van Heezik, Y. (2018). Children, nature and cities: Rethinking the connections. London/New York: Routledge. Gough, K. V., & Langevang, T. (Eds.). (2017). Young Entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa. London/New York: Routledge. Holloway, S. L., & Valentine, G. (2000). Children’s geographies: Playing, learning, living. London: Routledge. Holloway, S. L., & Valentine, G. (2002). Cyberkids: Children in the information age. Routledge Falmer. Holt, L. (Ed.). (2011). Geographies of children, youth and families: International perspectives. London: Routledge. Horton, J., & Pyer, M. (Eds.). (2017). Children, young people and care. London/New York: Routledge. Hörschelmann, K., & van Blerk, L. (2012). Children, youth and the city. London: Routledge. Jeffrey, C. (2010). Timepass, youth, class and the politics of waiting in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jeffrey, C., & Dyson, J. (Eds.). (2008). Telling young lives: Portraits of global youth. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jeffrey, C., Jeffery, P., & Jeffery, R. (2008). Degrees of freedom? Education, masculinities and unemployment in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Johnson, V., & West, A. (2018). Children’s participation in global contexts: Going beyond voice. New York/London: Routledge. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global. Minnesota: Guilford Press.

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Kraftl, P. (2013). Geographies of alternative education: Diverse learning spaces for children and young people. Bristol: Policy Press. Murnaghan, A.-M., & Shillington, L. (Eds.). (2015). Children, nature, and cities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Naafs, S., & Skelton, T. (Eds.). (2019). Realities and aspirations for Asian youth: Education, training, employment. London: Routledge. Ruddick, S. (1996). Young and homeless in Hollywood. Mapping social identities. London/New York: Routledge. Skelton, T., & Valentine, G. (Eds.). (1998). Cool places: Geographies of youth cultures. London: Routledge. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. London/New York: Routledge. Thomas, M. E. (2011). Multicultural girlhood: Racism, sexuality and the conflicted spaces of American education. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wells, K. (2015). Childhood in a global perspective (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Wells, K. (2018). Childhood studies: Making young subjects. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wells, K., Burman, E., Montgomery, H., & Watson, A. (Eds.). (2014). Childhood, youth and violence in global contexts: Research and practice in dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan. Wyn, J., & Cahill, H. (Eds.). (2015). Handbook of children and youth studies. Singapore: Springer. Singapore, Republic of Singapore San Diego, United States of America

Tracey Skelton Stuart C. Aitken

Contents

Part I Established and Contemporary Theorizations of Children and Young People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2

3

1

Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tracey Skelton and Stuart C. Aitken

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Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stuart C. Aitken

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Global South Research in Children’s Geographies: From Useful Illustration to Conceptual Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicola Ansell

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4

Intergenerational Geographies in Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . Robert M. Vanderbeck

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5

Theorizing Youth Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Caitlin Cahill

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6

Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cindi Katz

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Engaging with Bourdieu: A Review of the Utilization of Bourdieu Within Children and Young People’s Geographies Christina R. Ergler and Bronwyn E. Wood

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Approaching Child and Youth Geographies Through Darwin Stuart C. Aitken

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Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giorgio Hadi Curti

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Contents

Part II

Fundamental Politics and Political Foundations . . . . . . . . .

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Foundations and Impacts of Youthful Political Geographies . . . . . Tracey Skelton

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Paradoxes of Young People’s Political Participation Lynn A. Staeheli

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Theorizing Children’s Political Agency Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

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The Political Geography of the “Best Interest of the Child” . . . . . Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha

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Part III Youthful Formations: Education, Emotional and Affective Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Katharyne Mitchell

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Geographies of Education: Context and Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kathy Reilly, Ranu Basu, and Valerie Ledwith

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Children and Young People’s Emotional Geographies . . . . . . . . . . Matej Blazek

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Affective Geovisualization and Children: Representing the Embodied and Emotional Geographies of Children . . . . . . . . . . . . Jin-Kyu Jung

Part IV

Spaces and Places of Play, Learning, and Spirituality . . . .

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Play and Playgrounds in Children’s Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ann Marie F. Murnaghan

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Geographies of Architecture, Children’s Geographies, and Nonrepresentational Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter Kraftl

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Geographies of Youth Religiosity and Spirituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elizabeth Olson and Sertanya Reddy

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Finding a Place for Babies and Their Spatialities . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriela Guarnieri de Campos Tebet and Anete Abramowicz

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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About the Editors

Tracey Skelton is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She was previously Professor of Critical Geographies at the University of Loughborough in the UK. The essential elements of her research career focus on people who are socially, politically, and intellectually excluded. Her early work focused on the Caribbean and issues of gender and racial inequality, feminist geographies, and methodological analysis. She has contributed to culture and development debates, particularly through her longitudinal research on the island of Montserrat. Recently, A/P Skelton returned to this field of scholarship through research with volunteers and host organizations in Cambodia as part of a major comparative and collaborative project on development partnerships. She was the principal investigator of a major comparative urbanism research project on the livability, sustainability, and diversity of four Asian cities: Busan in South Korea, Hyderabad in India, Kunming in China, and Singapore. A/P Skelton is a recognized international leader in the subdiscipline of children’s and young people’s geographies. In particular, her work has served to challenge the invisibility and marginalization of young people from geographic academic research at the same time as it has demonstrated the rich and varied ways in which young people live their lives both spatially and temporally alongside, but differently from, adults. Her research work has been funded by key research institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK; the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Academic Research Fund and the Global Asia Institute, both of the xv

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About the Editors

National University of Singapore; the Australian Research Council; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A/P Skelton was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Children’s Geographies and has been the Viewpoints Editor since 2005 and became the Commissioning Editor for Asia in 2010. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Geoforum; the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography; and Geography Compass. She has coauthored 2 books, edited 5 collections, guest-edited 2 special issues, and 2 special sections, and published more than 95 journal articles and chapters. She is a passionate teacher and graduate supervisor. She is committed to the politics of research dissemination in accessible formats, in particular to enable the participants in her research projects to understand and recognize their coproduction of knowledge whether through specialized small-scale workshops, translation of reports into local languages, or production of audiovisual materials.

Dr. Stuart C. Aitken is June Burnett Chair and Distinguished Professor of Geography at San Diego State University, and Director of the research center Youth, Environment, Society and Space (YESS). His research interests include critical social theory, qualitative methods, film, children, families and communities, child rights, and youth activism. Stuart has worked with the UN on qualitative methods, child rights, and labor and migration issues. His previous books include Young People, Rights and Place (Routledge, 2018), The Ethnopoetics of Space: Young People’s Engagement, Activism and Aesthetics (Ashgate, 2016), The Fight to Stay Put (Steiner Verlag, 2013), Young People, Border Spaces and Revolutionary Imaginations (Routledge, 2011), Qualitative Geographies (Sage, 2010), The Awkward Spaces of Fathering (Ashgate, 2009), Global Childhoods (Routledge, 2008), Geographies of Young People (Routledge, 2001), Family Fantasies and Community Space (Rutgers University Press, 1998), and Place, Space, Situation and Spectacle (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994). He has published over 250 research

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papers, essays, and reviews in academic journals as well as in various edited book collections and encyclopedias. Stuart is past coeditor of The Professional Geographer and Children’s Geographies.

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Contributors

Anete Abramowicz Department of Pedagogical Theory and Practice, Federal University of São Carlos – UFSCar, São Carlos, SP, Brazil Stuart C. Aitken Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA Nicola Ansell Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University, London, UK Ranu Basu Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Matej Blazek Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Caitlin Cahill Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, USA Giorgio Hadi Curti Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA Gabriela Guarnieri de Campos Tebet Department of Social Sciences in Education, Faculty of Education – State University of Campinas – UNICAMP, Campinas, SP, Brazil Christina R. Ergler Department of Geography, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Jouni Häkli Space and Political Agency Research Group, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Jin-Kyu Jung Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of WashingtonBothell, Bothell, WA, USA Kirsi Pauliina Kallio Space and Political Agency Research Group, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Cindi Katz Earth and Environmental Sciences Program, The City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA Peter Kraftl School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK xix

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Contributors

Valerie Ledwith School of Geography and Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Katharyne Mitchell University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha School of Social Work, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada Ann Marie F. Murnaghan Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada Elizabeth Olson Department of Geography, University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA Sertanya Reddy Department of Geography, University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA Kathy Reilly School of Geography and Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Tracey Skelton Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore Lynn A. Staeheli School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA Robert M. Vanderbeck The School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Bronwyn E. Wood Faculty of Education, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Part I Established and Contemporary Theorizations of Children and Young People

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Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People: Introduction Tracey Skelton and Stuart C. Aitken

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Starting Points: Rethinking Theoretically and Conceptually . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Politics and the Political: Young People, Children, and Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Geographies of Education, Emotions, and Affect: Established and Fresh Perspectives . . . . 5 Focusing on Spatialities: Play, Architecture, Spiritualities, Babies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter introduces volume 1, which gathers together debates at philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual levels that have influenced the formation and continuation of Geographies of Children and Young People. Emphasis is placed on well-known and less well-known but influential theorists including Bourdieu, Darwin, and Spinoza. Contemporary agenda-setting scholars explore the genealogies of different thematic areas of geography and interrogate their foundational approaches alongside revisiting key concepts such as “development,” “participation,” and “accumulation.” The volume includes essays on the notions and conceptualizations of baby, child, children, childhood, youth, young people, intergenerationality, and critical geographies of age. Disciplinary approaches are considered in chapters that examine children’s and young people’s geographies through a range of themes including: the complexities, paradoxes, and T. Skelton (*) Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] S. C. Aitken Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_27

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diversities of political geographies; geographies of education in relation to state governance and economic discourses alongside the politics of pedagogy; emotional and affective geographies as genealogy and methodology; geographies of spatialities through play, playgrounds, and architecture with babies, children, and young people; geographies of religiosity and spirituality. The volume lays the ground for understanding the intersections between more “mainstream” disciplinary approaches within geographies of children and young people. This collection of chapters works to showcase, deepen, and develop geographic scholarship that aims to encapsulate aspects of the fascinating and rewarding socio-spatial heterogeneities of youthful lives across the world. Keywords

Child · Childhood · Young people · Babies · Spatialities · Genealogy · Foundations · Development · Intergenerationality · Participation · Waste · Bourdieu · Darwin · Neo-Darwinianism · Enlightenment thinkers · Poststructural · Spinoza · Walter Benjamin · Deleuze · Feminism · Post-human · Political geographies · Geographies of education · Emotional and affective geographies · Geovisualization · Play · Playgrounds · Architecture · Nonrepresentational theory · Religiosity · Spirituality

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Introduction

This chapter introduces volume 1 which gathers together debates at philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual levels that have influenced the formation and continuation of Geographies of Children and Young People. The volume adopts the key intellectual and political principles that constitute the foundational commitment of the series. Scholars of children’s and young people’s geographies have often had to fight hard to get their work taken seriously (see ▶ Chap. 2, “Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force,” by Aitken in this volume) and at the same time advocate on behalf of younger people to ensure the development of a scholarly and political visibility for this far too often neglected group of humanity. Collectively, as particular kinds of geographers, we have striven to: demonstrate that children and young people really do matter; end their marginalization within the academy and society in general; show that they have capacity, competence, and agency to live their lives; illustrate that there are different forms of participation that work badly or well for children and young people; scientifically prove that younger people do differ from adults in their social-spatial experiences; recognize that children and youths often work towards the creation of better and fairer futures; and support them in challenging inequality and injustice. As geographers working with children and young people, we aim to understand how youthful cohorts, usually aged between 0 and 29 experience, practice, and work at being who they are in different places and spaces. We endeavor to understand the ways in which they develop their own socio-spatialities, despite their almost universal exclusion from many spaces, places, and institutions. Collectively,

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we labor to demonstrate what children and young people create and contribute and to identify what support and care they need to achieve the best possible lives here and now, and in the future. The next part of this introductory chapter presents the chapters and explains the ways in which they have been grouped together. The latter process has not been an easy task as there could have been several permutations. This is an eclectic gathering of chapters. What they all have in common is an emphasis on foundational ideas, philosophies, and approaches and/or explanations of the development of innovative ways of thinking about, and techniques of practice for research work, with children and young people whether that be Darwin, geovisualization, play, education, politics, religion, the spatialities of babies, Spinoza, emotions, or architecture. As advertisers pronounce – we are sure there is something in this volume for everyone. In a collection of such varied chapters and topics then we can play around a little, as children and young people often do in creative and innovative ways, in order to make connections across subjects, theories, and empirical work but at the same time produce knowledge of association. Drawing upon childhood games, the decision about the running order of chapters was literally done as a jigsaw to try and shape the space of this volume into a serendipitous pathway through exciting geographies of children and young people. We hope readers will be drawn into chapters they might not have expected to read and start to build their own patterns of assemblage. This “starting point volume” comprises four parts that draw upon the notion of genealogies of the generation of ideas, philosophies, theories, concepts, and practices combined with the empirical data that builds greater understanding related to everyday realities of children’s and young people’s lives. The collection of chapters works to showcase, deepen, and develop geographic scholarship that aims to encapsulate aspects of the fascinating and rewarding socio-spatial heterogeneities of youthful lives across the world.

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Starting Points: Rethinking Theoretically and Conceptually

This section provides an overview of Part I, “Established and Contemporary Theorizations of Children and Young People,” of the volume and places emphasis on starting points and the possibilities and importance of rethinking theoretically and conceptually. The chapter authors speak to the foundations, advancements, and potentials of how we know and work with young people. Each, in their own way, establishes varied starting points and lines of flight that converge, cohere, compete, cleave, coalesce, and cohabitate (it is important to remember that the word cleave has multiple meanings that are, in fact, opposed to each other: to separate into distinct parts or to become closely attached – here we want it to convey both meanings.). After the Introduction, there are eight chapters in this section that logically divide into genealogy on the one hand and overview on the other: five chapters examine contemporary conceptualizations and challenges; and three engage with theoreticians and the ways in which they are of value to geographers working with younger people.

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▶ Chapter 2, “Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force,” traces and analyzes the growth of children’s (and to some extent young people’s) geographies as they have steadily progressed to the here and now. This chapter casts its genealogical gaze back to the 1970s and brings us through time and space where we can trace the formation of a substantive subdiscipline within the main discipline of Geography and beyond to other social sciences. The chapter ends with ruminating about the ways the field is currently reinventing itself through discussion of the postchild and more-than-child, and what that might mean for future research and practice. The metaphor of “coloring outwith the maps” captures the early, and in some cases, on-going struggle, to ensure children and young people are taken seriously. The diversity (and colors) of children’s and young people’s geographies are captured in vibrant ways throughout this chapter. This chapter provides a framework for all kinds of starting points and lines of flight delivered by a fascinating collection of debate and examination within this volume and beyond to the other 11 books. Pursuing the material and conceptual realities present in children’s and young people’s lives, the next four chapters encourage us to consider ways of rethinking established concepts and practices as well as engaging with new ideas and approaches. Nicola Ansell’s ▶ Chap. 3, “Global South Research in Children’s Geographies: From Useful Illustration to Conceptual Challenge,” draws upon her extensive research related to children, youth, and development. Ansell considers the ways in which the new social studies of childhood proved to be extremely useful in deeper and broader understandings of certain kinds of children’s lives but also examines the challenges this approach brought when southern childhoods were the focus of research. She provides examples of different ways of doing research on childhoods and how it is possible for southern children, and those who do research and practice with them, to be able to speak back to, and inform aspects of, northern childhoods. In particular, Ansell cautions the ways researchers use the term child agency, which is a decidedly global north phrase. Her work in general and this chapter in particular are important reminders of how much research on, and practice with, children’s and young people’s geographies has expanded globally and how that expansion heralds a caution against the universality of any particular way of knowing. Robert Vanderbeck provides a genealogical perspective on the relatively recent growth of the concept, intergenerationality, in ▶ Chap. 4, “Intergenerational Geographies in Theory and Practice.” He explores its use in geography and other study areas in order to investigate how the concept works and what it might contribute to future research. In particular, Vanderbeck outlines the robust connections made between intergenerationality and generation research within the context of relationality. The chapter is a reminder of how far work by children’s geographers has come since earlier research, which tended to focus on life-cycle stages rather than life-cycle relations (cf. Katz and Monk 1993). Additionally, Vanderbeck works to deconstruct some of the normativity found around the concept of intergenerationality and reminds us of the importance of paying attention to generation and life stages. Vanderbeck’s chapter here also serves as a valuable link to his co-edited Families, Intergenerationality, and Peer Group Relations (with Samantha Punch, volume 5 of this series, 2018).

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Caitlin Cahill has been a very important contributor to debates about participation and youth activism, both as practice with young people and as a research methodological tool in the guise of Participant Action Research. In ▶ Chap. 5, “Theorizing Youth Participation,” she focuses on the ways in which young people are resisting state-sanctioned violence, especially that targeted at a range of minority and vulnerable groups, and how they are working collectively on understanding and demanding their rights. Cahill illustrates the multiple ways in which young people, working co-operatively together, and connecting with activists, community leaders, and academics, are utilizing participatory action research in order theorize and practice resistance to structural injustices. Cindi Katz, as part of this collection of four, draws upon on her long-term project “Childhood as Spectacle” to interrogate neoliberal capitalism and critically engage and resist the silencing of the essential work that social reproduction does for Marxist and critical political-economic analyses. Her larger project, impressive in its scope, begins with pondering how globalization processes land differently in rural Sudan and urban New York (Katz 2004) and continues latterly with an unpacking of the geographies of reproduction with and through young people. In ▶ Chap. 6, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives,” Katz furthers this project with an exploration and illumination of state and economic strategies of “waste management” around children and childhood, rendering both redundant and hence open to exploitation through the school-to-prisonpipeline or exploitation of child labor to “recycle” waste ships. The final three chapters of Part I connect with philosophers and theorists. In ▶ Chap. 7, “Engaging with Bourdieu: A Review of the Utilization of Bourdieu Within Children and Young People’s Geographies Christina Ergler and Bronwyn Wood provide a valuable insight into the ways that working with Bourdieu enhances our understandings of children, space, and social justice. They recognize the value of existing scholarship around social and cultural capital but describe the ways in which they work to stretch and engage deeper with Bourdieurian analysis using his integrated conceptual triad of field, capital, and habitus, and his complete theory of practice in order to enrich understandings of the geographies of children and young people. Although Ergler and Wood go to pains to point out that Bourdieu was not “structural” to the degree that he wanted all three aspects of his tools used in unison, he was nonetheless an admitted social constructivist. The work pushes a theoretical boundary that relates in important ways to empirical issues such as young people’s health (e.g., Ergler et al. 2017), relations to education (Kraftl 2013) or to nature and habitus (e.g., Murnaghan and Shillington 2016). The chapter serves as both an introduction and consolidation of the potential value of drawing upon Bourdieu when working with children and young people. Stuart C. Aitken provides us with a rich and perhaps unexpected engagement with Darwin as a philosopher of science and biology, the creator of evolutionary biology (and, for some, ecology) and an expert on genealogy. ▶ Chapter 8, “Approaching Child and Youth Geographies Through Darwin,” by Aitken, reflects on the theoretical and philosophical approaches to children and young people through development and post-development studies. His starting point is a rereading of Darwin

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followed by a critique of neo-Darwinian and Enlightenment-based thinkers and their foundational work on child development. A rereading of Darwin, Aitken argues, provides new ways of thinking about better and more accurate ways of understanding children’s spatial development as processes of learning and experience that are on-going, emergent, affective, and embodied (see ▶ Chaps. 16, “Children and Young People’s Emotional Geographies,” by Blazek and ▶ 17, “Affective Geovisualization and Children: Representing the Embodied and Emotional Geographies of Children,” by Jung in this volume). His chapter opens up “established” theories through the use of post-structural, post-human, and feminist analysis in order to push past post-developmentalism and orient us rather towards tendency, emergence, and the affect of what children do and contribute. While Aitken’s chapter pulls heavily from geo-philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti who in turn are influenced by the Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher, ethicist, and heretic, Baruch Spinoza, for Georgio Hadi Curti, the philosopher of choice is Spinoza combined with Walter Benjamin’s theories around children and revolutionary play. In this third of the cluster of three chapters directly engaging with philosophers, ▶ Chap. 9, “Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect,” by Curti provides insight into Spinoza as a weaver of webs of immanence in order to explore embodied imaginations and the ways in which these form valuable knowings and understandings of children and childhood. Imagine, if you will, a young child’s engagement with a spider’s web as a philosophical practice and you may have a piece of Spinosa’s project as it related to young people. Through Spinoza, Curti argues, we can shift away from the entrapment of children and childhood as ages or stages of development and instead understand these younger people with bodily capacities as potential political agents. This chapter clearly connects effectively with Aitken’s work on Darwin and beyond and also closes Part I, nicely framing the following section which examines politics, the political, young people, and children.

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Politics and the Political: Young People, Children, and Childhoods

As an obvious extension of philosophy, theory, and concepts, this section provides an elaboration of some of the fundamental politics underpinning children’s and young people’s geographies, activities, and practices. The chapter authors speak to some of the foundational political ideas that relate adult worlds to youthful worlds, and some of the important ways young people’s politics are misunderstood and misused. The chapters speak to children’s and young people’s rights and the importance not only of their ideas but how they themselves are part of policy-making and political decisions that affect them. The four chapters in Part II, “Fundamental Politics and Political Foundations,” explore a range of young people’s and children’s political identities, doings, and creativities in a way that presages later volumes in this series.

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Tracey Skelton’s ▶ Chap. 10, “Foundations and Impacts of Youthful Political Geographies,” provides a detailed and comprehensive genealogy and overview of the starting points for a significant theoretical and conceptual theme of the political (and geopolitical) geographies of children and young people. It begins with the intellectual political act of asking whether there is a place for children and young people in geography through to demanding a more inclusive engagement with younger people across Geography as a discipline, and in particular with political geographies (Skelton 2010). Providing a rich resource of children’s and young people’s political geographies scholarship, the chapter illustrates the ways in which different political conceptualizations and deconstructions have delivered challenges and fresh ways of doing youthful politics that enlivens and energizes more taken-for-granted notions of the political within the subdiscipline of political geographies. The chapter is both reflective, focusing on the starting points of the 1990s, and forward looking with insights into nationalism and citizenship, playful, more-than-human, post-human and prefigurative, children’s and young people’s politics. Lynn Staeheli’s ▶ Chap. 11, “Paradoxes of Young People’s Political Participation,” explores the apparent complexities of young people’s political participation, activism, agency, and practices. The chapter explores the ways in which young people face a range of contradictory perceptions around their political participation. The paradox at the heart of this chapter revolves around the expectations of what young people can deliver in terms of hopeful, positive, and egalitarian politics at the same time as they are considered to not have the competence, skills, or capacity to be effective political actors. Drawing upon the concept of neo-communitarianism as an institutionalization of neoliberal governance, Staeheli demonstrates the ways in which young people are drawn into neoliberal discourses and rationalizations of entrepreneurialism and self-sufficiency as well as particular formations of citizenship identities (see ▶ Chaps. 6, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives,” by Katz and ▶ 14, “Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era,” by Mitchell in this volume, for additional critical interrogations of neoliberal practices around children and young people). The chapter shows the contradictions between adult expectations of full and constructive citizenship contributions from young people at the same time as dictating particular pedagogies of youthful citizenship which may not have any direct connection with young people’s actual lived realities – yet another paradoxical formation that challenges young people’s political participation. Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Kallio have published extensively on the theoretical importance of children’s politics and the politics of childhood. In ▶ Chap. 12, “Theorizing Children’s Political Agency,” the pair delivers insights into the tools required for understanding political agency and events, and the ways in which they are part and parcel of children’s everyday lives. Their review and discussion of the means by which new notions of politics and political agency have developed (in part by the work of children’s and young people’s political geographers), retell us about the diversity and multifaceted elements of youthful politics and agency. They remind us of a simple but fundamentally important question, at all scales of the meaning of politics, “why

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are children typically excluded from the concerns of political theory?” Drawing upon phenomenologies of political action, Häkli and Kallio turn to contextuality, relationality, and intersubjectivity in order to capture and better understand, theorize, and make visible children’s political agency. The focus on political agency is elaborated through “I” and “me,” “who” and “what,” with recognition of the theories of Hannah Arendt, George Herbert Mead, and Axel Honneth. There are important relations here to understanding young people using the lens of representation (see ▶ Chap. 7, “Engaging with Bourdieu: A Review of the Utilization of Bourdieu Within Children and Young People’s Geographies,” by Ergler and Wood), nonrepresentation theory (see ▶ Chap. 19, “Geographies of Architecture, Children’s Geographies, and Nonrepresentational Theory,” by Kraftl) or Deleuze (see ▶ Chap. 9, “Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect,” by Curti and ▶ Chaps. 2, “Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force,” and ▶ 8, “Approaching Child and Youth Geographies Through Darwin,” by Aitken). In this final chapter for Part II, Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha presents ▶ Chap. 13, “The Political Geography of the “Best Interest of the Child”” She focuses on children’s citizenship within wider political landscapes whereby children’s best interests are made through a series of scales, such as the local and the state, and practices including social policies and forms of adult care. Moosa-Mitha analyses the ways in which the “best interests of the child” is one of four key principles enshrined within the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. The “best interests” aspect links children to special legal protections, acceptable limits on their freedom, and obligations of duties of care on the part of adults, combined with normative assumptions about children and their welfare. Moosa-Mitha spatializes some of her earlier feminist inspired ideas about child- and other-centered citizenship. By so doing, she utilizes a spatial perspective to effectively capture the diverse ways in which children are defined, situated and interact with rights that vary within specific geographic spaces. Her retrospective analysis of articulations around children’s citizenship and their best interests within Western (neo)welfare states exposes the complexities and contradictions of the spaces, places, and scales where children’s lives are expected to be enacted versus the realities of their spatial lives. The chapter brings together critical geographies of space-time – from David Harvey (1991) and, in particular, Doreen Massey (2005) – with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and, on the ground, the practical policies that control young people.

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Geographies of Education, Emotions, and Affect: Established and Fresh Perspectives

Although it is clear that policies and everyday politics affect younger people in crucial ways, there are many other factors that impinge upon the formations, subjectivities, and identities of children and young people. In this section which introduces Part III of the volume, Youthful Formations: Education, Emotional and

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Affective Geographies, we consider the impact of education institutions and practices, including the material constructions of schools and the role of pedagogy. Additionally, two chapters introduce the roles of emotional and affective geographies in quite different ways. Katharyne Mitchell’s ▶ Chap. 14, “Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era,” addresses the interwoven relationships between education, youth formation, and socioeconomic change. She powerfully unpacks the ways educational institutions in the global north make and remake young lives through particular policies and rationalities of governance with a focus on the USA, England, and Canada. Her chapter explores three key themes: citizenship formation; technology and intergenerational relationships; and philanthropy, all of which are heavily inflected with free-market thinking. Mitchell interrogates not only what and where children are learning (she presents a fascinating, if disturbing, insight into Charter Schools) but also importantly “how” they are learning and what shifts this brings about. She alerts us to the fact that digital technologies relate to short-term consumerism and reduce young people’s ability to continue the intergenerational transfer of cultural memory and relational learning which is part and parcel of growing up and maturity (see ▶ Chaps. 13, “The Political Geography of the “Best Interest of the Child”” in this volume by Mehmoona MoosaMitha on the best interests of the child, and ▶ 4, “Intergenerational Geographies in Theory and Practice” by Vanderbeck on intergenerationality). Kathy Reilly, Ranu Basu, and Valerie Ledwith’s ▶ Chap. 15, “Geographies of Education: Context and Case” links extremely well with the previous chapter. The authors provide particular insights into complex and diverse aspects of geographies of education which include the politics of educational inequalities, particularly in relation to ethnic minority, migrant, and refugee children and young people. Providing case studies and contextual examples from Canada and Ireland, they explore the ways in which social justice and injustice works through pedagogy, institutions, and student experiences. They also explore the complexities of school choice and aspirations experienced both by parents and children alongside the roles the state and the local play in creating geographies of privileged and marginalized educational opportunities. The latter distinctions are deepened in both countries through territoriality, social class, mobility, discrimination, and neoliberal impacts on school systems that have affected both countries in similar but also differentiated ways (see ▶ Chap. 6, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives,” by Cindi Katz on the school-to-prison-pipeline debates in the USA in this volume). Having explored the complex ideological and material realities children, young people, and their families face in contemporary education spaces (not forgetting the genealogical histories discussed by both Mitchell and Reilly et al.), this section continues with an exploration of emotions and affect. Matej Blazek’s ▶ Chap. 16, “Children and Young People’s Emotional Geographies,” explores the ways in which geographical approaches to emotions help to re/conceptualize categories of childhood and adulthood but at the same time imbue children with particular emotional and

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affective conditions. For example, children’s emotionality is utilized in particular ways for policy, professional practice, and a politics of childhood. The chapter then continues to provide insights into the ways emotions connect in different ways with children’s spatialities such as home, school, and online spaces. Thereafter, methodological approaches that have been used and are being invented to enable nuanced and epistemologically appropriate research into children’s emotional geographies are examined (see volume 2, Methodological Approaches edited by Evans, Holt and Skelton 2017). Blazek closes the chapter with three important propositions for new directions in this strand of childrens’ and young people’s emotional geographies. The first is closer attention to the similarities and differences across the world and the need to theorize emotions in relation to the global south and not just in the global north (see ▶ Chap. 3, “Global South Research in Children’s Geographies: From Useful Illustration to Conceptual Challenge,” by Nicola Ansell on the analysis of development relationality around children and youth in this volume). The second is for greater recognition of the complexities of children’s emotional lives in relation to social difference such as dis/ability, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. The final call is to make childhood and emotions work harder theoretically and relationally to broaden our understandings of both these important categories. Connecting with a different formation of children’s emotional geographies, Jia-Kyu Jung’s ▶ Chap. 17, “Affective Geovisualization and Children: Representing the Embodied and Emotional Geographies of Children,” introduces qualitative and emotional forms of geographic visualization through which children may elicit their own accounts and feelings. In an ambitious chapter that tackles the tools of geovisualization and mapping as they relate to affect and the emotional geographies of children, Jia-Kyu Jung begins with a discussion of work that was done in the 1970s and 1980s on children’s cognitive mapping. In terms of the arguments put forth by Aitken in ▶ Chap. 2, “Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force,” it should be noted this work was focused on children as becoming adults from a developmental perspective and, as such, many of these early researchers did not consider emotions as a relevant mode of studying cognitive development. Nonetheless, methods that were developed around this time, including sketch mapping, autophotography, discussions of community, and journeys/wayfinding are still used today and are part of a progressive treatment of not only how young people think about the world but how they feel about it. Jung provides a comprehensive assessment of the relatively new field of affective mapping and speaks to how it influences children and youth mappings. Although work with children and their emotional mappings is only beginning (but see ▶ Chap. 21, “Finding a Place for Babies and Their Spatialities” by Tebet and Abramowicz, this volume), Jung nonetheless provides some interesting examples of this powerful way of knowing young people through articulation and representation of their experiences and spatial narratives. Jung’s section on “engaging with affective geovisualization” affords several illustrated examples of the use of geo-spatial and mapping technologies to deliver methods such as mood meters, bio mapping, smiley sticker projects, ethnopoetics, and creative mapping and geovisualization.

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Focusing on Spatialities: Play, Architecture, Spiritualities, Babies

Concern for young people’s emotional and affective relations to spaces continues in Part IV, Spaces and Places of Play, Learning and Spirituality, with a consideration of play and public/architectural spaces, and elaboration of spiritual connection to places. In this part of the volume, there is also a chapter that relates to educational spaces, connecting with previous education-oriented chapters, but it moves in the direction of the more-than-representation, more-than-human. The idea of nonhuman/ more-than-human also shows up in the formation of youthful religious/spiritual subjects. The ideas of corporeality, intimacy, and more-than-representational relations bring us finally and fittingly to babies and their place in the world. Ann Marie Murnaghan’s ▶ Chap. 18, “Play and Playgrounds in Children’s Geographies,” provides a review of the field which illustrates the foundational and contemporary literature on childrens’s play and the spatialities of playgrounds. She provides valuable definitions of what play is and theorizes it in terms of psychology, sociology, and, in particular, history (which is her main focus), as well as in terms of its relations to geography work and education. She notes that studies on play can be both abstract and material, range from the well-debated differentiation between work and play to the essential nature of children and childhood. To help understand this, Murnaghan unpacks some of the early organizations such as the Playground Movement, the City Beautiful Movements, and others linked to “saving children” and shows how critical they were in not only establishing play areas for children but also elaborating the importance of connections to nature. She notes how work in this area in the 1970s and 1980s is very different from what is done now both epistemologically and methodologically. Murnaghan uses examples from North America, Europe, and Scandinavia to show ways that researchers have paid attention to gender, race, class, and ethnic differences, the school ground, the greening of school grounds, diverse sites, and the role of risky play in adventure playgrounds. She notes that some of the up and coming research is using new technologies in order to study children’s microgeographies of play and playgrounds which may help to show how they use space (this links with the geovisual methods used ▶ Chap. 17, “Affective Geovisualization and Children: Representing the Embodied and Emotional Geographies of Children,” by Jung, this volume). In a powerful review ▶ Chap. 19, “Geographies of Architecture, Children’s Geographies, and Nonrepresentational Theory,” that relates to public spaces in a different way from Murnaghan, Peter Kraftl brings together young people and architecture in forceful ways and places them squarely in nonrepresentational theory (NRT). Kraftl then quickly moves the discussion to more recent scholarship, which highlights the importance of a more-than-representational approach to both children’s geographies and architectural spaces. These new approaches value the innovation of NRT, and particularly its attention to emotion, embodiment, and materiality (see ▶ Chaps. 16, “Children and Young People’s Emotional Geographies,” by Blazek and ▶ 17, “Affective Geovisualization and Children: Representing the Embodied and Emotional Geographies of Children,” by Jung in Part III of this

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volume), but they also focus on everyday politics that are manifest in voice, agency, and symbolic meaning (see ▶ Chaps. 10, “Foundations and Impacts of Youthful Political Geographies,” by Skelton, ▶ 11, “Paradoxes of Young People’s Political Participation,” by Staeheli, ▶ 12, “Theorizing Children’s Political Agency,” by Häkli and Kallio, and ▶ 13, “The Political Geography of the “Best Interest of the Child”,” by Moosa-Mitha focusing on politics, children and young people in Part II of this volume, 2019). With these ideas in mind, Kraftl examines the relatively small but important body of scholarship that has directly and explicitly examined children’s and young people’s lives in architectural spaces. In particular, he examines research in schools, which provides an excellent link to ▶ Chap. 14, “Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era,” by Mitchell in this volume, by focusing on young people’s participation in design, school-building policies, and, by default, the material construction of childhood. Kraftl’s discussion of research on urban architecture focuses on urban sports (such as skateboarding and parkour) and the experiences of young people living with sustainable urban design. By so doing, he elaborates the impressive scope and promise of younger people’s architectural geographies in terms of a more-than-representational approach. Elizabeth Ann Olsen and Sertanya Reddy’s ▶ Chap. 20, “Geographies of Youth Religiosity and Spirituality,” moves the idea of spirituality and the nonhuman further with the consideration of Spiritualities of Youth as an important new subfield. The chapter moves slightly away from Kraft’s spirit of place with a focus on how geographic research has brought into being the figure of the youthful religious subject. The chapter starts with the role of religion in early geographical scientific production and then moves quickly to the construction of the youthful religious figure in contemporary geographical work. Olsen and Reddy see the young religious subject as a relational becoming, which is institutionalized; racialized, sexualized, and classed; globalized; and spiritual. The emergence of geographies of religious youth as an historical field is outlined and marked as a colonial preoccupation with categorizations that are still clear. The resulting youthful religious figure of contemporary geographical scholarship is an active religious agent, but one who is also always part of broader social practices, and increasingly important as a national hope, a geopolitical concern, or the embodiment of transgression (see ▶ Chaps. 9, “Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect” by Curti, ▶ 10, “Foundations and Impacts of Youthful Political Geographies,” by Skelton, and ▶ 11, “Paradoxes of Young People’s Political Participation,” by Staeheli). The youthful religious subject is also a creative figure navigating and negotiating personal religiosity and spirituality with attendant symbols and meanings. In telling the story of the emergence of a new subfield, Olsen and Reddy also give an account of absences and closures, and as a result, the chapter concludes by reflecting upon the youthful religious figures that are not framed well by geographical analysis. The section and the volume ends, ironically, with a chapter on beginnings. Gabriela Tebet and Anete Abramowicz focus on babies and their spatialities and the beginnings of a relatively new focus in children’s geographies, the study of babies, in ▶ Chap. 21, “Finding a Place for Babies and Their Spatialities.” This is a timely chapter about an area of research that is in its infancy (pun intended). Tebet

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Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People: Introduction

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and Abramowicz note that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of our understandings of the spatialities of babies, and so this chapter is a welcome ending and beginning to the volume. The authors do well to tap into studies from anthropology, sociology, geography, and history to tease out some of the sparse yet important studies in this embryonic area. They also elaborate some of the important ways that show how we view babies have changed over time. Once this baseline is established, they draw on work by Latour, Deligny, Deleuz, Bourdieu, and, Clark and Moss, to push our thinking towards the critical and post-structural leanings of contemporary work on babies/infants/children and geography. Tebet and Abramowicz’s mosaic approach is particularly interesting and has a lot of potential for connecting to ways that we conceptualize space. Also of note and interest are the Brazilian examples and empirical work on affective mappings which suggest a very different way of coming into knowledge of the world. Tebet and Abramowicz end with the Deleuzian conceptionalizations of immanence and singularities and suggest that babies’ spaces are corporeally linked, and although perhaps unfathomable to adults (as they should be) nonetheless they are connected through intimate relations and how we understand and act towards babies.

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Conclusion

This introduction is designed to provide a pathway through a connected and yet eclectic collection of geographical work focusing on children and young people. Each chapter is complete in itself and in the story it tells, but, nevertheless important linkages can be made across chapters and with the other 11 volumes of the series. The organization of chapters provided in this volume is but one route through chapters that provide genealogical, foundational, established, reviewed, and novel introductions to a range of youthful geographies. The chapters that constitute Volume 1 could be imagined and experienced as enticing “starters” or an “amuse bouche” before the greater feasts or smorgasbords delivered by the 11 volumes that follow (in number order but not in chronological order). Readers will approach this volume in very different ways. These chapters are starting points, launch pads, first steps, for those who are curious about this “new” approach in geography where babies, children, and young people are the centers of attention rather than being on the margins or not even present – perhaps seen but not heard. Other readers might be hungry for the historical context of where the contemporary work all started or desirous of tucking into different philosophical engagements. As is evident, this volume takes genealogies, foundations, and pioneers seriously – history does really matter. With the contemporary instantaneity of resources and debate, it is too easy to skirt over the “older” stuff and yet this early work and the complexities of theorization are essential for our deeper understanding of concepts such as “childhood,” “play,” “youth,” “participation,” “agency,” “competence,” “politics,” “learning,” “spatialities,” and so on, and so on. These concepts have been built over time and they carry considerable meaning; it is essential that

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genealogies of these terms are recognized, understood, interrogated, and evaluated for their usefulness and for the political, social, and cultural work that they do. For others, the review approach is an expedient and generous way to learn quite a lot quickly about a particular subject area within children’s and young people’s geographies. A lot of choice is offered, this time following a different directional, but nevertheless still serendipitous, pathway of stepping stones (rewind): babies; spirituality; architecture; playgrounds; geovisualization; emotions; education; politics; philosophers; theoreticians; waste; participation; intergenerationality; development; and “coloring maps.” Each chapter in this volume provides a starting point for deeper and broader learning within the more “specialized” themes that are central to the ever expanding children’s and young people’s geographies and served generously through volumes 2–12. At the start of this introduction, we claimed we have something for everyone. We are confident that we are close to delivering that promise, but really the “something for all” is best delivered through the whole collection of the 12 volumes of the Geographies of Children and Young People series.

References Ergler, C. R., Kearns, R., & Witten, K. (Eds.). (2017). Children’s health and wellbeing in urban environments. New York/London: Routledge. Evans, R., Holt, L., & Skelton, T. (Eds.). (2017). Methodological approaches (1st ed.). Singapore: Springer. Harvey, D. (1991). The condition of postmodernity. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global. Minnesota: Guilford Press. Katz, C., & Monk, J. (1993). Full circles: Geographies of gender over the life course. New York/London: Routledge. Kraftl, P. (2013). Geographies of alternative education: Diverse learning spaces for children and young people. Bristol: Policy Press. Massey, D. (2005). For space. New York/London: Sage. Murnaghan, A.-M., & Shillington, L. J. (Eds.). (2016). Children, nature, and cities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Punch, S., Vanderbeck, R., & Skelton, T. (Eds.). (2018). Families, intergenerationality, and peer group relations. Singapore: Spinger. Skelton, T. (2010). Taking young people as political actors seriously: Opening the borders of political geography. Area, 42(2), 145–151.

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Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force Stuart C. Aitken

Contents 1 2 3 4

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Short and Pointed Defense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Lines of Flight (1970s–1990s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity Politics I: Feminism and the Queering of Children’s Geographies (1990s Onwards) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Identity Politics II: Being, Becoming, Rights, and Policy-Making (1990s Onwards) . . . . . . 6 The Global Child, Universal Rights, Postdevelopment, and Postcolonial Critiques (2000s Onwards) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Postchild Moment (2010s Onwards) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Conclusion: Prospects and Potentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18 19 21 29 33 36 39 42 43

Abstract

This chapter traces the evolution of children’s geographies as a subdiscipline from its beginnings as a dismissed and contested field of geographic research to its current status as a global intellectual and practical force. In the early 1970s, the field gained credibility only to the degree that it was influenced by developmental and environmental psychology. Beginning around 1990, children’s geographies cohered politically as geographers focused on young people’s identity through feminism and Marxism, and global policy initiatives on children’s rights. For the

This basis of this chapter (30%) comes from an article published in the Geographical Review (2017) entitled “Children’s Geographies: Tracing the Evolution and Involution of a Concept.” This is included with permission from the editor and publisher. Some other minor parts of the chapter are derived and developed from work in (i) Aitken (2004), (ii) Aitken (2001b), and (iii) Aitken (2018). S. C. Aitken (*) Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_25

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last 30 years, children’s geographies have flourished, coming from issues of political relationalities that challenge what we think we know about young people and their geographies, and also from a set of loose theories about the ways young people create and re-create spaces and themselves. Cognate disciplines coming to geography for insights about children and their worlds characterize the current phase of the field’s development and its potential. Keywords

Cognition and development · Feminism · Marxism · Postchild

1

Introduction

“What is this, a guide for helping children stay within the lines while coloring maps?” A fairly well-known geographer at the 2001 annual meetings of the American Association of Geographers voiced the question loudly and rhetorically while he picked up the first issue of Children’s Geographies at the Routledge’s exhibit table. “Well,” he went on to say while flicking through the pages of the journal, “a book to color in maps might have been a better idea.” These flippant and derisory comments illustrate a common opinion about a field of geographic study that had been working to establish an academic record for over 30 years. The journal, Children’s Geographies: Advancing Interdisciplinary Understanding of Younger People’s Lives, was a gambit through which researchers hoped that the field would gain an important regular publication forum. Substantive mass and critical engagement was reached, it may be argued, with the publication of some important work on children from the 1980s onwards (Wood 1982, 1985a, b; Aitken and Ginsberg 1988; James 1990; Katz 1991; Aitken and Wingate 1993; Aitken 1994, 2001b; Sibley 1995a; Valentine 1996; Skelton and Valentine 1998; Holloway and Valentine 2001), and it was clearly time for the creation of a journal. The quip from the fairly well-known geographer at the publishers’ exhibit belies issues of academic relevance that rarely plague children’s geographies nearly two decades later. The journal now publishes six volumes a year and has a respectable impact factor. In addition, the 12 volumes of the major reference work, of which this chapter is a part, comprise an impressive collection of over 450 scholarly works on a huge variety of children and youth related topics – social media, trafficking, labor, migration, politics, cities, play, planning, tourism, leadership, mapping, activism, education, religion, caring, art, GIS, spirituality, nature, mobility – that come under the rubric and title “Geographies of Children and Young People.” This and all the other publications, grants, named professorships, and accolades that the field has accrued notwithstanding, there is something deliciously ironic about the hapless comment from the somewhat well-known geographer. Here is what is both delightful and biting: the field may indeed be characterized as one that works with children and young people to color in, with, and through maps. In what follows, I argue that this is what the field does so vibrantly and with aplomb: that children and young people give maps (both real and imagined) flare and excite them; that they crash through cartographic boundaries and explore and rework the terra incognita of their

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margins and cartouches; these are the characteristics of children and young people that the field works with so that they, and we, can create and recreate, work and rework, and imagine and re-imagine our world. This chapter, then, is about coloring outwith the lines of the map as something that children and young people do, and that we as researchers and scholars try to become involved with, keep up with, (re)present, write about, film and in some way document, while perhaps trying to make things better for us and young people through informing policy makers. I use the old Scottish preposition “outwith” (ootwi) as something that means outside and beyond but also simultaneously maintaining connection to something inside and part of; it is thus different from without, which implies something missing or gone. Outwith in equivalency is out + with. To color outwith the lines of the map, then, is a prepositional metaphor for children and young people who are simultaneously outside of, and also part of, hegemonic adult cultures; they are in and of the physical world and simultaneously part of social media and virtual realities, they are outside of many voting structures and decision-making forums, but they are nonetheless crucial to policy concerns. In what follows, I use this prepositional metaphor to show how the field of children’s geographies evolves by continuously circling back to the ways children and young people color outwith the lines of the map. This chapter is not intended as a comprehensive elaboration of the rise of the field of children’s and young people’s geographies, which is covered well in both generalities and advanced specificities, through a variety of editorial, review, and prospect articles (e.g., Horton and Kraftl 2006; Kesby 2007; Horton et al. 2008; Ansell 2009; Colls 2009; Evans and Holt 2011; Evans et al. 2017; Wells 2015; Ergler et al. 2016; Blundell 2016). What I want to do here is trace the ways that children’s geographies as a concept became something different and unique (i.e., something that colors outwith the lines of the map) that pushed against and through disciplinary boundaries, from very shortly after it first showed up as a term in the 1970s as a way to understand how children literally mapped their worlds. I want to defer the assignment of categories and timelines, while recognizing the complex and fluid relations that play on the becoming of children’s and young people’s geographies, which is not at all about a sequence of ideas but about disciplinary disturbances, creative tensions, artful resolutions, and willfully different lines of flight. Nor is this work comprehensive or exhaustive. I will miss or gloss over many important contributions. Some people will be aggrieved or even angry at the omissions. I know only a little and contrive that knowledge with some trepidation into this chapter. It is my reading of the field and I am fully responsible for the content. The balance of this introduction gives a short and pointed defense of the field and from where it arose. The rest of the chapter elaborates some of these points.

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A Short and Pointed Defense

In the early 1990s, an article in the British journal Area stated that “. . . there has been little research undertaken which critically examines the ways in which children’s lives, experiences, attitudes and opportunities are socially and spatially structured”

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(James 1990, 278). This was followed in the same journal by rejoinders that suggested a diverse field that lacked intellectual coherence and direction but nonetheless existed (Sibley 1991; Winchester 1991). Although there is some acknowledgment in these texts of children’s mapping work by Jim Blaut, Roger Downs, and others, and some discussion of Bill Bunge’s work with children, there is no acknowledgment that children’s geographies show up (and are named) with US scholars as early as the 1970s. From the 1980s onwards, beginning with a focus on the multiple places and environments that children experience, feminists and critical theorists who were interested in young people’s identities and their diverse ways of knowing places grabbed the concept and pushed it in a very different but not unsurprising directions, towards something more political in both UK and US scholarship. The critical and radical edge of this work (often springing from feminism and the margins of Marxism) involved something that pushed the agency and rights of children and young people. Much of this was followed by an important empirical push through well-funded Nordic scholarship. Two important events – the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC 1989) and the concomitant rise of the “new sociology of childhood” (Qvortrup et al. 1994; James and Prout 1997; James et al. 1998; Prout 2011) – propelled children’s geographies onto a world stage and forced those working with the concept to consider its elaboration to embrace global childhoods (Aitken et al. 2008; but see also Johnson and West 2018 and Hanson 2018). The policy implications of the UNCRC raised questions about what precisely constituted “the child” and once more geographers were asked about the place of children, but this time they were fielding questions after what was called the spatial turn in the social sciences and the humanities. The importance of space to our understanding of the world propelled this turn, and from it, geographers offered a panoply of spatial theories and concepts. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre, Ed Soja (1996) heralded the end of history and the hegemonic rule of time in understanding development. He argued for a focus on spatialities, which elaborated not only the ways the social influenced the spatial but also the ways the spatial influenced the social. Doreen Massey (2005) brought much of this thinking together with a re-theorizing of space and place from a critical and poststructural perspective that drew on the work of Bergson, Laclau, and de Certeau as well as Deleuze and Guattari (see Kraftl’s ▶ Chap. 19, “Geographies of Architecture, Children’s Geographies, and Nonrepresentational Theory” in this volume for an elaboration of Massey’s contribution to children’s geographies). Children’s geographers confronted the spatialities of childhood that were missing from sociology, anthropology, and in policy circles towards something that was now rooted in spaces and embedded in places. At this time, important heretofore marginalized and peripheralized contributions from Latin America, Asia, and Africa elaborated postdevelopment, and postcolonial thinking that very much focused on global oppression, unfair economic restructuring practices, and the colonizing of young people’s minds and bodies in different places. Through the early part of the twenty-first century until now, the idea of children’s geographies has garnered sophistication to the degree that what started as an (oppressed) impression is now a tour-de-force propelling work in a myriad of new

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transdisciplinary directions from babies and care landscapes to child labor, child soldiers, migrations, postcolonizations, sexualities, mobilities, parenting and family geographies, education, youth activism, and ideas about children’s hybridities and trans-identities. Intriguingly, the concept is now involved with the advent of ideas about postchildhood – from posthumanism, and focusing specifically on the child/ human/non-human as a problematic category – which challenge once more any kind of status quo or simple evolution regarding how we approach children’s geographies. Roughly following the trajectory I have just outlined, in the balance of this chapter I trace children’s geographies as a concept through four roughly interleaved tensions: (i) initial lines of flight (1970s–1990s), (ii) feminism, identity politics, and rights (1990s onwards), (iii) postdevelopmentalism, postcolonialism, and globalization (2000s onwards), and (iv) the postchild moment as a challenge to what we think we know about young people and their geographies (2010s onwards). These tensile phases are involved with each other; they are intertwined and mutually interdependent. Older concepts and methods still linger and do well: work on how children experience places and map their worlds, for example, and their pluralities, suggests that there are always other ways to think about young people’s spaces. Today, children’s geographies are heterogeneous and hybrid, encompassing a myriad of different ways of knowing children and their places in the world. This chapter is my reading of how the concept children’s geographies evolved into what we have today – something that lets us all color outwith the map – and how the concept’s evolution involves complex relations. Finally, the chapter hints at children’s geographies’ promise and potential.

3

The First Lines of Flight (1970s–1990s)

The study of geography has been linked to how cultures, economies, and politics are reproduced through generations since the classic Greek and Roman writings of Herodutus, Strabo, and Ptolemy. The study of children and young people as part of that reproduction, and the recognition that the day-to-day geographical experiences of young people are necessarily different from adults, is perhaps more recent. Certainly the scientific study of the ways young people relate to their immediate environments and neighborhoods goes back to the 1930s (Bernard 1939), but serious scientific and humanistic study of the plurality of complex relations (with each other, adults, environments, politics, and cultures) with which children engage dates from the 1970s at the earliest and it is from here that the term, if not the field of, children’s geographies finds its origins. Roger Hart began experimenting with the idea of “children’s geographies” in Children’s Experience of Place: A Developmental Study (1979), a book that came out of his groundbreaking PhD research in geography at Clark University. Hart’s work was part of a larger project funded by the US Department of Education, headed up by Jim Blaut and David Stea as the faculty co-principal investigators. Other students involved included Denis Wood who focused on children’s mappings and place knowledge, Ben Wisner whose work entailed their agricultural and

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environmental knowledge, and Margaret Tindal who studied children’s home ranges (cf. Blaut 1971). It is fair to say that Blaut and Stea were the originators of the rich and varied field of children’s geographies, but Hart was the first to define and defend the term in print, and his PhD study moved work with children in new methodological directions. Hart’s research boldly introduced in-depth interviews and ethnographic methods with young people to an academic discipline steeped at the time in spatial science, quantitative methodologies, mathematical models, and empirical metrics. While geographers sought unique and unitary models to explain human behavior, Hart suggested that children’s worlds were multiple, variegated, and complex, and a way forward was to focus on how the child experienced different places, different geographies. It was only a hint at something different, though, because Hart was firmly part of the social science of behavioral geography, which at the time drew heavily from environmental and developmental psychology. For Hart, the complexities of how children grew into their environments were largely explainable through Jean Piaget’s developmental stages. This notion of developmentalism is going to be important for what I say later about the global child, so I want to spend some time with it just now. According to Piaget (1952), children acquire understanding of their place in the world in the normal course of human development. Piaget and his students (most notable Brenda Inhelder) amassed empirical evidence that eventually developed into four qualitatively distinct stages of intellectual growth from infancy to adolescence: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational (Piaget 1954; Piaget and Inhelder 1956). By so doing, Piagetian theory prescribes for most children a linear, unitary, progressive, normal, and natural form of development where each stage is quantitatively and qualitatively different from that which precedes it and together create a formation wherein multiple ways of engaging different places have little or no bearing. Although US geographers at this time of Cold War tensions were unsurprisingly silent about the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1933, 1978, 1987), he nonetheless offered an antidote to Piaget’s instrumentality and abstractions with theories of child learning that accounted for socially and culturally constructed knowledge (Vygotsky’s influence on children’s geographers shows up in more detail below). With many science-oriented US geographers dismissing anything that smacked of socialism, it is not surprising that cognitive behavioral presuppositions and concepts of the kind just discussed would heavily influence the field. In 1982 Hart prepared a paper entitled “The Geography of Children and Children’s Geographies” for a review session on the “State of Behavioral Geography” at the San Antonio meetings of the Association of American Geographers. As far as I am aware, this is the first time the term “children’s geographies” was used in an academic forum. With this paper, Hart derides the ways that children, if they showed up at all in geographic research, were considered trivial or, at best, epiphenomenal. He notes that children are an important part of the growing body of literature on environmental behavior, and particularly that work which is concerned with their spatial activities and use of landscape, a literature emanating primarily from planning and landscape

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architecture. Hart notes a second body of literature from developmental psychology focusing on children’s spatial knowledge acquisition, from Piaget and others. The mechanistic, empirical, naturalistic, process-oriented search for unitary theory that much of this literature embraces appears quite alien to today’s students of children’s geographies and, indeed, the contemporary canon rarely cites this work. That said, two things are important about Hart’s early work and are worth mentioning here. First, he raises some of the geographic questions with which planners and developmental psychologists were dealing. What kinds of things do environments afford children? How do children find their way in complex spaces? What kinds of experiences do different places elicit? Hart strongly encouraged geographers to join this research effort. As such, it seems reasonable to assert the notion of children’s geographies at the very least as a transdisciplinary impression. Second, and perhaps more important for how the field evolved, in the second half of his paper (subtitled “Children’s Geographies”), Hart talks of a new breed of empirical study that focuses on interviews and talking to children rather than conducting laboratory experiments or observing behavior. (The specific “Children’s Geographies” referred to in Hart’s paper are “Physical Geography,” “Human Geography,” “Cognitive Mapping,” and “Geographic Cognition Beyond the Local Environment,” each of which he used to elaborate the developmental work of Jean Piaget and his students.) He notes that this work is belittled as “of the case study variety, and hence of limited utility in guiding planning and design. . . While very suggestive, none of these studies makes specific links to the objective economic conditions of the children’s families” (Hart 1982, 11). Herein lie the points of dismissal for children’s geographies at the time: that they were not objective, that they were case studies or had small sample sizes, and that they had little value for larger economic conditions. Further, they focused on spaces too small for geographic consideration. Hart was clearly a supporter of interview and ethnographic work – that is, talking to and working/playing with children – but conceded its limited impact for a time in geography when a particular form of theory-driven spatial science held sway. Children’s geographers today do not spend much time with Piaget, but in the 1970s and 1980s his was the most focused spatial theory in the USA and his work held sway with UK and US educators (Walkerdine 1984, 1988; Burman 1994). It suggested a way to understand the development of spatial awareness, geographic knowledge, wayfinding abilities, and the ways children matured. What is perhaps ironic and important to note is that the major point of dismissal at the time – that merely talking to children was not scientific or productive – was precisely what propelled children’s geographies as a field that resonated with many young scholars who were raising questions that were difficult to answer with mechanistic and/or quantitative methodologies. Hart’s concept would open up as researchers talked more and more to children and began to realize how limited their questions were and how little they knew. Questions about what children did where, and how children became spatially aware, were transformed into why children did not do certain things in certain places, or what kinds of childhoods were afforded different children, and what had to change to enable young people more spatial freedom. In time, with more children participating in studies, and with research focused on

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difference, diversity, and political praxis, there began the opening up of a plethora of children’s and young people’s worlds that spoke volumes about new important geographies focusing on activities, rights, citizenship, works, mobilities, migrations, sustainabilities, cultures, sexualities, capacities, precarities, economics, and politics. If Hart was introducing children’s geographies as a transdisciplinary endeavor, and Piaget’s developmental theory was taking some hold amongst behavioral geographers, US developmental theorists were also considering what geography had to offer. Sensorimotor learning must occur in physical contexts that enable the child to interact with objects and spaces, they suggested, and the more varied and complex those contexts the more enhanced the learning. In a study of children’s outdoor play, Olds (1980, 25) argues that the capacity for movement is part of nature, and limiting a child’s opportunity for activity prevents them from having “. . . experiences fundamental to their intellectual, social and physical development.” Wachs (1985) recognized the physical environment as crucial to children’s development, and particularly their language performance. In geography, at about this time, a focus on language and the study of children’s knowledge development was garnering a more critical edge. As part of the larger study at Clark University, Blaut challenged the staged notions of child development, at least in terms of their spatial awareness, through some of the radical ideas of Noam Chomsky (Blaut 1987, 1991). For over a decade, Blaut argued that a child’s spatial abilities showed up at a much earlier age than Piagetian theory predicted and that they were capable of rudimentary mapping from the age of three onwards (Blaut et al. 1970; Blaut and Stea 1974). Chomsky (1965) had developed the idea of naturally evolving languages, which Blaut extended to suggest that all normal human beings of all ages and in all cultures carry out mapping behaviors; “. . . it is therefore a natural ability,” he says, “or habit, or faculty, ‘natural’ in a sense very close to the way language acquisition is ‘natural’” (Blaut 1991, 55). An important radical involvement of Blaut’s work for what was to come later was its relationality. He saw proto-mapping skills manifest themselves in toy play, movement, painting, and in physical settings like sandboxes (for very young children) and playgrounds (for older children). Blaut liked to think of mapping as natural, and something that children did as they learned how to relate to what he called the macroenvironment. Furthermore, he talked with children and observed what they did as well as have them do controlled experiments. Chomsky and Blaut at various times describe themselves as connected to the American left and “fellow travelers” in the anarchist tradition. Both pull from this tradition to challenge all forms of authority, including academic authority, and attempt to eliminate them if they are unjustified or when the burden on them to provide proof fails. Another Clark University geography student, Dennis Wood, was thinking about how urban environments and local physical spaces intertwine with larger global processes that impinge in hidden ways on the lives of young people. He was also the first geographer to focus on youth geographies as opposed to children’s geographies. In the early 1980s, he wrote a series of provocative studies about the importance of young people “doing nothing,” being bored or simply waiting around for their muses to show up (Wood 1982, 1985a, b). Working in Barranquitos, Puerto Rico, in places that Kevin Lynch (1977) had famously

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described as boring for young people and not worth their time, Wood argued for the importance of hanging out and doing nothing as a formative practice. He suggested that young people could get not only bored but also resentful getting shepherded around organized activities like baseball, football, piano, or ballet. Although interested in mapping (indeed he would later write some very influential cartographic texts), Wood’s methodologies were far different from the cognitive behavioral techniques of Lynch and Blaut. Wood lived in Barranquitos for a year conducting ethnographies. From his observations, he argued that doing nothing is a searching, a time of change, an aesthetic process and a social dynamic: It has nothing to do with being alone. A lot of kids can be empty together . . . all activity (in Barranquitos] sprang from doing nothing. Sitting on a step before the stairs or standing around on the porch at Angel’s comado (general store), the kids with nothing to do were poets waiting for their muse. . . . Doing nothing is filling. Doing nothing is an unfolding of things to do, an unfolding of things that have no names, like mooning around a lamppost or kicking stones into a drain across the street; an unfolding of things that do have names, like a whole string of street games such as El Gato y Rarton and Escondido and El Pote; an unfolding of things that have names that can as well be left unsaid like stealing and seeing who can pee the farthest; or an unfolding of all these things mixed together. Doing nothing is almost everything. As a term it conceals as it identifies. It is both comprehensive and evasive, simultaneously screen and mirror. Like a kaleidoscope, it is everything, and it is nothing. Most of all it is doing. And it is what the Barranquitos kids did most of the time. (Wood 1985a, 9)

This extended excerpt illustrates Wood’s genius at articulating the hidden processes and patterns of young people lived worlds. Nonactivities are seemingly inconsequential exchanges that nonetheless portend an important aspect of spaces that are not policed or controlled by an adult world. Wood’s work points to the significance of maintaining portions of children’s lives that are not organized and institutionalized. Based on participant observation, evidence from Wood’s early work is impressionistic and found little support in US academic geography (although his idea of young people with nothing to do is picked up by Tracey Skelton (2000) in her work with teenage girls and public space in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales). Wood published in venues that were not well circulated at the time and no longer exist today. In later work, Wood gained significant academic notice for describing the ways adult worlds constrain the fluidity of young people’s day-to-day rounds. His fieldwork in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, focused on young people’s built environments – rooms, houses, schools – that defined their lived experiences. The bounded space of the home, for example, may provide security, comfort, and familiarity, but it also constrains and contextualizes from remits that are often global: [C]ulture is concrete: It is manifested not in general but necessarily in situ. . . To enter a room is to find oneself immediately amidst objects whose character and arrangement admit only of certain possibilities; it is always to enter a unique system of rules. The rules educed from this room may often be exogenous (most will be), but inevitably some will prove to be sui generis, and the ensemble will in any event be a singular property of the time and place. (Wood and Beck 1990, 3)

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The radical nature of Wood’s later work resides with his focus on the ways a home’s seemingly neutral physical elements are understood as a stimulus that is also a product of one or more “voices” such as capitalism, gender, patriarchy, or social class. These voices are global, but they act at the intended level of action: the young person. The image of domestic propriety is that of a mother, a father, and their children lounging comfortably in a heated room, perhaps with a fire, as snow falls outside. The windows and doors must be kept closed to maintain the heat, but this image of comfort is contrived at great expense. The hidden voice that comfort requires – electricity, oil, pipes – is a system of contrivances that extends “into every part and plain of the planet’s economy” (Wood and Beck 1990, 13). The structures of meaning – the rules for kids and the comforts of adults – do not originate in the room but come from larger global effects. Another radical, Bill Bunge, did not use the term children’s geographies per se although he did refer to the idea of a “geography of children.” Bunge’s work presaged that of Wood, Hart, Blaut, and the cognitive behavioral theorists alluded to above, but it is worth spending some time with Bunge, because much of what we come to know and practice as children’s geographies today stems from his work in Detroit with Gwendolyn Warren, with whom he co-directed the famous Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institution (DGEI). The work of the institute provides an example of the unorthodox and revolutionary kind of thinking that set the stage for education, children’s geographies, and black geographies as radical and relational fields of study: “the word ‘relate’ has been blasted into our vocabulary . . . We must make geography relevant, We do make geography Black” (Yvonne Colvard, quoted in Warren 1971). While most geographers at the time dismissed the study of children as trivial, Bunge and his colleagues raised them as “. . . a furious subject: the most furious subject” (Bunge and Bordessa 1975, 1). Polemics of this kind did not ingratiate Bunge’s work to spatial scientists in search of value free objectivity and immutable theories. Of course, as a spatial theoretician, Bunge was in search of this too: “I am a scientist,” he reported. “That is enough. I do not make value judgements in my work or worry about ethics and doing right (or wrong). I simply do science, geography” (Bunge 1979, 172). With that said, Bunge was very much concerned with doing the right thing, and although it is problematic from the standpoint of contemporary critical theory, he used the seeming virtue of science – its truth-value – to draw attention to what he thought was a moral crisis in society. That crisis reflects, he argued, the plight of children, and he evoked Darwinism as a corollary to the importance of keeping children safe (see Aitken’s ▶ Chap. 8, “Approaching Child and Youth Geographies through Darwin,” this volume). The pressure of the environment on the young is crucial to any species surviving, Bunge averred, because it suggests that the “Darwinian logic of child protection, not sentimentality, not kindness, not value judgment, turns the search for survival, into a children’s book” (Bunge and Bordessa 1975, 2). Like canaries in a coalmine, for Bunge, children were a barometer to measure the wellness of society and spatial statistics revealed the patterns of that sickness. He may have been most interested in creating a unitary theory of machine space, for example, but he was also committed to the plight of

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children under the scourge of those machines, and as the litmus test for a healthy society, albeit it in a problematically paternalistic way. Bunge’s (1973; Bunge and Bordessa 1975) geographical “expeditions” with the DGEI in Detroit and later in Toronto focused upon the spatial and machine oppression of children. The central thesis of the expeditions posits children as the ultimate victims of the political, social, and economic forces that contrive the geography of the built environment. Starting with observations of children at play in inner city neighborhoods, Bunge’s work employed a myriad of quantitative and qualitative, aggregate, and individualistic geographic approaches to the study of spatial structure and interaction without losing sight of the central theme of children’s oppression. Information garnered from the expeditions gave sustenance to political programs when presented to city politicians and planners. Bunge’s report on school decentralization in Detroit, for example, highlighted hunger and the expense of bus fares to show the very real difficulties low-income African American youth faced in simply showing up for classes (Warren and Cozzens 1970). Geographers and local community leaders participated in this report, which was researched by students who were part of the DGEI, to produce a series of maps indicating a more appropriate and socially just geographical allocation of educational resources (cf. Merrifield 1995). Elsewhere, empirical data were teased and cajoled into propaganda maps of Detroit and Toronto that displayed infant mortality, doctorless regions, toyless landscapes, grassless spaces, machine landscapes, landscapes of broken glass and garbage, and rat-bitten baby landscapes. Other maps showed the relationship between the number of traffic accidents involving children and proximity to a predominantly black downtown, suggesting that the lack of what he called machine spaces favored the wealthy white suburbs. Bunge’s notion of machine space primarily focused on the modern technologies of the industrial city: cars, buses, electrical lines, high-rise towers, sewers, noxious industries, and so forth. He argued that machines of this kind are harmful to children and are more prevalent in low-income neighborhoods. Hart (1982, 15) noted that contemporaneous research on children elsewhere in geography “lacks the powerful political intentions of Bunge’s work.” While lauding the intentions of relevancy of the work, Hart suggests that Bunge fails through methodological sloppiness and overbearing rhetoric. Nevertheless, Bunge’s work resonates with geographers today because it does not shy away from politics, and because it involved new ways of thinking. As part of his geographical expeditions, Bunge merged mappable data with extensive field-work in what Andy Merrifield (1995, 50) argues is the epitome of a search for situated knowledge many years before the term was coined by Donna Haraway (1988) because it offers “a conceptual platform from which to call into question all privileged knowledge claims.” Knowledge of this kind enabled Bunge and his students, as well as school teachers and activists, to make new kinds of maps – Haraway (1991, 191) calls these “maps of consciousness” – for people who by virtue of their class, ethnicity, sex, or age are marginalized through masculinist, racist, and colonialist domination. Further, Bunge’s situated knowledge propelled a sense of urgency that short-circuited academic rumination. A while ago, I argued in the Geographical Review that Bunge was one of the first geographers to put people before his academic practice and engage in

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the day-to-day lived experiences of children and families (Aitken 2001a, 498): “I worked with a black woman,” Bunge says. (Thanks to Cindi Katz for pointing out that the woman in this quote is Gwendolyn Warren.) “She hated my concern about three-dimensionality of the species and our need to protect the world’s children. . . Another black woman . . . was teaching me similar lessons, filled with hatred for me because I did not notice the children being murdered by automobiles in front of their homes or children starving in front of abundant food. ‘Immediacy’ was their cry, ‘To Hell with the World’!” (Bunge 1973, 170). Situated knowledge displaces the privileged positions that academics hold (Merrifield 1995, 94): it is embedded in time and space and embodied in people and their actions, it accounts for both the agency of the knowledge producers and the agency of the object of the knowledge, and as such it is a perfect foil for political insight, historical and geographical materialism, and activism. Situated knowledge also heralds some of the ideas that push contemporary notions of postchildhood that I will get to at the close of this essay. For Bunge, the most important kinds of situated knowledge reside as part of the sphere of material reproduction. In 1977, he published a review of the Detroit/Toronto geographical expeditions under the title “The Point of Reproduction: A Second Front.” The paper is a manifesto of sorts in which he argues for a focus on class, gender, and race as issues of reproduction that are constituted in homes, families, and neighborhoods. Presaging J. K. Gibson-Graham’s (1996) famous lambasting of theories from the left and right for failing to accommodate the vastness of women’s reproductive labor, Bunge’s concern was that most contemporaneous economic geography was prejudiced against the “nonworking working class” because it focused on workplaces and the point of production. The “hidden landscape” of the home, Bunge claimed, is a legitimate arena for geographic inquiry as are the worlds of children’s welfare, care, and play. The point of reproduction is a point where marginalized groups – children, injured workers, retired workers, unemployed workers, and sexually, racially, ethnically, and religiously discriminated-against workers – constitute the majority of the working class even during periods of “full employment” (Bunge 1977, 61). Bunge’s agenda was not only to find these groups but also to “establish their geography, their perceptions of space,” to make “their rightful claim to their turf” (Expedition Field Manual, quoted in Merrifield 1995, 58). In a sentiment that portents later concerns for neoliberal-globalization and local practices, he argued that global problems were reducible to the scale of people’s normal everyday lives (cf. Ansell 2009). The DGEI and Bunge’s theorizing mirrored much of what was going on at the time around US civil rights, but they also mirrored the paternalism of the day and continued binary power relations under capitalism and patriarchy: “[for Bunge] women were praised and privileged as mothers, with little sense that children and mothers were anything but biological units” (Katz 1996, 181). Bunge’s concerns for children and social reproduction were taken up in a more complex and nuanced way a little later with the work of Cindi Katz (1991, 1994b, 2004). His maps of consciousness garnered widespread public appeal, but the seeming lack of rigor in his fieldwork and his polemical style did not immediately pave the way for further scholarly work. Before that could happen there required a sea-change in geography’s disciplinary politics.

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It is curious that geographers were not applying the work of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky to help them understand young people’s places in the world given that he mirrored the epistemological focus of work it the USA and UK at this time; it is clear that his methods were experimental, and his research design was scientific. Blaut’s interest in leftist theory and Bunge’s Marxism certainly would have endeared them to Vygotsky (1987), who nonetheless de-emphasized traditional Marxist concepts such as class consciousness and the psychology of fetishism and alienation in favor of a focus on the nature of human activity, mediation, and, in particular, the social origins of psychological processes that promote difference (Wertsch 1985, 5). Vygotsky’s (1933) work provides an important underpinning for socio-cultural psychology and influenced children’s geographers to the degree that he offset Piaget’s mechanistic teleology. Tisdall and Punch (2012) point out that Vygotsky (1978) argued that higher forms of cognition come from social interactions and not maturation, and these are predicated upon intimate relations with “expert partners” (e.g., a parent). Moreover, Barbara Rogoff (2003) has championed Vygotsky’s sociocultural theories over Piaget as a focus of child development in both the Global South and Global North. Like Piaget, however, Vygotsky (1987) believed in universal human rationality and progress. The rationality of his work presupposes the ways children learn to conform to social norms, and as such, his ideas and work do not distance themselves sufficiently from work based on other kinds of structuralism. Moreover, and specifically, his work and that of his students is silent about notions of social resistance and activism (Aitken 2014). Vygotsky nonetheless raised important issues of the ways young people develop differently through psychological processes and social practices, a theme that is picked up by feminists and radical geographers interested in children and young people.

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Identity Politics I: Feminism and the Queering of Children’s Geographies (1990s Onwards)

One of the most important political changes to aid the adoption of children’s geographies as a field of study was the rise of feminist perspectives and the study of women in geography from the early 1980s onwards. An early piece in The Professional Geographer by Janice Monk and Susan Hanson (1982) entitled “On Not Excluding Half the Human in Human Geography” focused on the lack of women’s issues in economic and urban geography and sexist biases in the content, methods, and purposes of geographic research. A mirror piece, noted above, almost a decade later in Area by James (1990) asked “Is there a ‘Place for Children in Geography’?” By this time, feminist geography was helping the discipline engage with issues of difference, diversity, and identity politics through studies not just of gender but also class, income, ethnicity, and race. James (1990, 1) argues that “children’s geographies differ from those of other social groups,” and although there had been work on children’s mapping abilities, she notes that there is “. . . little research undertaken which critically examines the ways in which children’s lives, experiences, attitudes and opportunities are socially and spatially constructed.”

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Raising the idea of socially constructed spaces (and spatially constructed social realms) paved the way for a consideration of the politics of children and their geographies. The rise of feminist geography enabled an opening of Bunge’s hidden landscape of reproduction just discussed. Susan Mackenzie (1988) took pains to show how reproduction was a vital part of feminist and Marxist perspectives and how labor laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century favored removing children and women from the factories for ostensible, and important, safety reasons. For example, children should not work at coalfaces and in the small spaces beneath weaving machines because the cramped conditions stunted growth and accidents caused deformities. Feminists pointed out that the Factory Acts of this time, and other legislation promoting the notion of “the family wage,” were about sequestering women and children into the private domestic sphere and away from the public world of work. They criticized the notion of a family wage that was about increasing men’s waged labor so that they could support dependents rather than creating equality between men’s and women’s wages. By pointing out that most working class women were employed outside of the home during the growth of industrialization and that the sequestering of women and children in private spaces was about control, feminists elaborated a more nuanced set of theories that connected the importance of reproduction and consumption, and women’s and children’s work, to a growing industrial economy. Cindi Katz (1986) takes up exploration of the role of the physical environment in social and cultural reproduction in her study of children in rural Sudan. Although she uses many of the methods pioneered by Hart, Katz’s work is a significant extension because she is sensitive not only to the role of the physical environment in social and cultural reproduction, but also to the connection between space, place, and power in terms of how children’s local lived experiences are affected by global economic restructuring and change. In the case of her work in rural Sudan, this involved reflection on the changes in the everyday lives of girls and boys after an agribusiness irrigation scheme had altered the type of agriculture practiced in the village she was studying. While the men and boys from the village left to work for the agribusiness, the women and girls who were left behind managed their scarce resources well and began engaging in productive activities (such as animal husbandry), which had theretofore been the sole concern of men and boys. In a further study, Katz (1994b) compares the local lived experiences of children in her Sudanese village with New York City in terms of the same economic restructuring processes. She argues that economic restructuring is a global phenomenon, and although it lands in local areas in different ways, it is nonetheless possible to track problems that accrue to young workers as they resist economic strictures. Theoretically and methodologically, this work opened up the possibility of comparative geographic research; it highlighted not only the ways global economic restructuring is mapped onto local young lives, but also how young lives push back and change (or not) these larger processes. The young women in Sudan pushed back against patriarchy and the control of resources by men, encouraging the local population to raise enough revenue to build separate classrooms for girls, hire women teachers, and construct

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a much-needed secondary school, thereby transforming the educational capacity for the children remaining in the village. It is important to note also the value of ethnomethodological approaches that articulate a greater appreciation of the nuanced links between local environments and social and cultural reproduction. These methods rapidly eclipsed traditional developmental techniques that separated out the effects of the environment and tended to reduce children to psychological phenomena, or the epiphenomena of parents’ actions (see Katz 1994a on methodologies). Critical feminist and reflexive ethno-methodologies are hugely influential on contemporary research in children’s geographies, and it was the rigor of work like Katz’s that set the stage for the acceptance of these kinds of approaches (Horton and Kraftl 2006; Kesby 2007). This was not business as usual and the early scientific research on children’s mappings was eclipsed by work focusing on difference and diversity and a queering of hetero-normative notions of family and care. Empirical work engaging these methodologies in combination with nuanced situated spatial and queer theories paved the way for research on children focusing on democracy, justice, citizenship, sexualities, dialectics between the local and the global, and the celebration of difference. (The focus on difference and globalization perhaps found its height in two edited collections of work. Aitken et al. (2008) brought together a collection of essays that pondered the theoretical and conceptual implications of global childhoods, while a volume by Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson (2008) brought together the stories of young people from around the globe.) Katz’s work also heralded important research on children and youth, in relation to postdevelopment and postcolonialism, to be dealt with in a later section. In the meantime, as the politics of children and their geographies were recast by feminist and Marxist methodologies and theories, and young people were engaged from nonnormative perspectives, another challenge further queered the field. Mary Thomas (2011) queers children’s geographies further by challenging the field away from its fear of engaging with child sexualities and racial identities. In later work, she argues persuasively that children’s geographies have been remiss (out of fear, denial, prudishness, or whatever) in not recognizing the potency of children’s sexualities (Thomas 2014). She uses psychoanalytic theory (and particularly that of Laplanche) to focus on what she calls “misplacement” of this endeavor and argues empirically from her work on Los Angeles high school’s segregated territories of racial-ethnic-sexual difference (see also Melissa Hyams (2000) work on “hoochie mammas”). The disruptive event that Thomas’ (2011) book turns upon is a mediahyped race riot involving Latino and Armenian boys in the school, when several hundred students fought until police arrived in riot gear and locked down the school. Thomas’ focus is on the school’s teen girls and the ways their subjectivities not only surround the event of the riot but also go beyond their bodies, the school, and race issues. The girls who are part of her ethnography understood well the “border line” that divides the “pretty people” (high-income groups) from “gangsters” (poorer Hispanic students) and Armenians. On the day of the riot, this is the line where students gathered to hurl whatever objects they could find (trash-cans, milk cartons, golf balls). Thomas follows 26 young women and their feelings and behaviors around the riot, school spaces, sexuality, shopping malls, immigration, families,

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and home-spaces before returning to the riot and the ways it was implicated with and through campus space. The study is relational to the extent that it explores the complex and conflicting relations leading up to, and in the aftermath of, a violent event. In the schoolyard, the girls expressed discomfort and pain when their racialized bodies enter into the “wrong” segregated territory and are met with stares, racial epithets, or silence, each of which can be characterized as a violent act. In an important sense that echoes the performative work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993), these feelings of discomfort and pain, argues Thomas, indicate the girls’ failure to be fully captured by the categories that mark them. In the schoolyard, she goes on to note, the spatiality of the social-racial body is experienced acutely “as part of the pressures to conform and solidify identification in their teen years, the girls also reproduce racial–ethnic identification and segregation by accepting and often reproducing the same categorizations of difference that pain them” (Thomas 2011, 8). Thomas’ work is liberatory and queer in the sense that it relieves girls from the “impossibly responsibility” (2011, 10) of undoing institutionalized and discursive political and sexual identities through empowerment and agency (e.g., “girl power”). Thomas creates a psycho-geographic, postfeminist reading of racialized and sexualized urban spaces that pivot around the schoolyard (see also Blaise 2005). She challenges contemporary feminists, psychologists, and policy makers to unburden young women (and men) from the huge responsibility of creating a self that is empowered and engaged. Thomas’ point is that although academic interest in identity politics insists that the practices of young subjects are always embodied, these girls’ narratives may also indicate the failure of embodiment to fully represent the subject: “The ‘uncomfortable’ awkwardness of being in the wrong racial territory,” Thomas (2011, 17) argues, “marks how complexly the social body is taken up.” Not unlike the earlier work by Wood, Thomas’ work on, around, and beyond the schoolyard suggests that boundaries – of bodies, places – and violent events are fluid, intersubjective, and multispatial. This comes together in the schoolyard where the girls’ depictions of their bodies in “other” territories “point to the intersubjective, spatial negotiations at the heart of coming to terms with social relations, norms and differences” (Thomas 2011, 17). There is an inclusivity and exteriority to understanding political embodiment as a precursor to the disruptive events that are the harbingers of radical ethical acts. Moreover, and importantly, Thomas’ girls are not fully and fundamentally invested in social and spatial categories of difference, “[t]hey shrug and leave the territories of their ‘friends,’ they live segregated lives, and they claim ethnic–racial identities smoothly and without irony in their selfdescriptions and through their casual marking of others’ racial–ethnic identifiers” (Thomas 2011, 18). With the context of schoolyard ecologies established through psychogeographies and power structures, Thomas’ work ties in with earlier feminist challenges to masculinist and adultist perspectives and pushes youth identity politics to a new level of discomfort that values difference and diversity. At the same time that feminist and queer theory was pushing the boundaries of identity, young people’s politics and identity were being taken to task in the global arena of policy-making.

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Identity Politics II: Being, Becoming, Rights, and PolicyMaking (1990s Onwards)

The writing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 and its subsequent ratification by all countries except the USA opened debates on what, precisely, constitutes children and childhood, on what kind of children’s rights should be implemented, and on how children might participate in decision-making. (Roger Hart was active in both the convention and its aftermath, including its 20-year rethinking in 2009. His UNICEF book, Children’s Participation (1982), is well respected by both academics and policy makers.) The UNCRC established a Children’s Rights Committee (CRC), which monitors the progress of child rights implementation. How the UNCRC rights land in different national jurisdictions and for different children is of some concern, and Katz’s comparative work opened the door for a number of fruitful evaluations of how the UNCRC translates locally (Skelton 2007; Swanson 2010; Kallio and Häkli 2013; Wells 2015; Aitken 2018). The trajectory and implementation of laws about who constitute children and which laws protect them have significant variability around the world. Although it is important to recognize the progress made on children’s rights prior to the UNCRC, particularly in the USA and the UK, it is nonetheless clear that some kind of sea change occurred in 1989, and the impact was felt broadly and continues today. This notwithstanding, discussion about children’s and young people’s rights is still hotly debated 30 years later, and the establishment and implementation of policies from the UNCRC are difficult and sometimes at odds with other human rights agendas. For example, the UNCRC’s focus on protection, provision, and participation (the so-called three Ps) departs from categorizations with which human rights actors are familiar (e.g., economic, social and political rights) and it often pits children’s rights against the rights of other vulnerable groups (e.g., women and refugees). Most agree that since WWII the UNCRC is the most successful of all the rights-based agendas in terms of its scope and adoption, but Fernando (2001, 8) points out that there is a widening gap between expectations and achievements for human rights as a whole, which has ramifications for “. . . how comfortably children’s rights fit with our convictions about social justice.” In the 1990s, the distinction between child rights and human rights was not necessarily an inappropriate tension because it helped set the stage for academic discussions about the efficacy of the UNCRC, which in turn propelled a large part of what came to be known as the “new sociology of childhood” (cf. Qvortrup et al. 1994; James and Prout 1997; Jenks 1982, 1996; James et al. 1998). Sociologists recognized and engaged with the work of children’s geographers in an ensuing series of debates, which re-shaped how we understand children’s places in the world. One of the fundamental arguments of the new sociology of childhood literature was that rather than “becoming adults,” young people were “beings” in-and-of-themselves with their own set of rights and privileges. This was an important distinction for a literature that had heretofore mostly considered children from a developmental perspective. The new standpoint, drawn from the UNCRC,

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lumped children together as a political group worthy of consideration as subjects of rights rather than objects of rights. To the extent that this was the same political move made by women in the early twentieth century as they struggled for emancipation, it also drew a feminist critique that pointed to the denial of difference amongst children in term of class, sex, ethnicity, race, and geographic location. The “new sociology” also was criticized for providing a static and monolithic view of children and creating problematic taxonomies such as the presocial child, the minority group child, and the tribal child (n.b. James et al. 1998). Children’s geographers defended multiple and variegated ideas of childhood (Skelton 2010), pointed to the lack of concern in the “new sociology” for children’s relations to space and environment, and criticized the notion of children as “beings” (Aitken 2014). While perhaps politically expedient, a focus on children as “beings” forecloses the possibility of children “becoming other,” that is, something different from “becoming-the-same” as adults. Children “becoming other” pushes the notion of postchildhood to be discussed in a moment. These academic discussions not only provided insights about the ways that the voices and agency of young people could be incorporated into policy decisions, they also raised larger issues of what precisely constitutes children and childhood, young people, and adolescence. Today these issues and questions are still of pressing concern, and they are addressed, delimited, and contested around the world (Aitken et al. 2008; Ansell 2009; Jeffrey 2013; Kraftl 2013a; Wells 2015; Johnson and West 2018). And where they are not addressed, larger issues of problematic social, economic, and spatial structures and political foreclosures are highlighted as broader human rights, which map onto children and young people in convoluted ways. For example, the provision in the UNCRC that children should be involved in discussions about policies that affect them results in some unanticipated concerns about how young voices are incorporated in political decisionmaking. Examples of so-called participation run the gamut from tokenism to outright exploitation. Even young people who are activists and who are politically perceptive may be represented only symbolically at national forums and international conventions, and sometimes the representations are in ways that are of little use in improving their life situations (Kjörlholt 2008). Perhaps more disturbing is the tendency to groom young people for political office through national policies created with the ratification of the UNCRC. Kallio and Häkli (2013), for example, note that the children’s politics in official Finnish settings are almost always different from children’s politics in everyday settings. In the last few years, the work of Kallio and her colleagues has raised an interesting discussion about the complex ways that children’s everyday lives are politically contrived and the ways that they perform dissent and push back with their own politics (Skelton 2010; Aitken 2014; Staeheli et al. 2016). And in an interesting shift towards lived experiences, Peter Kraftl (2013a, see also Kraftl et al. 2013) moves beyond including children’s voices in policy matters as merely emotional resonance, to consider the potential of their everyday environments, and particularly alternative education programs, as a vehicle for fuller civic participation (see also Johnson and West 2018).

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Issues of the global variability in laws about children’s right to work have engaged geographers in Latin America, Asia, and Africa over the last decade (Aitken et al. 2006; Jennings et al. 2006; Punch 2009; Abebe et al. 2016). This is another interesting debate about categories that foment in part around children’s work and children’s employment (or child labor), where distinctions are made about what is in the best interest of children (Katz 2004; Abebe et al. 2016). The International Labor Organization (ILO) has used the UNCRC as a foil for arguing that childhood is not for labor, but for play and education. This is a problematic proclamation for the Global South, where most children work from a young age, and in capacities that are vital for their families’ well-being. No one denies that child safety should trump economic concerns, but raising the legal age to work does not stop children working and often sends them to more dangerous (and illegal) forms of work. Some forward-looking nations are attempting to counter these trends. For example, in 2014 Bolivia enacted a law allowing children as young as 10 years old to work in paid employment, which flies in the face of dedicating childhood exclusively to education and play. Under Bolivia’s new law, 10-year-olds can work if they are self-employed and if they are attending school. The legislation also sets 12 as the age when a child can work under contract, assuming that they have permission from their parents or guardians and continue in school. These criteria expand Bolivia’s “Code for Children and Adolescents,” which previously followed UNCRC and ILO recommendations of 14 years of age as the minimum for child labor. In acknowledging that a large swathe of Bolivian children work anyway, the law was also an attempt to ensure better provisions for young people’s physical and mental health. To that end, it put in place restrictions on employers, enacted severe consequences for violence against children, required voluntary consent from child laborers and their guardians, and mandated permission from a public ombudsman before any child could work (Thompson 2014). The law ensured an outright ban on children working in mining, lumber, and other hazardous industries. The complex nature and spatial variability of child labor predicates uneven development and systemic poverty that cannot be eradicated by simply removing children from productive work. The Bolivian labor law begins from the premise that children work because they are poor and that, until their poverty is overcome, they are better served by having their work brought out of the shadows of illegality (cf. Aitken 2016). With this example in mind, to the extent that the UNCRC provides a broad platform for discussion of children’s rights, there is no doubt about its importance and its impetus for a series of policy debates and practices, not least of which are discussions of when childhood begins and ends. There are more important notions of spatial and distributive justice to which the Bolivian case is pointedly addressed, but the issue of what precisely constitutes childhood lingers in academic and policy circles. These challenges of how we think about childhood and children and their work, learning, and place bring spatial and distributive justice into sharper relief at a time when the idea of a global child was becoming predominant.

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The Global Child, Universal Rights, Postdevelopment, and Postcolonial Critiques (2000s Onwards)

The idea of a globalized child comes in large part from the UNCRC and academics (including children’s geographers) writing about it, but it also comes at a time of rapid change in the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seemed that economists and politicians were all talking about globalization in terms of global economic restructuring, unprecedented movements of people over more porous borders, transnationalism, and rapid movements of capital with close to instantaneous market adjustments. In a world connected by flexible capital, mobile labor, and transnational families, it was clear that young people provided an important fulcrum of, and impetus for, change. In many ways, the argument was twofold: on the one hand there was a push to understand the globalized child and, on the other, there was focus on putting young people at the heart of globalization. A number of key texts at this time explored the global contexts of children and young people (Katz 2004; Ansell 2005; Goddard et al. 2005; Aitken et al. 2008). In poor neighborhoods in the global North, urban disinvestment, social disenfranchisement, the deskilling of children and their policing on public streets contributed to problems with the ways children were placed. Low-income children in the USA and the UK were seen as poorer than their counterparts in most other countries, and highincome children were seemingly better off by far. And yet, in more affluent neighborhoods, children were missing from public streets, their lives circumscribed by highly structured activities in safe havens (child care centers, day camps, mini-theme parks) that also survey and discipline their bodies and behaviors. In the global South, economic restructuring and the pervasive postcolonial practices of global corporations resulted in disinvestment that forced many children out of educational institutions and onto streets (Beazley 2003; Abebe and Kjørholt 2013), into bondage (e.g., the global sex industry, cf. Beazley 2002; Yea 2013), into exploitive work (e.g., sweatshops), or into the practice of healthcare for ailing relatives (Robson 1996). These problems were not new, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, children’s geographers were writing in an era of profound change in how they came to know those problems. Numerous geographical studies argued that childhood is not only constructed in different ways at different times but also varies depending upon where it is constructed (Skelton and Valentine 1998; Holloway and Valentine 2000; Aitken 1994, 2001b). Interpretative lenses focused simultaneously on local and global representations and lived experiences enabled a more comprehensive analysis. A focus on the scaling of children highlighted social reproduction as an important, but as yet missing, aspect in globalization debates (Katz 2001, 2004). Coming from feminism and discussed above, reproduction was not just about biological reproduction; it was also about the daily health and welfare of people. Social reproduction was in large part about the differentiation and skill of a labor force. Children’s geographies are integrally linked to social reproduction, but the places and practices of children’s everyday lives were rarely considered a dynamic context for understanding historical change, geographic variation, and social differentiation.

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While geographers had focused on important issues like child-care, child-rearing, and home rules (Wood and Beck 1994; Holloway 1998), these discussions spoke only of the ways rules, ideals, and practices are transmitted to children; they say very little about the ways they are received, internalized, resisted, and mobilized. With a focus on the latter, young people provide a very different, and in many ways more illuminating, window upon social reproduction. It is during childhood and adolescence that the principles of society are mapped onto the consciousness and unconsciousness. This is also when some portion of social reproduction is contested and negotiated. Caught up in a global web of flexible accumulation with associated widespread economic uncertainty, unemployment, and decreasing public services, the lives of children are drastically affected and constituted precariously. But prior to the 1989 UNCRC, unless it is through tokenism, children’s voices were rarely included in the common political culture that defines public discourses. And with the ratification and implementation of the UNCRC by most countries in the world, there was still the thorny issue of structural inequalities to be dealt with, and to the degree that the UNCRC was wholeheartedly and globally embraced, it is not surprising that its European origins open yet another possibility for postcolonial critique. To the degree that global issues of unequal development, postcolonialism, and social justice suggest questions about categories such as “childhood” or “the child” or “children’s rights” are of pressing concern, they were sometimes addressed, delimited, and contested around the world in interesting and provocative ways, but mostly they were ignored. If addressed at all, larger issues of problematic social, economic and spatial structures, and political foreclosures were highlighted as part of broader human rights, which mapped onto children and young people in convoluted and intractable ways. Fernando (2001) points out that the key issue of universal child rights is fundamentally an issue of distributive justice. When the UNCRC sets up a stage for the child as competent social actor, it missed the detailed need for a comprehensive plan for a new and more just economic system and, perhaps, provides instead a model for the child as the new neoliberal subject, destined for subjugation to an increasingly pervasive and insidious capitalist system. As Fernando (2001, 8) notes, academics are at fault for not offering a critical theorizing and a political consciousness that prescribes reflective action. The discourse on children’s rights as elaborated by the UNCRC and taken up by ratifying governments rapidly became technocratic to the extent that it no longer addressed the issue of power relations (Fernando 2001, 12). Just as mainstreaming gender peripheralized women’s needs in development studies (Brun et al. 2014), so the mainstreaming of children’s rights marginalizes the real issues behind children’s needs: “. . . isolating children’s rights from issues of class, race and gender . . . has become a convenient means for avoiding direct engagement with the political and economic realities of the emerging global economy” (Fernando 2001, 12). In the context of other human rights (women, refugees, etc.), the hope that Fernando lays out resides with the universal entreaty that children inspire for intercultural consensus, but he points out that it is impossible to isolate children’s rights from their embeddedness in class, race, and gender relations experienced through their relationships with other children and adults.

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The UNCRC’s idea of universal child rights with its basis in European Enlightenment was not propagated, then, without important shifts in perspective with local implementations that may well appear neo-colonial if not imperialist. As David Harvey (2000, 83) points out, the notion of universal rights brings into sharp relief the tensions of scale and difference that are an anathema to the construction of a relatively homogeneous capitalist worker and consumer, which a postwar economic boom was dependent upon. Within this context, is it possible to create forms of universal rights through which “uneven geographical advancements of human interests might flourish in more interesting and productive ways”? (Harvey 1992, 84) What kinds of rules and mores may be established for young people through which we can still respect local differences and customs in a global economy where we all relate to one another in some way? In many ways, then, with its trenchant focus on the rights of the child, the UNCRC’s focus on individual agency, participation, and flexibility played into the changing global economics of the time as a neoliberal project. Katharyne Mitchell (2003, 2006, and ▶ Chap. 14, “Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era” in this volume) tracks these changes in the UK, Canada, and the USA through education policies that move away from multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s towards a focus on the globally aware student who is flexible enough to compete in the evolving neoliberal global market place. She notes that “there has been a subtle but intensifying move away from person-centered education for all, or the creation of the tolerant, ‘multicultural self,’ towards a more individuated, mobile and highly tracked, skills-based education, or the creation of the strategic cosmopolitanism” (Mitchell 2003, 387). These ideas are the basis of the UK’s Education Reform Act (1988) and the USA’s “No Child Left Behind” Education Reform Act (2002) and its follow-up, “Race to the Top” (2008), all of which emphasize standardized testing to achieve the goals of a citizenship flexibly rising to the challenges of global economic competition. Is it any coincidence that the UNCRC positions young people as capable, individuated social actors? The debates and discussions initiated with the idea of the UNCRC as a neoliberal/ neocolonial project in concert with the actions and activism of young people against the International Monetary Fund and such put at stake the self-evidence of that which was and is perceived, thinkable, and doable with regard to young people’s places in the world. These new places break with previously understood distributions of competences, capacities, and territories. Over the last two decades, young people’s rights moved from a somewhat marginalized discussion or set of self-evident truths in scholarship and policy-making to a central force in how we come to articulate and legislate the world, and for young people this is not necessarily a good thing. For geographers, the rights of children are now essential to discussions of migration, labor, and war, as well as education and development, but there is also the important notion of how rights agendas fail young people (Mitchell 2006 and ▶ Chap. 14, “Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era” in this volume; Ruddick 2007; Swanson 2010; Aitken 2018). While postcolonial and postdevelopment thinking has taken a position on children that focuses on their rights and actions not as universalized individuals but as a collective

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political group, there are of course important contexts of the child’s lived world that are about unstructured and vaguely structured, direct and indirect relations to caregivers, other children, institutions, and the nonhuman environment that surrounds.

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The Postchild Moment (2010s Onwards)

“There is no such thing as a baby,” writes British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1975, 99) in a famous essay on the mind and child development and their relationship to psychosomatic illnesses. By this, he meant that our understanding of infants does not exist apart from our understanding of the care environments with which they and we relate. He goes on to say, “I was alarmed to hear myself utter these words and tried to justify myself by pointing out that if you show me a baby you certainly also show me someone caring for a baby, or at least a pram with someone’s eyes and ears glued to it.” Winnicott’s point is that a child’s bodily experiences – oral, anal, tactile, olfactory, auditory – cannot be separated from, and are always shaped by and given meaning through and within, the child’s relations and dependencies. Although Winnicott was writing well before what we have come to know as poststructuralism or posthumanism, his words resonate with the central tenets of those perspectives, which for the purposes of this essay can be defined as trying to get beyond the structure of developmental psychology by embracing the fluidity of children’s lives and the nonhuman and more-than-human aspects of those lives. The child perceives the physical environment simultaneously as part of and as independent of the self and in conjunction with a world of social and cultural practices. It is clear that the shaping of environments and children occurs not only as psychological processes, but also in cultural, political, historical, and geographical contexts, which are always emergent. Some of the best poststructural work on babies comes from Brazil, where researchers are probing the multiplicity of infants’ relationalities (Tebet 2015; Tebet and Abramowicz ▶ Chap. 21, “Finding a Place for Babies and Their Spatialities” in this volume; Abramowicz and Tebet 2018). From a British perspective, Boyer and Spinney (2016) discuss the relationship between infants, mothers, baby carriages, and mobility. Rather than focusing on mothers, babies, perambulators, sidewalks, and so forth, they bring them all together as an assemblage by focusing on their relations with each other. Work of this kind is indebted to the thinking of geo-philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983, 1987). In their influential Anti-Oedipus (1983), Deleuze and Guatrari describe the relations of individuals and their bodies as assemblages of social and natural machines (see also DeLanda 2016). Deleuze and Guattari (1983) famously evoke the breast-mouth assemblage of a feeding baby and a mother as a “desiring machine,” which is not part of other wholes but a working body (the breast and the mouth) with its own purpose at a particular moment. Work by Chris Harker (2005) focuses on assemblages of young children’s bodies in action and school playgrounds, while from a North American perspective Sue Ruddick (2003) uses Deleuze to explode the assembled elements of development and globalization as pirated from youth and childhood discourses.

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Australian psychologist Price-Robertson (2018, 2019) draws heavily on work in children’s geographies to describe the spatiality of the family assemblage. Seen from a postdevelopmental and postchild perspective, Winnicott’s idea that there is no such thing as a baby is perhaps more liberating than he thought because from the outset, there are always dependencies and relations. He would have been particularly happy to see how these relations reveal the darker side of the global political economy (Ruddick 2003; Aitken 2004). The work on assemblages and bodies also includes an important nod to mobilities research. Harker (2005) and Ruddick (2007; cf. McLaren et al. 2010), for example, are also interested in children’s mobility, motion and learning. In the UK, Peter Krafl extends this way of thinking to alternative and experimental educational environments and, in some of his more recent work, to the complicated relations between young people, learning and biopolitics (Kraftl 2013a, b, 2015, 2016). Kraftl’s (2006) earlier work on hybridity and the materialities of childhood is extended in later work to a complex interweaving of nature, sustainability, and young practices (cf. Kraftl et al. 2013). Returning to Brazil, and related to Kraftl’s work, rethinking the relations between time, space, and education are at the forefront of geographer Jader Janer Moreira Lopes’ (2013, 2016) work. His most recent academic work is an attempt to understanding children’s places through how they imagine space and time (Lopes 2016). In a remarkable children’s book entitled O Menino Que Colecionava Lugares (The Boy Who Collected Places), Lopes (2013) takes work on fluidity and hybridity an important step forward by writing disarmingly for young people about the complexities of time/space/place relations, ownership, identity, and young memories. Lopes’ work coincides to some degree with Karin Murris’ (2016) concern about the ways children work and process through play and picturebooks, but his concerns fold into images, actions, embeddedness, and place in ways that speak volumes about worlds inaccessible to adults. Unlike Murris, it is not part of Janer’s project to open children’s imaginations for us to examine. Child subjectivities are always enigmatic, plural, and relational, and there is a multiplicity of ways to know childhood. Childhoods are multiple and variable and they are emergent, predicated upon social, political, historical, geographical, and moral contexts. If we try to compartmentalize children’s lives as universal and unchanging and staged, then, as Harvey (1992, 303) puts it, we “dwell on the separateness and non-compatibility of language games, discourses, and experiential domains, and treat those diversities as biographically and sometimes even institutionally, socially and geographically determined.” By so doing, children’s lives are contained within spatial frames that foreclose upon the possibility of politics and change. Poststructural theorists point out that if we are intent upon “liberating childhood,” we must embrace children’s resistances and transform our assumptions of what constitutes “natural” child development, childhood, youth, and so forth. Peter Hopkins and Rachel Pain (2007) expand this further to encompass a relational geography of age that simultaneously considers intergenerationality, intersectionality, and lifecourse. The postchild moment moves this trajectory further out and further in, at the same time, by considering

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a multiplicity of relations across time and space, including the material, the living, the cohabiting, the distant, the spiritual, and the ephemeral. Rosi Braidotti (2013) argues for a posthuman and postanthropocentric ethics that focuses on what she calls “the missing people” because, with Enlightenment, a certain person was put forward as human (e.g., Michelangelo’s Vitruvian Man). It is clear from Enlightenment thinking that this person was not a child; rather children were cast as less-than-fully-human. Braidotti’s (2013, 183) ideas take relationality to its larger conclusion by prescribing “new ecologies of belonging” where all matter is one, and “. . . it is intelligent and self-organizing.” The postchild is a fluid historical and geographic condition, with an embedded materiality that calls for the end of universality, developmentalism, and disciplinary purity. The postchild is multilayered, nomadic, hybrid, and relational to human and nonhuman agents and mediated by technology. To understand this, argues Braidotti, we need an adequate mapping: the cartography of the postchild is a counter-topography that advances social justice because it does away with preconceived notions that foreclose upon the political. It is important to recognize that postcolonialism, postdevelopment studies and feminism provide coherent and locatable political bases for Braidotti’s posthumanism, which sets it apart from other work that is criticized for obfuscating politics (cf. Barad 2007; Taylor et al. 2012; Murris 2016). The idea of children’s play, for example, is a counter-topography when it shows up as a radical flash of inspiration and creativity. Katz (2004, 2011) puts the idea of play on a revolutionary footing as a counter-topography where received meanings and relations are refused or reworked (see also Aitken 2001b; Brown and Patte 2012). From Katz’s perspective, this kind of play is not just (not even) about identity making, it is about making the world anew. There is an important affective quality to this power because it is not “of the child,” or “theirs” in the sense of having power at their disposal in an instrumental way. Rather, it is a power that they are “endowed with” (Hamacher 2005, 41–42) as part of a connection with others, including the nonhuman. It is through relations and intra-action rather than interaction that creativity and the imagination propel change and transformation. Curti (▶ Chap. 9, “Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect”) points out that this counter-topography is seen in a child’s ability to think and act simultaneously and with embodied reflexivity (contra the Cartesian mindbody split that came from ideas of the Vitruvian man). It endows children with a different intuition “granted through the parallel attributes of thought and extension that emerge through bodily affection and affect while at play.” Play of this kind is a “becoming other” and a way of coming to consciousness. The aesthetic created by these play spaces and practices passes through children and young people to suggest not only dislocation and surprise, but also a suspension of adult strictures and sensibilities. Sandy Marshall (2013, 54) argues that, “. . . how we might understand the present political moment through the lives of children and how children play a role in building alternative futures . . . [is about] how children both perform and transform the aesthetics of suffering.” For Marshall, working in Palestine, young people’s disruptions of adult sensibilities show up in their art and play, but I want to argue

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through Kallio and Häkli’s (2011, 2013) ideas of children’s politics in the day-to-day as discussed earlier to Staeheli and her colleagues’ (2013) forceful declaration that there is a radical aesthetics in play that can change the world. These proclamations are reinforced by a series of loose theories developed in the last two decades and for the most part inspired by the spatial turn in the sciences and the humanities. The theories extend earlier work on identity and difference to focus on more ephemeral but nonetheless spatial notions such as dislocation, embeddedness, surprise, and sensibility, summarized superbly in Massey’s (2005) For Space. The theories connect with the solid empirical work by Katz, Kraftl, Marshall, Staeheli, and others that is now inspiring researchers from other disciplines (e.g., Price-Robertson 2018, 2019; Tebet and Abramowicz 2017). This, then, is a large part of the promise of the postchild as articulated by children’s geographers. There is gathering interest in what might be called postchild relationalities focusing on, for example, language and the material world (Rautio and Winston 2015), sexuality and the classroom (Blaise 2005), play and picturebooks (Lopes 2013; Murris 2016), indigenous politics (Taylor et al. 2012), and child rights (Aitken 2018). What does this hyper-relationality mean for children and young people? The rise of postchild sensibilities – in conjunction with posthumanist thinking in general – recognizes young people’s relations, ambiguities, dependencies, autonomies, and politics. It understands that at any one time and at any specific place the actions, practices and politics of young people are an assemblage of relations with other young people, technologies, adults, animals, and materialities that cast doubt on the nature of being and becoming. Postchild sensibilities recognize further that efforts to represent young people, or to frame their experience and act on their behalf, may show up at best as an extension of adultist or colonial thought and at worst as a form of repression and violence.

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Conclusion: Prospects and Potentials

David Oswell (2013, 3) notes that, as they stand now, young people’s “capacities to speak, act, and become” is dependent on networks, assemblages or infrastructures involving “. . . other persons and things in such ways as to endow [children] with powers, which they alone could neither use nor hold.” These problems come from a complex set of policies and legal practices. The tension in Oswell’s relational, postcolonial, and postchild critique raises young people as simultaneously and complexly dependent, independent, individual, aggregate, virtual, and vital. For Oswell postchild sensibilities begin by thinking of children as doings, where they are neither objects nor subjects, nor are they categories of being or becoming. Today, young people are active in the construction and the reimagining of their spaces so that they are seen and felt in families, societies, and politics in ways that they were not seen or felt before. Young people are not simply beings or becomings, they are more significantly doings that have the potential to become and do something different, something yet unimaginable.

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And yet despite all the geographical research, and all the legal and political efforts that are summarized above that might convince otherwise, many young people today are in a more dispossessed and precarious position than ever while at the same time, ironically, their capacity “to do” has intensified and the spaces in which they are able to do have proliferated. As Helena Pimlott-Wilson and Sarah Marie Hall (2017, 260) note, “examining the shifting nature of the economic landscape from the perspective of children, youth and families brings to the fore the effects of macro-economic changes for intimate, everyday geographies.” They go on to call for an exploration of the interweaving of individual and collective responses and resistances. Given the current dispossession and precarity of young people, this rather lengthy chapter comes to a close by asking whether the questions posed by children’s geographers are the right and appropriate focus for the well-being of young people in our postchild moment. Over half a century of the study of children and their geographies brings us to a point that is pushing well beyond the beginning influences of environmental and developmental psychology and the trenchant critiques of feminist, Marxist, postcolonial thinking to poststructural and posthumanist perspectives that embrace much of what came heretofore with a will to engage and let go simultaneously. The last two decades have produced research on children’s identities, the institution of childhood, young people’s relations with adults, child rights, education, movement and migration, children in urban environments, children in rural environments, citizenship, child health, and geographies of babies, geographies of care, and youth activism and politics. We are now looking at postchild and more-than-child studies, as geographers problematize the essential characteristics of children and blur the distinctions between children, adults, institutions, technology, and so forth. Children’s geographies today are about the spaces of young people’s lives, characterized experientially, aesthetically, politically, morally, and ethically. The concept of children’s geographies is about how pluralities of children show up and make and re-make space and therefore themselves and how we, as adults, enable or constrain them in the process of making the world anew. What next? If the notion of the posthuman teaches us nothing else, it is to note that there is little gained from predicting outcomes. Rather, our focus needs to remain on the here and the now and on increasing capacities (in the Deleuzian sense of the word) so that young people can be liberated from the tyranny of adult rules and constraints because therein lies a fuller potential for them and us.

References Abebe, T., & Kjørholt, A. T. (2013). Childhood and local knowledge in Ethiopia: Livelihoods, rights and intergenerational relationships. Trondheim: Akademika forlag. Abebe, T., Waters, J., & Skelton, T. (Eds.). (2016). Labouring and Learning, volume 10 of Springer major reference work, Geographies of children and young people. Singapore: Springer. Abramowicz, A., & Tebet, G. (2018). Infãncia & Pós-estruturalismo. São Paulo: Porto de Odéios. Aitken, S. C. (1994). Putting children in their place. Association of American Geographers. Washington, DC: Edwards Bros.

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Global South Research in Children’s Geographies: From Useful Illustration to Conceptual Challenge Nicola Ansell

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Evidencing a Paradigm, Generating Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Social Construction of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Children’s Social Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Challenging the Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Nuancing Critiques of Northern Discourses of Southern Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Questioning Children’s Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Provoking Alternative Framings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The Significance of Global Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Role of Children’s Relationally Constituted Practices in Global Processes . . . . . 4.3 The Value of a Social Justice Framing for Research with Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

A substantial body of research concerning the geographies of children in the global south has emerged over the past two decades. This chapter traces the ways in which geographers have engaged with the new social studies of childhood to advance understanding of southern children’s lives. It firstly outlines how the two key tenets of the new social studies of childhood – that childhood is a social construct and that children are social actors – proved valuable in illuminating aspects of children’s lives. Research with southern children provided particularly convincing examples of how childhood is differently constructed in different societies, the problems that arise when interventions rooted in normative social

N. Ansell (*) Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_11

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constructs are imposed in societies where childhood is understood differently, and of the apparent exercise of autonomous agency by young people heading households, living on the streets or engaging in economic activity. In a second section, the chapter considers some of the ways in which research with children in the global south has also posed conceptual challenges to childhood studies. It outlines how research concerning southern children demonstrates that greater nuance is required in understanding social constructions of childhood and why the insights offered by studying children’s lives through a lens of social agency are often both limited and problematic. In a third and final section, the chapter examines three alternative framings of research on childhood that are rooted in research among children in the global south but are potentially applicable more widely. Keywords

Child soldier · Children · Agency · Caring responsibilities · Critiques of northern discourses of southern · Generational relationships · Significance of global process · Social agency · Social construction · Social justice · Social reproduction · Countertopographies · Fluidity · Global neoliberalism · Social construction, children · Street children · Systematic institutional processes · Zero tolerance for child labour

1

Introduction

Of the world’s population, nearly a third (31%) are aged under 18, of whom the vast majority (87%) inhabit regions of the world that are commonly described as the “global south” – the lower and middle income countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (UNICEF 2015). Despite this weight of numbers, until the late 1990s, geographers paid little attention to the lives of young people in the global south (or indeed, to young people anywhere). Where research was undertaken, it generally viewed children as passive objects – as targets of policies and practices or as indicators of the condition of a country. Children were considered relevant in relation to demography (focusing on reproduction, child mortality, child health), nutrition, and education, but there was little indication of any interest in their day-to-day lives. There were a few exceptions, notably Cindi Katz’ (1991); Katz and Monk (1993) ethnographic research with children in Sudan which recognized children’s lives to be important in their own right, while examining how they were affected by and incorporated into global processes of economic change. Anthropologists, too, furnished a few children-focused studies (e.g., Schildkrout 2002/1978; Ennew and Milne 1990). In the late 1990s, however, many geographers turned their attention to the lives of children in the global south. This burgeoning of research was strongly related to the developing influence of the “new social studies of childhood” on geography. This chapter will argue that geographers were attracted to research with southern children because they provided particularly pertinent exemplars of the two key tenets of the new social studies of childhood: the notions that childhood is a social construct and

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that children are social agents. In the first instance, researchers were able to contribute to the establishment of this paradigm, and to make use of it to further understanding of young people’s lives in circumstances that differed from those of typical northern children. Policies and interventions were critiqued and alternative approaches advocated. Over the past quarter century, however, there has been a shift in the function of southern research on childhood: southern children from diverse contexts increasingly pose a challenge to the new social studies of childhood. Discourses of southern childhood(s) are recognized to be more complex and nuanced than was credited in earlier research, and focusing on children’s agency is viewed by many as problematic and of questionable value (see also ▶ Chaps. 12, “Theorizing Children’s Political Agency,” by Häkli and ▶ 4, “Intergenerational Geographies in Theory and Practice,” by Vanderbeck this volume). Instead, southern children are inspiring new ways of thinking about geographies of childhood and children that have the potential to transform research across the discipline. Southern children are not, of course, a homogeneous group – the diversity they represent is in part key to understanding the roles they play in shaping understanding of children’s geographies. There are also significant variations in how children’s lives are studied in different regions of the south, between, for instance, South and Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. Research from all of these settings has contributed in important ways to the conceptual development of children’s geographies over the past quarter century.

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Evidencing a Paradigm, Generating Critique

Studies of southern children in the 1990s and early 2000s offered opportunities to employ, confirm and provide empirical evidence in support of the two key tenets of the new social studies of childhood: the social construction of childhood and children’s agency. Through their situations and practices, children from the global south contest the “global model of childhood” (Boyden and Ennew 1997) that has been spread worldwide through the actions of international organizations and the “development industry,” revealing this to be a normative construction, based upon ideals of childhood dominant in the global north. Southern children also contest their own representation as passive. They demonstrate that childhoods can be lived in diverse ways and that diverse alternative childhoods are valued in societies around the world. Southern children also demonstrate children’s agency – as active participants in their own lives and also as contributors to their families and communities. In contesting dominant norms (both knowingly and unwittingly), children may also contribute to social transformation.

2.1

The Social Construction of Childhood

Research exploring the lives of children in most southern contexts can scarcely avoid highlighting the diversity of childhoods that exist globally. Children in different places and different situations experience very different life circumstances and

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engage in different lifestyles. Moreover, expectations and assumptions about childhood differ markedly between societies. Southern-focused research furnishes plentiful evidence that childhood is variable not only over time (as argued, for instance, in the work of Philippe Aries 1962) but also across space. Childhood is very evidently socially and spatially constructed. Research in the global south from the outset went beyond illustrating childhood’s social construction to engage in critique of a range of social constructions of childhood and their application to southern children. First, research by geographers in the early 2000s (e.g., Aitken 2001; Robson 2004) began to add to that of, for instance, Jo Boyden (1990), to critique dominant conceptualizations of a global childhood and global child. Boyden and Ennew (1997) describe a “global childhood” that is imagined by policy makers and professionals. It is imagined as fundamentally distinct from adulthood, based on universal biological and psychological features and defined in largely deficit terms (children are smaller and weaker than adults and defined by things they cannot do). It incorporates the features that Western society has long associated with childhood (Jenks 1996) – vulnerability, innocence, passivity, as well as taken-for-granted understandings that children need protection from the world (protection that should be provided through nuclear families) and that they need schooling and should not be involved in economic activity (Nieuwenhuys 2007). This model of childhood constructed in the north has been exported and imposed globally through international organizations and conventions as well as the media and advertising (Aitken et al. 2007; Tisdall and Punch 2012). Childhoods in the global south (as well as many childhoods in the north) frequently contradict this model (Holt and Holloway 2006; Tisdall and Punch 2012). Visible working children and child violence, for instance, represent unchildlike behaviors that clearly suggest indeterminacy in the constitution of the global child (Aitken 2001). Research among southern children is therefore able to provoke a questioning of normative assumptions. Those children who fall outside normative expectations of childhood may be seen as outside childhood itself (Ennew 1995). In this respect, it is clear that dominant discourses are not only inapplicable to many contexts, but also potentially harmful. If certain groups of children are excluded from consideration as children (as Joronen (2016) charts in relation to Palestinian children under Israeli military rule), or their interests are not considered in children-focused policies and interventions, this might not only lead to their neglect in policy and practice, but might result in inappropriate policy measures that seek to “normalize” their lives or simply do not fit their situations. Street children may, for instance, be returned to parents on the basis that children belong within (nuclear) families; yet in situations where fosterage is common, those parents may have had little connection with the child for many years and have no capacity to provide the material or emotional support that they require. Often families living in poverty have different values and expectations regarding their children’s lives, as well as lacking the resources to provide the childhood experiences that reflect the “global child” discourse (Ansell 2016a). Second, while many researchers have problematized dominant discourses, others have argued that such discourses were never entirely homogeneous; rather, northern discourse has constructed southern childhoods in different terms from those lived by

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children in the north. Burman (1995), for instance, engages in a critique that draws on the parallels between psychological development and international development. She argues that while Northern children are understood to “develop” (and that policies and practices are designed to promote this), dominant discourses of children in the south are preoccupied with “survival” (Burman 1995). The third world child is thus the ultimate passive child: it survives rather than develops. Third, geographers have critiqued a series of constructions of particular “types” of southern child: the street child (Young 2003; van Blerk 2012), the working child (Jennings et al. 2006), the child soldier (Hyndman 2010), the trafficked child (Manzo 2005). A number of geographers have explored, for instance, how street children are discursively constructed through development policies. Young (2003) explains how children have come to be seen as “out-of-place” in urban public space, which has inevitable outcomes in terms of the interventions used to address this “problem” (see also van Blerk 2013). Panter-Brick (2004) explores how street children have come to be defined as “at risk” due to their homelessness and lack of adult supervision. She argues that this discourse of vulnerability can result in more discrimination and social exclusion for such children (Panter-Brick 2004). Similarly, the “child soldier” is constructed as a category for intervention and victim status (Hyndman 2010), yet the construction of children in this way – as passive or at risk – in challenging situations such as war is also shown to increase children’s vulnerability (Boyden and De Berry 2004).

2.2

Children’s Social Agency

Southern children, through their own actions, pose a very apparent challenge to global discourses of children (and specifically southern children) as passive. Children encountering poverty often provide the most obvious examples of social agency – as workers (Robson 1996), carers (Evans 2010; Robson 2004), street children (Beazley 2003; Young 2003), household heads (Evans 2011), and autonomous migrants (Young 2004; Young and Ansell 2003). Much of the geographical research concerning southern children over the past quarter century has focused on their social agency. Many street children, for instance, engage in apparently autonomous, independent migration into cities (Young 2004). Once in the city, they are able to select from a “repertoire of strategies” for survival (Beazley 2003). Child traders are similarly seen to exercise agency over their own lives (Bromley and Mackie 2009). Geographers have paid particular attention to the ways in which street children in urban environments negotiate public and private, street and nonstreet locations (van Blerk 2005), appropriating or creating niches that vary spatially and temporally (Beazley 2003; Young 2003), while contesting mainstream uses of urban space and their own construction as out of place in order to generate livelihoods (Young 2003). While street children may exemplify the apparently autonomous agency that children are capable of (see also Ansell 2016b in relation to orphans), few children live their lives in isolation – either from other children or from adults. Indeed, their agency is often expressed in contributions to household survival, rather than purely

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individual survival. Robson (1996), for instance, explores how children contribute to their household livelihoods through work. More recent studies have emphasized relational aspects of young people’s agency: the ways in which they navigate their own identities, life courses, and social relationships over time. “Fluidity” is a common theme. Van Blerk (2005) for instance stresses the fluidity of Ugandan street children’s identities as they traverse both space and time. Abebe (2008) writes about the fluidity of begging as an activity undertaken by children in Ethiopia. Evans (2006) explores Tanzanian children’s construction of “street careers” and later the “caring pathways” forged by young people heading households in Tanzania and Uganda, as well as their agency in negotiating life course transitions (Evans 2011). Langevang (2008) has written at length about how young Ghanaians engage in “social navigation.” Evans (2006) examines how, rather than simply being socialized into particular roles and relationships, street children negotiate their social identities and construct life course trajectories, actively reconfiguring gender norms and concepts of family in the process. Young carers demonstrate resilience in managing their caring responsibilities (Evans 2010). In some contexts, children have purposefully resisted their governance through western norms that accompany the influence of international institutions. Where the ILO has promoted “zero tolerance for child labor,” organizations of working children have contested new laws and practices. In Bolivia, they were directly involved in drafting a new legal code that allows children to work in regulated conditions, in defiance of the ILO (Liebel 2015). By providing evidence of children’s capacity to exercise agency, these studies not only lend weight to the new social studies of childhood, they have also been used to argue for alternative forms of policy and engagement with children living in poverty and in other challenging situations. Recognition of children’s agency has led to support for participatory approaches to development with children that recognizes their unique, enlightened perspectives on their own lives and capacity to act in their own interests. It is argued that recognizing children’s agency increases understanding of their lives, helps avoid inappropriate policies and practices, and enables policies to build on their strengths such as resilience, rather than seeing them as simply requiring protection. Chant and Jones (2005), for instance, argue that young people need to be given a voice to express how work and education link together in their lives. Recognizing childhood as a social construct also contributes to calls for participatory approaches to policy and intervention: in the absence of universal “global models” of childhood, children’s own contextualized constructions carry greater weight. Likewise, researchers who understand children to be active social agents often seek to involve them directly in research. If children are capable of acting in their own interests and in the interests of their families and peers, they are deemed also to be capable commentators on own lives. Young and Barrett (2001) argue that children’s voices are most clearly heard when the input of the researcher is minimized. They also outline in some detail the ethical issues that children’s participation in research poses; considerations such as gaining parental consent for children’s

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involvement in research need particular consideration where children are considered capable agents in their own right (Young and Barrett 2001).

3

Challenging the Paradigm

Over recent years, a number of scholars have begun to question the relevance of northern conceptualizations of childhood to southern contexts (Hart 2006; Tisdall and Punch 2012). It is not only the northern discourses of childhood (those that have been critiqued through research framed within the new social studies) that are deemed irrelevant to the lives of southern children. In line with, and contributing to, a growing critique of the new social studies of childhood, scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with the “mantras” (Tisdall and Punch 2012) that the new social studies offer in theorizing southern children’s lives. For reasons rooted in empirical research in the global south, critiques of the northern construction of southern childhoods are seen to require greater nuance, and focusing research on children’s agency is viewed as problematic and of questionable value.

3.1

Nuancing Critiques of Northern Discourses of Southern Children

Research that critiques the application of northern or “global” discourses of childhood to southern children tends to adopt a binary lens – north versus south or global versus local. In many respects, this is useful in making sense of, for instance, the imposition of ILO expectations concerning children’s work in impoverished African countries. Here, it is clear that the ILO prescriptions are based on a northern middle class ideal of childhood that is not shared by those in many countries that view children’s engagement in economic activity to be not only essential to household survival but also positive forms of socialization for children themselves. It is increasingly acknowledged, however, that the binary distinction is not always applicable or very revealing. Global and local are not so distinct (Ansell 2009). Moreover, defining the “global south” is problematic. This label is applied to a vast range of societies, differing greatly along economic and other dimensions. Many countries are ambiguously positioned, with rapidly growing economies and expanding middle classes that have taken on many of the traits of “global childhood.” Moreover, the “global north” is itself far from homogeneous (and certainly not synonymous with “the West”). As Aitken et al. (2007: 5) observe, “when the complexities of the local are looked at closely it is difficult to find a global south.” Moreover, Burman’s (1995) writing makes it very clear that “development” is not simply happening in the south; this discourse is far more pervasive. Geographers have undertaken research with liminally placed children: those living at borders between north and south (e.g., research by Bosco 2010 with children living close to the Mexico/US border); those raised by diasporic populations (McGregor 2008); and those migrating to or seeking asylum in northern countries (Crawley 2010; Pozzo and Evers 2016; Sporton et al.

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2006). Such research demonstrates how children from the south are forced to inhabit the normative boundaries and practices of northern institutions. It is also noteworthy that southern children, through their actions, challenge not only northern constructions of childhood, but very often dominant southern constructs too. As Kesby et al. (2006) point out, there is a need to recognize “other” “other childhoods”: not all children in southern contexts conform to local understandings of acceptable ways of doing childhood. Children’s caring work challenges both global and local constructions of childhood (Evans 2010). Indonesian street children’s subculture is performed as a symbolic challenge to dominant Indonesian culture (Beazley 2003). By contrast, child beggars in Ethiopia construct their begging activity as “business” in order to better conform to social expectations, but they are nonetheless constructed by the local population as “at risk” or “as risk” (Abebe 2008). Moreover, local constructions of childhood – and even children’s own constructions of their lives – are not unproblematic. As Beazley (2003) notes, street child subculture may resist dominant power, but it can do harm to the children who practise it. Nonetheless, it is obligatory for children to participate if they are to remain accepted in a group of street children. Southern constructions of childhood are never simply local and indigenous nor are the constructions that imbue development policies produced purely in the sphere of global policy making. Interventions implemented in southern contexts are products of negotiation between diverse actors that may be seen as “local” or “global” to differing degrees. Research exploring how education-focused responses to AIDS were constructed in Lesotho found that interventions did not simply reflect global or northern discourses. Rather, such discourses were transformed through the complex relationships between organizations and personnel involved in their design and implementation (Ansell 2010). Finally, in terms of binaries, the adult-child binary itself is arguably less relevant in southern contexts where households are often larger and less clearly structured by age (Tisdall and Punch 2012). In multigenerational households, or those with large numbers of siblings, there is often more continuity between generations with household members representing “interstitial generations” between children and their parents. Equally, in southern contexts (some) responsibilities may be less structured by age as children are required to engage in “adult” activities such as income generation. It is noteworthy that Holt and Holloway (2006) warn of the danger that by focusing a subdiscipline of geography on children, children’s geographers may inadvertently reproduce a sense that there is a commonality among children and a fundamental distinction from adults. “[T]he categorisation of an individual as a child and not an adult is a powerful act that can (re)produce dominant representations while simultaneously endeavouring to transform them” (Holt and Holloway 2006: 136). Focusing on children as a distinct category can also draw attention away from the relationships that shape their lives (Ansell 2016a).

3.2

Questioning Children’s Agency

Research by geographers in the global south has raised significant questions about children’s agency: the extent to which they are able to act upon the world; whether

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children’s agency is necessarily positive; and whether agency remains a useful focus for research relating to children’s lives. Those researching the lives of southern children have long recognized that there are aspects of the social, political, and economic contexts of children’s lives that both shape and constrain their agency. Robson (2000), for instance, charts how macroeconomic decline and structural adjustment in Zimbabwe generated a situation in which children took on the role of caring for sick relatives. Abebe (2007) explores children’s survival strategies in relation to globally unjust patterns of international trade that impoverished their coffee-growing households and required their economic participation. Young (2004) writes of the significance of political, economic, and social contexts in prompting children’s “independent” migration to Uganda’s city streets. For these young people, “agency” is less a free choice than a necessity provoked by challenging situations. That is not to deny that any degree of choice is involved. Langevang (2008) writes of young people’s “spaces of possibility” within a context of economic hardship and neoliberal reform; however, such spaces are clearly limited, and it may be more useful to think of contexts of poverty as constraining rather than enabling agency. Evans (2011), for instance, outlines how poverty limits children’s agency and control over their sexual relationships, schooling, and livelihood strategies. These examples raise the question of what agency means in relation to children. Jeffrey (2012) suggests that resourcefulness itself may be viewed as a form of agency. Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi (2013) view agency among southern children as something that is frequently borne of desperate circumstances. Understanding agency as the “specific powers of human beings to determine what to do under structural and cultural conditions not of their making” (p. 15), they observe that children in Ghanaian slums “have the powers to determine what to do under dire circumstances not of their making, formulate commitments they are capable of keeping and who, in doing so, act with intelligence, empathy and ingenuity” (p. 21). In a similar vein, Klocker (2007) describes the agency exercised by child domestic workers in Tanzania as “thin agency,” recognizing that such children “understand and actively negotiate the expectations and power relations that surround them while making decisions aimed at improving their own lives and those of their families” (p. 85). This is on a continuum with “thick agency” at the other end, in which the range of options is greater. While much research has raised the question of the extent to which children exercise agency through making meaningful choices, others have questioned whether agency is meaningful if it does not enable children to achieve real change in their circumstances. Young people’s agency takes diverse forms – survival, resistance, or subversion of dominant norms (Jeffrey 2012). It is often asserted that children’s agency is limited to “tactics” (immediate responses to situations) rather than orchestrated “strategies” (aimed at transforming situations). Yet even “tactical” agency may generate change. Dyson (2008) suggests that agency exists in the way working children in rural India imbue their work with meaning, manage their work practices and sometimes transgress established norms; this agency thus has some transformative potential and does not merely reproduce common patterns or respond

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to adverse situations. Moreover, in practice, young people often do plan strategically for their own long-term futures (Jeffrey 2012; Ansell et al. 2014), albeit their goals are often frustrated. In general, however, the capacity of children to act deliberately in ways that might transform the processes through which they are marginalized is very limited (Ansell 2009). Another important issue raised in relation to children’s agency is whether that agency is necessarily positive. The new social studies of childhood promoted a selfconsciously normative construction of childhood in which children’s social agency was to be acknowledged, celebrated, and extended as far as possible. As with any normative construction, this perspective is not shared across all societies. As Tisdall and Punch (2012) point out, agency and rights are seen as antithetical to particular contexts. In many societies, family interdependence is valued more highly than independence; children are expected to develop ever more intricate interdependences in order to ensure family survival and continuity (Abebe and Tefera 2014; Punch 2002; Punch 2015). It is noteworthy that “the longstanding epistemological assumption of a polarity in childhood studies between the discursive construction of children and youth as autonomous agents and their construction as innocent and passive disguises the extent to which both discourses have evolved with Western capitalism and served to extend its reach into less prosperous regions of the world” (Ansell 2010: 796). The construction of children as autonomous agents is a northern discourse exported to the south which, despite its selfconscious normativity, in effect makes claims to universal validity. The idea of agency more broadly is closely bound to liberal subjectivity (Bordonaro and Payne 2012) and the neoliberal ideal of producing autonomous individuals capable of functioning as workers and consumers in the global economy, taking responsibility for their own “development” (Ansell 2016a). Agency as a concept serves neoliberalism in a number of ways. In emphasizing the capacities of individuals to act in their own interests, it supports the withdrawal of conventional public welfare services and may lead to interventions that put the burden of responsibility onto children. It allows policy responses that focus on individuals and enhance their (individual) capacity to exercise agency, denying the need to engage with the political, or with systemic causes of poverty. It emphasizes the individual rather than the social – although agency is clearly a social not an individual process: people’s actions in situations of adversity or otherwise are relational, taking account of and involving others in action (Jeffrey 2012). Promotion of the concept of children’s agency, then, can have adverse consequences in terms of bolstering an approach that exacerbates economic exploitation and inequality. But young people’s exercise of agency itself has effects that may be considered problematic. Bordonaro and Payne (2012) contrast the types of agency that international organizations expect young people to engage in with the “ambiguous agency” that contravenes normative conceptions of childhood and moral and social ideals concerning the behavior expected of young people. Such ambiguous agency is exercised by categories of marginalized young people deemed to be “at risk” such as “child soldiers,” “street children,” and “child-headed households.” Moreover, young people’s economic contributions are regarded as forms of agency

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by most geographers researching children’s lives, yet these tend to be viewed as an abuse of rights and in opposition to meaningful agency by many organizations. Importantly, agency may not only contravene social expectations, but it can be selfdestructive, as Gigengack (2014) argues in relation to street children. Young people’s agency certainly does not always serve progressive ends. Jeffrey (2012) uses the term “negative agency” to refer to situations where young people reproduce and deepen dominant structures of power, such as where “young women police each other’s behaviour and reinforce performative hierarchies of femininity” (Jeffrey 2012: 5). Indeed, agency is seldom unequivocally progressive. Jeffrey (2012) describes how young people, through politics or otherwise, may simultaneously detach themselves from dominant ideas while also becoming complicit with dominant power. They engage in a contestation, negotiation, and deepening of social inequalities. Not only is children’s agency and its promotion potentially harmful, but a narrow focus of research on children’s agency is also problematic. Research that explores children’s agency tends to draw attention to certain types of process and certain categories of child. Focusing on individual agency, in particular, suggests that individuals and families rather than entrenched poverty determine their fortunes (Abebe and Tefera 2014). Processes that are actually more significant in shaping children’s lives may be neglected. Research concerned with children’s agency often focuses on particular categories of children. Teenagers tend to embody agency more clearly than younger children (Ansell 2014a). Street children and AIDS orphans have been particularly popular subjects for children’s geographers. Such children are seen as particularly illustrative of social agency (see Evans 2011, Payne 2012 in relation to orphans): they enable researchers to contest stereotypes of vulnerability and passivity, the children’s agency being visible and amenable to study. Research accounts are often reminiscent of the fairytale orphan: the hero that acts alone, independent of adult kin, an individual active autonomous child (Ansell 2016b). Focusing on agency is often unduly attentive to children as individuals “rather than as having responsibilities, living relationally, intergenerationally and in their communities” (Tisdall and Punch 2012: 258). It is also noteworthy that a focus on agency can silence those who fail to enact it so prominently. For many poor children, who are neither orphans nor street children but rather share the marginalized lives of their families, the story of agency is harder to tell (Ansell 2016b).

4

Provoking Alternative Framings

This third section of the chapter considers three observations that emerge from research with and about southern children that should be taken seriously in setting research agendas relating to children in the global south – and more widely: global social, economic, and political processes play important roles in children’s lives; children’s relationally constituted practices play a key part in these global processes; and a social justice lens offers a valuable alternative perspective on children’s lives.

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The Significance of Global Processes

Research clearly needs to be attentive to the multiple power relations that frame young people’s lives, yet children’s place in the global political economy has received relatively little attention (Ansell 2016a). This is in part attributable to a long-standing concern that research about children should be conducted with children, in the everyday spaces of their lives. For many years, research with children focused on the “local” and “concrete” and on agency which were conflated and opposed to a “global,” “abstract,” or “structuralist” perspective that was viewed with suspicion as too “distant” from real children (Ansell 2009). Focusing on children’s agency tended to constrain research to the microlevel: children – particularly the very young – are not easily able to act purposefully beyond their immediate encounters with people and places. Children generally lack capacity to comment on or intervene in many of the processes and decisions that shape their lives most profoundly but which have more distant origins. Yet if we are to adequately understand children’s lives, “it is crucial to consider not only children’s encounters with the world, but also the processes, decisions and events that shape the world they perceive, interpret and act upon” (Ansell 2009: 204). Global neoliberalism is affecting the lives of children worldwide by restructuring production (Punch 2007; Robson 1996; Robson 2000; Abebe 2007) and social reproduction (Katz 2001; Katz 2004; Robson 2004). Such processes remain untouched by the small-scale participatory projects that have been the focus of much research (Ansell 2009). Rapid global transformations are profoundly shaping children’s experiences in the realms of education and employment. Educational restructuring, the privatization of school curricula and the regulation of children’s work are altering the lives of many of those who are most socio-spatially marginalized (Jeffrey 2010). Some locations are marginalized further by global and regional circuits of capital (Dyson 2008), but this does not mean that global processes are irrelevant; rather the young inhabitants of such communities are likely to experience increasing motivation and necessity to migrate. Huijsmans (2014) for instance, charts how rural transformation in Laos is leading many young people to leave their rural homes. In terms of political processes, children’s rights enshrined in international law have limited purchase on welfare provision, either by states or international organizations, and cannot transform the global economic processes that impinge on children’s lives (Grugel 2013). By contrast, macroeconomic and foreign policy strongly affect children’s welfare and equity but are not responsive to interventions focused on individual agency and rights. There is a need for research to engage with these policy areas and not merely those focused more obviously on children, if children’s lives are to be better understood. While the significance of poverty and marginalization, and the global processes behind them, are perhaps most in evidence when researching the lives of marginalized southern children, they are important too for understanding the lives of children in the north. Moreover, rather than thinking in binary terms of north and south, Holt and Holloway (2006) call for research to focus on processes interconnecting individuals and places across the globe that impact on children’s experiences.

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The Role of Children’s Relationally Constituted Practices in Global Processes

There is a need for research to focus on children not just because they are numerous, important in their own right, differently affected by processes relative to adults and have their own perspectives. It is also necessary because they play important roles in economic and social processes that affect everyone (Ansell 2014a). The roles they play are not necessarily best framed as forms of agency: they may not be consciously deliberated upon, involve any apparent degree of choice or necessarily even provoke change. Children are, however, basic to the constitution of societies, and understanding their lives and relationships to others does provide insight into the production of both continuity and change in the world (Ansell 2014a). Although as Aitken (2001: 123) points out, “the places and practices of children’s everyday life are rarely considered a dynamic context for understanding social and material transformations,” they are of profound significance. Moreover, it is not only young people’s practices that are integral to wider social processes. “Far from being extraneous to or even a byproduct of global transformations . . . conflicts and re-representations of the nature of youth and childhood are at the very center of the struggle over hearts, minds and bodies in the emergence of a new globalized modernity” (Ruddick 2003: 357) The most obvious way in which children contribute to continuity and change is through social reproduction – defined by Katz (2001: 711) as the “material and social practices through which people reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis.” Katz has explored children’s role in social reproduction over more than two decades, arguing that children’s “mundane practices” of work, play, and learning contribute to transformation in the face of externally imposed socioeconomic and cultural-ecological change (Katz 1991). In particular, she showed how a Sudanese community’s incorporation into an agricultural project increased demands on children’s labor, decoupling play from work and ultimately deskilling the population, such that the quest for economic opportunity came to require out-migration from the area. More recently, Abebe’s (2007) research in rural Ethiopia has revealed how children’s changing reproductive activities lie at the heart of structural processes and north-south relations in trade and development. Nieuwenhuys (2007) offers fascinating insights into children’s contribution to the global economy. Although excluded from formal employment by increasingly globalized restrictions on “child labor,” children in marginalized communities have taken on a growing share of care and domestic work as public services are reduced and adults under pressure to commit longer hours to productive labor. She describes the “global womb” wherein children engage in forms of reproductive work that sustain the capitalist economy but which are hidden from view. Nieuwenhuys suggests a distinct and ritualized border is drawn between the “global womb” and “global childhood.” As international institutions ostensibly protecting “global childhood” dismiss children’s reproductive labor as inconsequential (and not requiring regulation), they contribute to the myth of a self-reproducing global workforce that actually depends on the unseen and unacknowledged labor of children.

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Reproductive work is, of course, constituted relationally. A number of scholars researching in the global south have developed relational approaches to researching children’s caring responsibilities. Evans (2010), for instance, details how care is embedded in social relationships, cultural norms, and structural inequalities. Others have pointed to the potential for children-focused research of exploring notions of relations, relationships, and reciprocity more widely (Tisdall and Punch 2012). There are numerous forms of relation in which children are embedded – material, ideological, political – and which operate at (mutually constituted) scales ranging from intimate to global (Ansell 2014a). Key among the relationships through which young people’s lives sustain and transform society are those of gender, age, and generation (see ▶ Chap. 4, “Intergenerational Geographies in Theory and Practice,” by Vanderbeck this volume). Generation is of particular salience in relation to children’s roles (Ansell 2014a). Generation as a relation is both horizontal (located in time) and vertical (extended over time). It encompasses relationships across an age cohort, between a cohort and the context that produces and shapes it, between different generations (of a family or of wider society) and within an individual life course (Ansell 2014a). Generational relationships do not simply affect children’s life experiences; they are fundamental to understanding processes of change. In some contexts, these experiences clearly involve children (e.g., expansion of education) but there are also important processes where the connections to children are less obvious, such as in relation to practices of land tenure transfer which usually take place generationally but are governed by culturally specific practices. Generation clearly intersects with other social relations, often reinforcing existing inequalities. Within rural Burundian families, for instance, Berckmoes and White (2016) have demonstrated how generational relationships sustain unequal gender relations. Generational relations are productive of change, but they are themselves susceptible to change, and many countries in the global south are experiencing particularly rapid change, in part due to social policies that have recently been introduced by governments, sometimes on the advice of and/or supported by funding from donor governments and other agencies. For instance, with the introduction of old age pensions and child grants, intergenerational contracts are being enacted through the state rather than the family, shifting relationships of obligation among kin (Ansell 2014a). A significant impact of turning research toward generational relations is that it requires some shift of focus from actor toward relationship, from agency to structure, from understanding children to understanding the processes prevailing in and shaping society.

4.3

The Value of a Social Justice Framing for Research with Children

Adopting a relational approach to research offers useful insights into the processes in which children’s lives are implicated, but in itself it does not help a researcher to identify the extent to which children’s interests are being promoted or harmed. Assuming that children’s interests lie only in extending their agency or advancing

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their individual rights is problematic, as has been outlined above. Indeed, Nieuwenhuys (2007) criticizes the ritualistic celebration of children’s rights, disengaged from social justice. As elaborated more fully elsewhere (Ansell 2014b), framing research in relation to social justice offers a useful lens through which to understand the ways in which diverse processes, policies, and interventions may serve to advance or harm children’s interests. In considering social justice in relation to children, the work of Iris Marion Young (1990) is particularly useful. Instead of promoting a universal, abstract ‘theory of justice’ in which injustices are identified through objective calculations, Young recognizes that society is far from homogenous and that claims for justice often arise from specific social groups. Children are not among the groups she considers, but her focus on social difference makes her ideas particularly applicable to understanding social justice in relation to children. For Young (1990), social groups are collectivities differentiated from other groups by cultural forms, practices or way of life. As a result, group members have an affinity, and tend to associate more with each other than with those outside the group. Groups are not merely aggregates of individuals: they exist prior to individuals and constitute identities (although these are fluid and shifting). Nonetheless, it is possible for a group to be identified by outsiders without those who are identified as members necessarily being conscious of belonging. On the basis of this description, children can certainly be understood as a social group. Young (1990) suggests that some, but not all, social groups are systematically subjected to social injustice. Injustice, she argues, operates through processes of domination and oppression, rather than directly through the distribution of goods and burdens. This, again, makes the approach particularly relevant when considering social justice in relation to children, for whom a distributional justice lens has limited value. She understands domination to refer to situations where “other persons or groups can determine without reciprocation the conditions of [a person’s] action, either directly or by virtue of the structural consequences of their actions,” while oppression refers to systematic institutional processes which limit people’s meaningful social participation. A social group is deemed to be oppressed if it is subject to one or more of 5 conditions: exploitation (being expected to work for the benefit of others); marginalization (exclusion from “useful participation in social life”); powerlessness; cultural imperialism (being both rendered invisible and stereotyped by the dominant in society); and violence (particularly the social context that makes acts of violence possible and even acceptable). It is not difficult to see that in most societies children are subject to many of these processes, and that poor children are systematically subjected to most of them. While Young’s work has long been used by feminist geographers (see, for instance, McDowell 1999; Wright 2010), it has received less attention from children’s geographers. Beyond Ansell’s (2014a) use of Young’s work to frame a discussion of how far the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child advances social justice for African children, Catlin (2003) has argued that understanding justice in terms of Young’s 5 conditions of oppression may support an argument for recognizing children as active participants in the English primary school curriculum.

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Aitken (2014) has flagged the value of a difference-centered approach to justice to challenge assimilationist ideals of citizenship that exclude children (see also Aitken and Herman 1997; Bosco et al. 2011; Moosa-Mitha 2005). This formulation of social justice clearly has the capacity to illuminate social processes that shape the lives of children worldwide, and also to advocate for (and with) children in ways that do not seek to repudiate difference.

5

Conclusions

Over the past quarter of a century, empirical studies of the lives of children in the global south have contributed to theory building in northern institutions. Although there is no simple chronological narrative, much of the earlier research by children’s geographers drew on the new social studies of childhood to provide insights into aspects of children’s lives and in the process provided illustrations of theoretical propositions. Studies critiqued the effects of dominant discourses and critiqued development interventions based upon constructions of childhood that were inappropriate to the contexts. More recently, research with southern children has contributed to a critique of the “mantras” (Tisdall and Punch 2012) of the new social studies of childhood. There have been a number of more nuanced accounts of the hybrid and complex constructions of childhood at work in diverse contexts, and research with southern children has unsettled celebratory tellings of children’s social agency. Those researching the lives of children in the south have promoted alternative theoretical lenses. Some have stressed the significance of global interconnections in constituting childhoods around the world. This is, of course, not a new strand of work. Katz (2004) developed the concept of “countertopographies” to explore the impacts of global processes on children in the 1990s, and has developed it more recently (Katz 2011) to point to the connected ways in which children are cast as “waste” under contemporary capitalism (through underresourced schools in poor neighborhoods of the USA, as victims and combatants in military conflicts, or in debilitating work “recycling” old ships). Others have argued for mainstreaming of children in development research by drawing attention to the significance of relations of age and generation that function to sustain or challenge the social order and shape individual and collective experiences. There is also value in exploring the lives of southern children through a social justice lens, to seek to understand how and why some processes operate to advance children’s interests while others do them harm. Tisdall and Punch (2012: 259) ask “what can Majority World research on childhood offer to childhood studies, in both the Majority and Minority Worlds?” It seems that research focused on majority world – or global south – children has a great deal to offer. Rather than simply applying theories generated in the north, such research is both challenging theoretical propositions that are often taken for granted and is generating alternative conceptual lenses. Beyond the answers they proffer themselves, Tisdall and Punch’s (2012) call has presaged new work examining the interface between children’s geographies and development geographies (e.g., Smith 2013).

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Others have built on their ideas to further critique children’s agency (Gigengack 2014) and explore generational relations (Kassa 2016), interdependencies (Punch 2015) and broader relationalities (van Blerk 2012) drawing on empirical material from the global south. However, Tisdall and Punch (2012) recommend that there should be more “bottom-up” theorization. Hitherto, those in northern institutions researching children in both north and south have drawn little on theorizations that actually emanate from southern academia. Doubtless, there is potential for further challenges to northern theorizing if those working with children in both north and south are more open to dialogue with not just southern children but also southern researchers.

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Jeffrey, C. (2012). Geographies of children and youth II: Global youth agency. Progress in Human Geography, 36(2), 245–253. Jenks, C. (1996). Childhood. London: Routledge. Jennings, J., Aitken, S., Lopez Estrada, S., & Fernandez, A. (2006). Learning and earning: Relational scales of children’s work. Area, 38(3), 231–239. Joronen, M. (2016). Politics of precarious childhood: Ill treatment of Palestinian children under the Israeli military order. Geopolitics, 21(1), 92–114. Kassa, S. C. (2016). Negotiating intergenerational relationships and social expectations in childhood in rural and urban Ethiopia. Childhood, 23(3), 394–409. Katz, C. (1991). Sow what you know: The struggle for social reproduction in rural Sudan. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81(3), 488–514. Katz, C. (2001). Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode, 33(4), 708–727. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Katz, C. (2011). Accumulation, excess, childhood: toward a countertopography of risk and waste Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 57(1), 47–60. Katz, C., & Monk, J. (1993). Full circles: Geographies of women over the life course, International studies of women and place series (Vol. 317). London: Routledge. Kesby, M., Gwanzura-Ottemoller, F., & Chizororo, M. (2006). Thorising other, “other childhoods”: Issues emerging from work on HIV in urban and rural Zimbabwe. Children’s Geographies, 4(2), 185–202. Klocker, N. (2007). An example of “thin” agency: Child domestic workers in Tanzania. In R. Panelli, S. Punch, & E. Robson (Eds.), Global perspectives on rural childhood and youth: Young rural lives (pp. 83–94). London: Routledge. Langevang, T. (2008). “we are managing!” uncertain paths to respectable adulthoods in Accra, Ghana. Geoforum, 39(6), 2039–2047. Liebel, M. (2015). Protecting the rights of working children instead of banning child labour. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 23(3), 529–547. Manzo, K. (2005). Exploiting West Africa’s children: Trafficking, slavery and uneven development. Area, 37(4), 393–401. McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, identity and place: Understanding feminist geographies. Oxford: Polity Press. McGregor, J. A. (2008). Children and “African values”: Zimbabwean professionals in Britain reconfiguring family life. Environment and Planning A, 40(3), 596–614. Mizen, P., & Ofosu-Kusi, Y. (2013). Agency as vulnerability: Accounting for children’s movement to the streets of Accra. The Sociological Review, 61(2), 363–382. Moosa-Mitha, M. (2005). A difference-centred alternative to theorization of children’s citizenship rights. Citizenship Studies, 9(4), 369–388. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2007). Embedding the global womb: Global child labour and the new policy agenda. Children’s Geographies, 5(1–2), 149–163. Panter-Brick, C. (2004). Homelessness, poverty, and risks to health: Beyond at risk categorizations of street children. Children’s Geographies, 2(1), 83–94. Payne, R. (2012). “extraordinary survivors” or “ordinary lives”? Embracing “everyday agency” in social interventions with child-headed households in Zambia. Children’s Geographies, 10(4), 399–411. Pozzo, M., & Evers, S. J. T. M. (2016). “staying active” in confined living conditions: Participation assessments of young asylum seekers (aged 12–23) in the Netherlands. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 468–481. Punch, S. (2002). Youth transitions and interdependent adult-child relations in rural Bolivia. Journal of Rural Studies, 18(2), 123–133. Punch, S. (2007). Negotiating Migrant Identities: Young People in Bolivia and Argentina. Children’s Geographies, 5(1&2), 95–112.

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Intergenerational Geographies in Theory and Practice Robert M. Vanderbeck

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Growth of “Intergenerational Geographies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Meanings of Generations and Intergenerationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Familial Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Generations as Life Stages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Historical Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Intersecting Notions of Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Geographies of Age Segregation, Integration, and Differentiation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Promoting “Intergenerational Space” and “Intergenerational Encounter” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72 72 77 77 79 80 81 82 85 88 89

Abstract

There has been a recent proliferation of interest in the concept of intergenerationality within geographical research. This chapter seeks to trace the emergence of this surge of interest, situate it within wider conceptual and theoretical debates in geographical research on children and young people, explore how research in geography and cognate areas has deployed the concept, and identify future research challenges. The chapter begins by first placing discussions about the turn toward intergenerationality within the wider context of debates over the past decade about the future trajectories of research in the geographies of children and young people. The chapter shows how the rise in use of notions of intergenerationality has been influenced by recent calls within the geographies of children and young people to (1) adopt a more relational approach R. M. Vanderbeck (*) The School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_4

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to understanding age, (2) to bring into conversation areas of research (e.g., on childhood and old age) that have traditionally been compartmentalized from one another, and (3) to explore more robustly the nature of child/adult interdependencies. Geographers have deployed the concept of intergenerationality both as an analytical lens (particularly to understand patterns and processes of continuity and change) and as a normative ideal. The chapter then discusses different ways in which ideas of generation and intergenerationality have been deployed within the geographies of children and young people, highlighting established and emerging areas of contemporary interest in relation to familial generations, life stages, and historical generations. Attention is also given to normative arguments about the need to combat age segregation and to engage in forms of intergenerational practice to improve the quality of relationships between different generations (in contexts where these are deemed to be problematic). The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need for greater engagement between disciplines to address the future research challenges of intergenerational geographies. Keywords

Intergenerationality · Intergenerational spaces · Generations · Family · Age relations

1

Introduction

This chapter examines the proliferation of interest in the concept of intergenerationality within geographical research. It begins by first situating discussions about the value of intergenerationality as both an analytical tool and a normative ideal within the wider context of debates over the past decade about the future trajectories of research in the geographies of children and young people. The chapter then discusses different ways in which ideas of generation and intergenerationality have (and have not) been deployed within geography, highlighting established and emerging areas of contemporary interest. It also gives attention to normative arguments about the need to combat age segregation and to engage in forms of intergenerational practice to improve the quality of relationships between different generations (in contexts where these are deemed to be problematic). The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need for greater engagement between disciplines to address the future research challenges of intergenerational geographies.

2

The Growth of “Intergenerational Geographies”

In recent years the term “intergenerational” has undeniably become a more prominent component of the lexicon of geographical research. Even a cursory examination of patterns of usage of the term in the discipline’s journals would seem to affirm this.

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A simple counting exercise involving Children’s Geographies (the primary specialist journal for research on the geographies of children and young people, launched in 2003) reveals the following pattern: whereas the term “intergenerational” appeared in an average of 0.7 articles per issue from 2003 to 2005 and only 0.6 from 2006 to 2008, this increased to 1.4 from 2009 to 2011 and 2.25 in 2012 to 2014 (see Table 1). This represents an average increase of more than threefold between 2003–2005 and 2012–2014. Geographical journals with a much wider disciplinary remit than Children’s Geographies also show some evidence of a recent increase in the frequency with which the term is deployed compared to prior years, with average per issue increases for the same time period (2003–2005 to 2012–2014) in Annals of the Association of American Geographers (x 2.5), Social & Cultural Geography (x 4), Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (x 6), and Geoforum (x 8). Of course, crude statistics like this are open to diverse readings, and it is important not to over-interpret them. Nevertheless, while it would be premature to declare anything so bold as an “intergenerational turn” within the geographies of children and young people, these types of data are consistent with an observed increase in interest in questions related to intergenerational geographies and spaces that has been noted in other sources (Vanderbeck and Worth 2015). Of course, the term “intergenerational” denotes a wide range of different forms of relationship depending on the particular conception of “generation” that one adopts. The notion of generation is employed both colloquially and within the social sciences as a means to temporally position groups of people in relation to one another, although there are a number of differing and sometimes competing usages. In broad terms, one can identify three particular uses of the term “generation” in the social scientific literature (Vanderbeck 2007; Vanderbeck and Worth 2015; Biggs and Lowenstein 2011): (1) familial generations (e.g., grandparent, parent, child), (2) life stages (e.g., child, adult, elder), and (3) historical generations (e.g., the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials). Each of these notions of generation will be Table 1 Articles using the term “intergenerational” in Children’s Geographies Year 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Number of issues 2 2 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

Number of articles using “intergenerational” 1 0 4 2 4 1 2 6 9 11 7 9

Average number of articles using “intergenerational” per issue 0.50 0 1.33 0.67 1.00 0.25 0.50 1.50 2.25 2.75 1.75 2.25

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considered in more detail later in the chapter in relation to recent geographical research. First, however, it is necessary to situate the growing attention to generations and intergenerationality within broader trends in the development of research on the geographies of children and young people. The increased interest in ideas of intergenerationality can be located within a wider set of discussions which took place circa 2005–2010 regarding the coalescence of the geographies of children and young people into a recognizable subfield within human geography. During this period, a number of commentaries emerged (e.g., Horton and Kraftl 2005; Ansell 2009; Vanderbeck 2008) which, while celebrating the blossoming of research within the subfield, nevertheless critiqued certain tendencies and habits of thought within the literature that some commentators considered problematic. These critiques came from multiple angles, including a perception that research on children and young people was overly compartmentalized in two interrelated ways. First, there was a sense that the growing subfield evidenced too great a degree of theoretical and conceptual homogeneity, borrowing heavily and sometimes uncritically from ideas from within the new social studies (or new sociology) of childhood (Horton and Kraftl 2005). A particular concern was how children’s agency was being conceptualized (e.g., Vanderbeck 2008), with some accounts suggesting that the emphasis on children’s agency and capacities for autonomy downplayed the importance of understanding the relational nature of agency and the reality of child/ adult interdependencies (Ruddick 2007). These critiques provided the basis for a proliferation of research that has adopted a more explicitly relational approach to questions of age, an approach to which the idea of intergenerationality is central. For much recent “intergenerational” research, whether in familial or extrafamilial contexts, this relational view means conceptualizing age identities as dynamically produced through interactions and relationships and hence “situated, fluid, and contested” (Hopkins and Pain 2007: 287). The notion of intergenerationality has been advanced in geography as a tool that could contribute to the development of a more explicitly relational understanding of age that emphasizes how it is “produced in the interactions between different people” (Hopkins and Pain 2007: 288). Sociologist Leena Alanen (2014: 133) similarly argues that the sociology of childhood should proceed from “a particular social ontology that helps to conceptualize childhood as a fundamentally relational phenomenon.” She continues: This relationality [. . .] implies intergenerationality, in that children are constituted specifically as children primarily (although not exclusively) within intergenerational relations, that is, as a generational category of beings that is internally related to other existing generational categories, especially adults.

However, it should be stressed that not all research conducted under the sign of “intergenerationality” necessarily share an explicit commitment to a relational view of age. Indeed, some work in the area of intergenerational practice – forms of practice meant to improve relations between members of different generations – implicitly relies on relatively normative, static, and arguably essentialized notions of

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the needs, abilities, and dispositions of members of different generations (see Vanderbeck 2007), although this is not the norm. Second, and relatedly, a set of critiques emerged that suggested that the geographical literature on children and young people was developing almost entirely in isolation from literatures focusing on other age groups, particularly geographical literatures on old age (influenced by social gerontology and other fields) (Vanderbeck 2007; Hopkins and Pain 2008). In response to this perception, it was proposed that greater attention ought to be paid to questions of so-called intergenerational geographies (Vanderbeck 2007). Geographers interested in children and young people were challenged to contribute to debates regarding how space(s) facilitate and/or limit intergenerational contact and relationships, how the geographies of intergenerational relationships vary between contexts and groups, and how generational separation and segregation (in contexts where this is a problematic feature of social life) could be challenged and ameliorated (Vanderbeck 2007). A growing body of work has sought to respond to these challenges (Vanderbeck and Worth 2015), as discussed in greater depth later in the chapter. It is important to stress, however, that some commentators have expressed reservations about the potential utility of the notion of intergenerationality for geographers interested in children and young people. Perhaps most notably, Horton and Kraftl (2008: 284), in a reply to Hopkins and Pain (2007), have questioned “what the concept of (inter)generationality does, compared with other social signifiers of social difference,” most particularly “childhood,” a signifier they see as having far greater popular currency. They continue: For example, sociologists. . .have focused upon the specific term ‘childhood’ because it is a signifying term for a set of complex, contested discourses (based broadly around ‘children’). Crucially, though, the term childhood is a point of articulation, policymaking, expert knowledge and mass-mediated representations. Does the notion of intergenerationality represent such a point of articulation or controversy?

Skepticism has also been expressed regarding whether the notion of intergenerationality has true “analytical power” (Horton and Kraftl 2008: 285) given that “generational differences themselves can be ascribed to much more powerful, cross-cutting differences in attitude, education, assumption, morality, experience [. . .] which evade any loose correspondence with a particular ‘generation’ in whatever sense.” The analytic power of the idea of generations, from this vantage point, “feels vague and limited,” and Horton and Kraft (2008: 285) expressed feeling unconvinced “that intergenerationality is (yet) a useful concept for explaining either geographies of age, difference, or human interaction.” Horton and Kraftl’s challenge provided an important and necessary opportunity to clarify why a turn toward the “intergenerational” matters for research on the geographies of children and young people. Hopkins and Pain (2008: 289) respond directly to this challenge by asserting that they see “intergenerationality as both a descriptive tool, and part of broader apparatus for explaining social and cultural processes and phenomena.” Intergenerationality, they argue, does in fact provide a significant point of articulation for social discourse and practice:

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A diverse set of contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental concerns are described as having important (inter)generational components, including the provision of social welfare (often spoken about in terms of an “intergenerational contract” and “generational inequalities”), environmental and sustainability issues (often framed in terms of “intergenerational justice”), and neighborhood and community relations (with forms of intergenerational practice used to improve contact and understanding between younger and older people) (see Vanderbeck and Worth 2015). On an analytical level, the lens of intergenerationality has usefully been applied in research in relation to diverse contemporary concerns that are central to contemporary human geography including, among other areas, “the relationship between places and identities; processes of segregation and integration; the socio-spatial organization of practices of care; encounters with social difference; the influence of cyberspace and new technologies on people’s social networks; and the relationship between space and embodiment” (as outlined in Vanderbeck and Worth 2015: 2). Indeed, despite doubts by some commentators about the utility of intergenerationality compared to more familiar concepts like “childhood,” recent research provides insight into how our understanding of the notion of childhood itself can be enhanced through explicitly intergenerational forms of analysis. For example, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Guji people of Ethiopia, Jirata (2015) demonstrates how the category “child” is contested between an adult generation that defines childhood in relation to a complex system of patriarchal lineage irrespective of chronological age, whereas for children themselves “one’s level of physical maturity is a basis for defining somebody as a child” (Jirata 2015: 104; see also Jirata and Kjørholt 2015). Thus, forms of intergenerational analysis can prove essential for understanding of the categories “children”/“young” and “childhood”/“youth” which are at the core of the geographies of children and young people. That said, Horton and Kraftl’s assertion that the analytical power of “generations” and “intergenerationality” can seem “vague” does reflect to some degree the lack of a singular intergenerational approach, theoretical perspective, or conceptual understanding (see also Kuehne and Melville (2014) on the diversity of theoretical approaches in the multidisciplinary field of intergenerational practice). For some researchers, intergenerationality provides an analytic lens through which to (partially) understand processes of continuity and change in terms of, for example, patterns of religious belief (Hopkins et al. 2011), attitudes toward diversity and difference (Valentine 2015), cultural tastes and fashion (Rawlins 2006), diasporic belonging (Ho 2013), and many other phenomena. For other researchers and commentators, however, the value of the concept of intergenerationality is not so much

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solely or primarily as an analytical tool to “explain” a phenomenon; rather, its value is as a signifier of a normative or ethical position that seeks to break down barriers and structures that impede the development of relationships between people of different generations. Among these scholars and practitioners, there is a commitment to the idea that contemporary patterns of age segregation and differentiation (where they exist, as there is large variation within and between Minority and Majority World contexts: see Evans (2015)) are potentially destructive and that societies are healthier, happier, and more just when people of different ages are more actively involved in each other’s lives, both within and beyond kinship systems. The normative commitment from this vantage point is to produce “reformed age relations” (Laws 1993: 689) between younger and older generations, with various types of intergenerational practice and design being central to many approaches to seeking these reforms. The remainder of the chapter first outlines some of the key areas where an intergenerational analytical lens has become important within human geography and cognate disciplines and then turns to an exploration of current thinking about themes of generational segregation/integration and practices designed with a normative commitment to improving the quality of contemporary intergenerational relationships.

3

The Meanings of Generations and Intergenerationality

Having outlined the context in which notions of intergenerationality have proliferated in recent geographical work on children and young people, this section provides an overview of how each of the three key social scientific uses of generation (and hence different visions of what constitutes “intergenerationality”) has featured within recent geographical research while also noting the importance of recognizing the ways in which these notions intersect within the context of individual lives (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011).

3.1

Familial Generations

The first common usage of ideas around generation and intergenerationality is in relation to families and kinship, where the idea of generation denotes a particular position within a familial lineage/system of kinship. This usage has been prominent in relation to a range of geographical concerns, including the lives and experiences of transnational families (e.g., Waite and Cooke 2011), changing practices of parenting and grandparenting (e.g., Tarrant 2015), and household transformations in the context of rapid economic, social, and environmental change (e.g., Fengbo and Punch 2015). Familial intergenerationality has been an important concept in studies of practices of social reproduction, which are concerned with the nature of household decisionmaking and the complex organization of practices of care across time and space, including practices of child care and care for older people (Bailey et al. 2004) that

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rely on intergenerational solidarities (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011). These intergenerational practices of care, as research in both the Minority and Majority Worlds has shown, can be transformed by wider shifts in the economies, demographies, and epidemiologies of places. For example, recent geographical research in diverse sub-Saharan African contexts has demonstrated changing patterns of intergenerational relations in the context of the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)-AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) epidemic. Due to high rates of morbidity and mortality among adult parents in some countries, young people often assume significant caring responsibility at an earlier age than before, including both care for younger siblings and for older relatives (Evans 2015: 209). These shifting patterns of intergenerational care have significant implications for the young people directly affected by them in terms of access to educational and other opportunities. There are also wider potential consequences for young carers who in some contexts have been constructed as a kind of “moral threat” to the social order “when they engage in activities conventionally associated with adulthood, such as heading households without a co-resident adult relative or young parenting outside of marriage” (Evans 2015: 209). These changes have implications not only within families but for the wider structure of generational relationships at the societal level, as discussed below. A familial sense of intergenerationality has also been central to recent geographical research on the negotiation and contestation of values, beliefs, and politics between generations (Kallio 2015; Vanderbeck and Worth 2015). For example, research in England on attitudes toward alcohol consumption by geographers has shown how the family home is a key space for the generational transmission and contestation of drinking cultures between parents and children, with the practices of parents having important implications for the knowledges and attitudes that young people develop toward alcohol (Valentine et al. 2012). Social scientific research on religion has long had a particular interest in intergenerational relationships, and recent work in the growing subfield of the geographies of religion has successfully used an intergenerational lens to provide a more nuanced and spatially sensitive understanding of patterns of continuity and change in religious practice. This is exemplified by recent research with Christian young people and families in Scotland. This research moves beyond standard narratives of “intergenerational transmission” which have featured in much traditional quantitative research in the sociology of religion (emphasizing a primarily unidirectional transmission of religious beliefs and practices from parents to children) toward a more nuanced account that recognizes processes of negotiation between generations, with children, for example, in some cases influencing and shaping the religious involvement of the parental generation. As Hopkins et al. (2011: 314) argue, “intergenerational relations need to be understood as part of the site-based practices that are central to the development and experience of young people’s religious identities.” Research on mother-daughter relationships in a deindustrialized region of South Wales explores generational differences in senses of (dis)connection to place, showing how place was central to the different ways in which mothers and daughters understood their respective identities and future possibilities (Mannay 2015).

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Generations as Life Stages

The second common usage of “generation” is in reference to age-related positions that are held within a wider social system as opposed to specifically within a system of kinship. In the broadest terms, research concerned with this sense of “generations” is focused on relationships between “children,” “young people,” “adults,” “older people,” and whatever age-related categorizations have currency in particular contexts. However, the association of these kinds of categorizations strictly with age can be complicated by the fact that in some contexts, both historically and at present, the boundaries and transitions between these life stages (e.g., the process of being recognized as an “adult”) are not strictly age related but tied to life events such as marriage/civil partnerships or the assumption of particular kinds of responsibilities (Jirata 2015; see also Morse (2015) for an account from the US context that forms of “generational” difference can emerge among people of similar ages). It should also be noted that some social scientists have warned against using the term “generation” to signify life stages such as childhood due to the potential for confusion about the term’s meaning and theoretical underpinnings (e.g., Närvänen and Näsman 2004), although the usage of generation to denote age categories remains widespread (e.g., the phrases “age segregation” and “generational segregation” both appear in the research literature used by different authors to signify essentially the same phenomenon). Among those adopting an extrafamilial sense of generations, a common focus of research has been on interactions between children and adults in a range of public spaces (Karsten 2005), such as neighborhoods (Pickering et al. 2012) or consumption spaces like shopping malls (Vanderbeck and Johnson 2000). This literature is often specifically concerned with sources of generational conflict as well as how practices of social control (e.g., policing) by adults regulate and restrict young people’s conduct in these settings (e.g., Brown 2013). An extrafamilial notion of generation also predominates in the literature on patterns and processes of age segregation and integration (or generational segregation and integration: both sets of terms can be found in the research literature to describe the same phenomena) at a variety of scales (Vanderbeck 2007). For example, recent research (e.g., Moos 2014) documents new scales and patterns of generational spatial clustering in Minority World cities, which have significance for how the contemporary evolution of city centers is understood. At a broad scale, it has been suggested that patterns of age differentiation are evident at the regional scale in the United States (see also Rogerson et al. 1997; Winkler and Klaas 2012; Winkler 2013). Age segregation has even been said to extend into cyberspace: this notion, for example, has been invoked in recent research from South Korea that shows that there are sharp differences in the kinds of news and information sources followed by people of different generations, limiting the prospects for types of meaningful intergenerational encounter and exchange in online environments (Hahn et al. 2015). An extrafamilial sense of generation is also prominent in the rapidly growing literature on the production of forms of “intergenerational space” and intergenerational practice. This literature, as suggested previously, often has an explicit normative commitment to experimenting with and exploring sites, contexts,

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and practices that facilitate age integration, such as in van Vliet’s (2011) work on producing the “intergenerational city.” This literature has primarily been produced by academics and practitioners outside of human geography, yet it in some cases draws specifically on geographical ideas (e.g., Kaplan and Haider 2015; Mannion and Gilbert 2015; Richardson 2015; Thang 2015) and has become of increasing interest to geographers, who are examining an increasingly diverse set of contexts and spaces. One major site of interest is in the constructions and transmission of memory, with innovative research taking place in relation to a range of programs that bring younger and older people together to build solidarities by both sharing past experience and building positive memories for the future (e.g., Mitchell and Elwood 2013; Dickens and MacDonald 2015; Leyshon and Tverin 2015).

3.3

Historical Generations

The third key usage of “generation” is used to denote a grouping of people born within a particular time frame who are often imputed particular dispositions, characteristics, or identities based on a common set of historical experiences. For example, one commonly hears in North America and Europe of the significance of the Baby Boomer generation (people born in the years of the post-World War II surge in birth rates) or more recently of so-called Generation X (the generation following the Baby Boomers) and the Millennials (a term most associated with the work of Howe and Strauss (e.g., Howe and Strauss 2009) to refer to those born in the United States circa 1982–2004). While this sense of generation is often invoked loosely in popular discourse as a form of “cultural labeling” (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011: 6), the notion of identifiable historical generations with particular traits has also been used by social scientists, with a paradigm of “social generations” having become influential in youth studies over the past decade (Wyn and Woodman 2006; but see France and Roberts (2015) for a critique of the ascendancy of this approach). Some recent use of historical generations as a concept has been made by Worth (2016) in researching the experiences of Millennial women in Canada in relation to the world of employment. Nairn et al. (2012) also invoke a sense of historical generations in their research on young people they refer to as New Zealand’s “neoliberal generation.” This generational classification is used to refer to those cohorts who were educated during a period of neoliberal educational reforms, with particular attention to how this generation both accepts and resists forms of “neoliberal rationality” (Nairn et al. 2012). The notion of historical generations also features in sociological research which shows how in post-Soviet contexts a form of generational consciousness can exist among those who came of age before Communism’s collapse (Nugin 2010). Recent geographical research has also explored particular generational framings of climate change and environmental issues, such as work in Uganda that demonstrates how different historical generations are differentially attributed with culpability and responsibility for changing rainfall patterns and the degradation of the landscape (McQuaid et al. 2018). However, of the three key social scientific usages of “generation,” this is the one that has been deployed the least within the literature on the geographies of children and young people. The reasons for this are

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difficult to ascertain but potentially relate to questions about the validity of certain theoretical approaches to generational theory (see below) and the reality that generational identities are often not ascribed to cohorts until they reach adulthood. Within sociology, the notion of historical generations has most influentially been developed by Karl Mannheim (1952 [1927]) in his well-known essay “The Problem of Generations.” For Mannheim, “the unity of generations” (p. 290) is constituted by particular social and historical locations occupied by individuals born at a similar time. As he argues, “Generational location is based on the existence of biological rhythms in human existence – the factors of life and death, a limited span of life, and ageing. Individuals who belong to the same generation [. . .] are endowed, to that extent, with a common location in the historical dimension of the social process” (p. 290). The regular birth of new members into a society necessitates the continuous transmission of culture; it also produces possibilities for social transformation given that those born in different periods experience historical events from different vantage points. Thus, for example, although the Great Depression impacted Americans as a whole, the position from which the Depression was experienced differs for those born in 1915 (for whom it was a formative experience of youth) from those born in 1875, as demonstrated in Elder’s (1974) groundbreaking Children of the Great Depression. This is not to suggest that generations can be considered to be internally homogenous; rather, Mannheim argues that generations consist of so-called generational units that can be differentiated based on factors including class and political philosophy, although he has been rightly critiqued for ignoring other facets of social difference such as gender (Edmunds and Turner 2002). Mannheim was particularly concerned with the nature of political relations between generations, arguing that generations could develop a sense of generational awareness and become political actors, although he also noted that this sense of generational awareness did not develop in all circumstances. A sense of generations being agents of historical change is central to a controversial body of work that is sometimes known as Strauss-Howe generational theory. In generations and subsequent writings, Strauss and Howe (1991) develop a theory of American historical change, seeing American history as fundamentally shaped by generational forces that have a cyclical character. Outlining the details of their approach exceeds the remit of the chapter, but it should be noted that their approach has received considerable popular attention while also being subject to academic critique (Hoover 2009) on the grounds of being overgeneralized and ultimately unverifiable. In any case, while geographical research has been interested in exploring potential differences between historical generations in attitudes, values, and experiences (e.g., Adekunle 2015; Valentine 2015; Worth 2016), the stronger notion of generations as drivers of change employed within Strauss-Howe generational theory has yet to receive significant attention or interest from within geographical research on children and young people.

3.4

Intersecting Notions of Generation

While the three senses of generation discussed above can be considered analytically distinct, there are also important intersections between them at the level of the lived

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experiences of individuals (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011; Vanderbeck and Worth 2015). Some commentators argue that one’s generational status is experienced “as an undifferentiated whole, all in one go, as part of who one is [. . ..] [G]eneration [. . .] is generally experienced as a felt degree of similarity or distance with respect to others loosely based on something to do with age” (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011: 6). For example, “when UK Baby Boomers were asked about their generational experience, they responded holistically, drawing intuitively on different aspects of generation as it is used in common understanding and moving freely between and combining demographic categories” (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011: 9; see also Biggs et al. 2007). Of course, the extent to which generational statuses will be “experienced in immediate action as a phenomenological whole” (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011: 9) will vary between people and contexts, but the intersecting nature of different generational statuses is evident in a range of work on intergenerational geographies. For example, Xu’s (2015) work on the changing relationships between teenage girls and their fathers in Shanghai, China, shows how a sense of generational tension can arise simultaneously through differences in power/authority based on generational difference within the family and broader differences in the experiences of the current teenage generation and an older generation of now middle-aged men (e.g., in terms of educational and employment opportunities, or changing gender norms). Similarly, Hopkins’s (2006) investigation of masculinities, identities, and generational relationships among young Muslim men in Scotland exemplifies how there can be an overlap between familial and extrafamilial notions of generational relations. In exploring and critiquing notions of “conflict between young Muslims and their parents’ generation” (Hopkins 2006: 346), he simultaneously invokes familial and extrafamilial notions of generation. Thus, although one can identify both familial and extrafamilial processes that are significant for understanding the lives of these young men, in practice creating a clear analytical distinction between them at the level of individual biographies may be neither precisely achievable nor desirable. Having explored the diverse ways in which ideas of generation and intergenerationality have been used analytically within recent research in geography and cognate disciplines, the remainder of the chapter focuses on a growing body of research (primarily focused on the Minority World) concerned specifically with understanding and improving the quality of relationships between members of different generations. It begins by first examining the development of research and thinking on the themes of age segregation, integration, and differentiation and then gives attention specifically to intentional efforts to produce new forms of intergenerational interaction and encounter.

4

Geographies of Age Segregation, Integration, and Differentiation

As suggested previously, there is a substantial body of research concerning ways in which improved relations can be fostered between members of different generations. This literature often specifically reflects Minority World concerns relating to patterns

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of perceived age segregation and the social consequences of these patterns (Evans 2015). While social scientists continue to vigorously debate how best to measure, conceptualize, and understand racial and ethnic segregation and integration, far less attention has been given to the study of age segregation, to some degree reflecting the extent to which certain kinds of age segregation are viewed as natural and not requiring critical scrutiny (Hagestad and Uhlenberg 2005). Age segregation takes multiple spatial forms. Institutional age segregation is a widely noted phenomena in the Minority World that can include (at a very broad level of generality) the separation of children and young people into schools (as well as segregated recreational spaces and even hospital wards; see Kearns and Barnett 1999), the separation of working age adults into workplaces that often have little or no presence of children or older people, and the separation of older people from the workplace and, in some cases, into institutional forms of housing and care. Other forms of age segregation can occur at multiple scales, from the intimate sphere of the home to everyday activity spaces, neighborhoods, and cities (Vanderbeck 2007). Many of the patterns of age differentiation and segregation that exist in the Minority World today are comparatively recent phenomena. The emergence of contemporary forms of age segregation has been linked historically to processes of economic and political change, including the growth of industrial capitalism that marked a shift away from home-based systems of production, challenges to the practice of child labor and the spread of compulsory schooling, and the creation of social security systems and welfare states. Riley and Riley (2000) contrast two ideal types of social structures: the age-integrated society and the age-differentiated society. In the age-integrated society, the domains of education, work, and leisure are not closely associated with particular stages of a rigidly structured life course and are not formally segregated by age. In contrast, the age-differentiated society is based on the notion of a tripartite life course, where the early stages of the life course are dominated by activities in the educational arena, the middle portions of the life course are dominated by work, and the later stages of life, when individuals have retired from the workforce, are characterized by leisure (understood broadly to include activities outside the educational and work arenas). Commentators such as Riley and Riley (2000) are strongly motivated by a normative view that increased age integration would bring benefits to societies in the Minority World. Even as life courses in the Minority World have seemingly become more individualized in the post-Fordist era (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), many aspects of generational separation and segregation seem to persist. Why, however, do so many commentators on intergenerational relations consider age segregation to be problematic and take the normative view that greater age integration is both socially desirable and necessary? From the vantage point of research on childhood and youth, the key concern of commentators regarding perceived patterns of age segregation is that it inhibits mechanism of cultural transmission and socialization for children. Bronfenbrenner (quoted in Elder 1975: 174), for example, has suggested that “If children have contact only with their own age-mates, there is no possibility for learning culturally established patterns of cooperation and mutual concern.” Of course, however, this must be tempered with

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the recognition that there are cultural patterns that one would rather see interrupted than transmitted and also that young people can also teach things to older generations (Mead 1970; Thang 2001). Coleman (1982) suggests that patterns of age segregation deny young people a more complete understanding of how the world of adults works while generating adults who have less capacity to understand children (see also Hagestad and Uhlenberg 2005). A growing body of work in psychology, social work, education, and other disciplines supports the contention that relationships with non-kin adults have significant influences on outcomes for children and young people (see Vanderbeck 2007), yet comparatively little is known about where, when, and how these relationships form and are maintained. Although there is a pervasive focus in academic writing about children and young people about their assumed need to have spaces for themselves beyond adult scrutiny (see Vanderbeck 2007; Kjørholt 2003), many also want to have deeper and more meaningful engagement with the “adult” world. A number of scholars of child labor have critiqued the often strict segregation of children in the global North from the adult world of work. While the need to eliminate abusive and exploitative forms of child labor is widely acknowledged, many scholars note that children often enjoy and benefit from particular kinds of involvement in economic production and social reproduction, such as the satisfaction and status that comes from performing a job competently or contributing to the finances of the households in which they live (Aitken 2001; Jennings et al. 2006). In relation to older people (particularly the very old), the problem of age segregation is often framed in terms of loneliness and isolation, particularly given the institutionalization of many older people who require high degrees of care into spaces such as nursing homes where contact with the outside world can be limited (Uhlenberg 2000a, b). Older people who live independently in their own homes are still often constrained by age-based stereotypes and practices, which, for example, can make developing friendships and other relationships across the generations challenging. The gerontological literature often suggests that increased contact with younger people can have a positive impact on the mental and physical wellbeing of older people (Thang 2001). At the same time, the segregation of older people can have negative implications for children. For instance, it has been argued that the withdrawal of older people’s watchful presence from many neighborhood streets has inadvertently restricted children’s independent spatial mobility by making neighborhoods less safe for children’s outdoor play (see Engwicht 2005). Research in sociology, psychology, and other fields has begun to explicitly conceptualize how age segregation can be socially damaging, contributing to and reinforcing ageist attitudes. Ageism has been defined as relating to “culturally prescribed sets of norms about people and their behaviour at different stages in the life course” (Pain et al. 2000: 378). Some theorists (e.g., Uhlenberg 2000a, b; Uhlenberg and Jong Gierveld 2004; Hagestad and Uhlenberg 2005) emphasize the need to study age segregation because, it is argued, macroscale patterns of age segregation are closely linked to the formation of ageist attitudes at the microscale. Micro- and macroscales can be analytically linked through mesoscale analyses of age-based social networks. These analyses of age-based social networks in the

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Minority World, although not particularly common, provide compelling evidence that patterns of intergenerational extrafamilial relationships can be highly restricted (Vanderbeck 2007). If members of different generations infrequently interact in meaningful ways, then there is reduced scope to challenge ageist stereotypes that one group might hold of another and less scope for building mutual empathy (Uhlenberg and Jong Gierveld 2004). Put in different terms, age segregation in social networks can be said to present an obstacle to the development of so-called generational intelligence, which has been characterized as “an ability to reflect and act, which draws on an understanding of one’s own and others’ life-course, family and social history, placed within its social and cultural context” (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011: 2). From this perspective, a failure of individuals to develop generational intelligence – in essence, the ability to understand and take into account the perspectives and experiences of people of different ages – can impede the ability to engage in intergenerational dialogue intended to develop solutions to social, political, and economic challenges that may impact differently on members of different generations.

5

Promoting “Intergenerational Space” and “Intergenerational Encounter”

It has been argued that promoting age integration involves two linked sets of processes: breaking down structural barriers and bringing people together of different ages (Riley and Riley 2000: 267). In the view of Riley and Riley (2000), breaking down structural barriers would necessitate adopting “flexible age criteria” in the arenas of work, education, leisure, and other sites where separation of the ages is often the norm. In fact, there is evidence that in certain ways, there have been declines in social structural barriers in Western countries, for example, due to the growth of “lifelong learning,” the changes in the workplace, and the development of age discrimination legislation in some contexts (Sargeant 2006). Although reducing structural barriers is an obvious precondition for age integration, the bringing together of people of different ages is not an automatic outcome of the removal of structural obstacles (Riley and Riley 2000) and may require intentional efforts to promote it through intentional efforts in education, the design of public space, and other means. Bringing people together of different ages, however, is a key goal of the field of intergenerational practice, which has developed considerably over recent decades. Intentional efforts to promote meaningful interaction between members of different generations take multiple forms and operate with multiple rationales. Intergenerational programs have been created to improve levels of educational achievement (through practices of tutoring and mentoring), to support neighborhood regeneration efforts, to foster a sense of community safety, and to promote healthy lifestyles and exercise, among other rationales (Vanderbeck 2007; Kaplan and Haider 2015; Melville and Hatton-Yeo 2015; McQuaid et al. 2017). The forms that these intergenerational interactions take also vary significantly in scope,

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intensity, and duration and include open community forums, participatory action research projects, oral history projects intended to foster empathy and understanding in younger people regarding the older members of their neighborhoods, and programs of mutual assistance and support. A number of debates exist over what forms of intergenerational programming are most effective. A commonly cited concern is that programs based on light, sporadic, or one-off contact between people of different ages can be ineffective and potentially counterproductive, inadvertently strengthening and reinforcing stereotypical notions that generational groups have regarding one another. As Hagestad and Uhlenberg (2005: 357) argue: All too often, efforts aimed at cross-age interaction create ephemeral and quite superficial interactions [. . ..] (T)o have school children sing carols in the old people’s home at Christmas time or inviting an older person for one session at the local school to talk about World War II will not do the job of forging personal knowledge and viable ties.

How then can improved intergenerational interactions and communication be intentionally fostered in contexts where this is deemed necessary? Research on how to develop forms of intergenerational practice can be traced to the 1960s, an era which saw the rise of a number of programs intended to link members of different generations (Hanks and Ponzetti 2004). The extent of both research and practice in the area of intergenerational programming varies widely between contexts, with, for example, the United States having developed a much larger body of research on these issues than Britain (Melville and Hatton-Yeo 2015). As the body of research in this area grows, there is an increasing awareness of the need for cross-cultural dialogue and to put these issues into comparative perspective (Roodin 2004), especially given the dominant focus on the Minority World found in much of the literature (but see Larkin et al. 2004). Within the British context, improving the frequency and quality of intergenerational contact has become a focus of some neighborhood regeneration efforts intended to foster greater social cohesion and sustainability in local communities (Pain 2005). In some local situations, for example, older people’s isolation and hesitancy to navigate public space independently have been linked to fears of young people in local areas (Pain et al. 2000). In neighborhoods that have recently experienced rapid ethnic change, tensions and misunderstandings with a distinct generational dimension can emerge when, for example, older residents identify as part of a different ethnic group than younger, newer residents of the area. Pain (2005) makes a number of recommendations for the development of intergenerational practice in Britain while also noting the obstacles and limitations to these intergenerational approaches to promoting neighborhood regeneration and social cohesion. In particular, she argues that programs are most likely to be successful when they take a “bottom-up” participatory approach where members of different generational groups participate at all levels of decision-making about the nature, content, and methods of programming (Pain 2005: 30).

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One significant form of intergenerational program involves the creation of what are known as intergenerational shared sites (IGSSs). Although there are competing definitions of this term, in the dominant North American model, IGSS “has come to signify a physical environment deliberately constructed or redeveloped to enable two or more groups of different ages to more readily interact in a location designed primarily to provide a service to each group separately” (Melville and Hatton-Yeo 2015: 59). A common example of this would be the co-location of a child day care facility with a care home for older people, often with some form of facilitated interaction between the respective service users, although IGSSs can take multiple forms. As discussed by Melville and Hatton-Yeo (2015: 55–7), proponents of the IGSS model typically note a range of potential benefits including benefits to individual participants (e.g., improved communication skills for children, reduced sense of isolation for older people, a sense of enjoyment for both), financial benefits (e.g., the potential cost-effectiveness of co-location of facilities), and wider social benefits. However, the development of “hard” indicators to rigorously evaluate the success of IGSSs has proven challenging given the relatively small scale and diversity of these sites as well as disagreement about what would constitute good, measurable outcomes (Melville and Hatton-Yeo 2015: 54). One of the most important studies of an IGSS is an anthropologist Leng Leng Thang’s (2001) Generations in Touch: Linking the Old and Young in a Tokyo Neighborhood. Thang develops the notion of “generational reengagement” as a way “to emphasize the dilemma of alienation between generations in contemporary societies – a dilemma that calls for conscious efforts to link the generations” (p. 7). Her research is based on an in-depth ethnographic investigation of one well-known site in Japan named Kotoen, which combines housing and services for older people with a nursery for children under 5 years old. The philosophy of Kotoen is to produce fureai between the generations, which can be translated as “coming in contact” or “touching each other” and “implies spontaneous interaction involving feelings and emotions” (p. 8). In Kotoen, a variety of efforts are made to link children in the nursery with older people who live at Kotoen, with the residents referred to by children as honorary grandparents. For example, children and Kotoen residents often exercise together in the mornings and participate in joint celebrations and festivals. Some of the residents provide direct support to the nursery by helping newly enrolled children settle into the routine of the nursery or assisting children in their preparations for nap time (such as changing into pajamas). As Thang notes, however, interactions between the generations are heavily mediated and orchestrated by the paid staff of Kotoen. Although Thang takes a generally positive view of Kotoen and other intergenerational facilities, she also reflects on the contradictions and limits of conscious attempts to orchestrate spontaneous, meaningful interactions within institutional space. For example, staff at Kotoen tended to prefer that older residents spread their attentions across the range of children in the nursery and discouraged the formation of close one-on-one relationships between particular children and “grandparents,” in some senses preventing truly close extrafamilial intergenerational relationships from developing. Relationships between children and Kotoen residents rarely last once the children have graduated from the nursery, even though many of the children live in the local area. Although

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facilities such as Kotoen are an innovative way to address the needs of both young and old within the context of rapidly aging societies, there are also a number of challenges and limitations to be confronted (Thang 2001). Although the IGSS model is clearly important, recently there has been a growing recognition that research and practice on the facilitation of meaningful encounters between members of different generations need to develop a more expansive vision beyond its typical focus on structured activities in institutional settings (Thang and Kaplan 2013). Indeed, it has been proposed that researchers and practitioners should think in terms of intergenerational shared spaces rather than simply sites, to include the wider realm of public spaces. In designing these public spaces, recent research has stressed the importance of differentiating between multigenerational settings (in which “multigenerational design would accommodate the physical and psychological needs of people of different ages and abilities with inclusion of ‘universal design’ and “inclusive design” specifications”) and intergenerational settings (which “besides creating environments that are accessible for multiple generations, would also be concerned with creating conductive environments where opportunities for meaningful engagement between generations can take place”) (Thang 2015: 19–20). An example of the latter is provided by Thang’s (2015) critical analysis of 2G (two generation) and 3G (three generation) leisure/fitness facilities on a housing estate in Singapore, where children’s playgrounds, older people’s fitness corners, and adult’s fitness corners are co-located. The decision by planners to co-locate these facilities was motivated in part by a desire to generate more spontaneous forms of interaction between the generations than provided by more formalized institutional forms of intergenerational programming. Interestingly, Thang’s qualitative analysis suggests that the forms of extrafamilial intergenerational encounter facilitated by these specific facilities in fact have proved somewhat limited, with more evidence that the spaces have created opportunities for improved familial intergenerational interaction (e.g., by providing a space where grandparents can bring grandchildren and engage in shared activities). Drawing on Pratt’s (1991) notion of “contact zones,” Thang (2015: 18) proposes the concept of the “intergenerational contact zone” as a way of thinking about designing co-located spaces for members of different generations “to meet, clash and grapple with each other.” Many questions remain however about how most effectively to promote and produce these kinds of spaces. The concept of intergenerational contact zone is also deployed in a different context by Bandrup (2008) to describe the Tapati Rapa Nui festival on Rapanui (Easter Island), which provides an important time and space to bring together elders and youth, given that Rapanui youth are often sent to mainland Chile for education for much of the year, something which serves to interrupt patterns of intergenerational transmission and exchange.

6

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the growing interest in notions of generation and intergenerationality within research on the geographies of children and young people. It first sought to situate this recent surge of interest within the context of

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wider debates over the future direction of geographical research on children and young people. Specifically, the rise in the use of notions of intergenerationality has been influenced by calls to adopt a more relational approach to understanding age, to bring into conversation areas of research (e.g., on childhood and old age) that have traditionally been compartmentalized from one another, and to explore more robustly the nature of child/adult interdependencies. Geographers and those working in cognate areas have deployed intergenerationality both as an analytical tool to understand processes of continuity and change and a normative ideal signifying a commitment to research and practices that promote particular kinds of improved interactions between members of different generations in contexts where these are deemed to be problematic. Since the first calls for geographers to adopt a more explicitly intergenerational lens nearly a decade ago, research on intergenerational geographies has developed considerably, focusing on more diverse sets of contexts, deploying diverse theoretical perspectives, and introducing innovative methodological approaches (e.g., Lomax 2015; Richardson 2015). Nevertheless, there continue to be substantial opportunities for further engagement between academic disciplines. Biggs and Lowenstein (2011: 3) assert that “the different disciplines which are engaged with the concept of generation, such as sociology, psychology, medicine, [and] geography, rarely cross-communicate.” Although geographers working in this area have engaged with some disciplines quite extensively (particularly sociology and, to a lesser extent, anthropology), there are other areas, including psychology, where there has been considerably less engagement despite the existence of important bodies of work that speak directly to relevant themes such as the spatialities and temporalities of age segregation (e.g., Rogoff et al. 2010). The expanding corpus of research on intergenerational geographies has much to offer, as well as much to gain from, greater cross-disciplinary engagement with the wider fields of intergenerational research and practice. Acknowledgment Portions of this chapter are adapted from Vanderbeck, R.M. (2007) Intergenerational geographies: age relations, segregation and re-engagements. Geography Compass 1(2): 200–221.

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Theorizing Youth Participation Caitlin Cahill

Contents 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Youth Participation in a Neoliberal Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overview: Youth Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Principles of Participatory Action Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Makes Me Mad! The Fed Up Honeys Challenge the Gentrification of the Lower East Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 We Know Our Rights! Participatory Action Research as Youth Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Conclusion: Critical PAR for an Emancipatory Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This is an exciting juncture at which to bear witness to the growing, multidisciplinary support for youth participation and more inclusive collaborative research practices in geography and the social sciences more broadly. In this overview of youth participation, I consider how critical participatory action research (PAR) approaches might pry open a space for youth agency, making them “subjects [and] architects, of research . . . researchers [not just] the ‘researched’.” At stake in young people’s engagement with critical PAR is the relationship between connecting one’s own personal experiences to a broader set of social, political, and economic forces and at the same time working collectively to transform them. Placing emphasis upon the critical, I signal the commitment to documenting structural inequalities. In what follows I explore the neoliberal context for youth participation, discussing the contradictions young people negotiate in their everyday lives. Next I offer an overview of youth participation, C. Cahill (*) Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_3

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tracing the hallmarks of the field and its critiques. Within this context, I explore principles of youth participation, drawing upon two projects to offer a specificity to the discussion. In conclusion, I consider critical insights into the field and gesture at questions we need to consider as we move forward. Keywords

Youth participation · Critical participatory action research · Neoliberal capitalism · Race · Collaboration

1

Introduction “We rise for the student who works against all odds to stand for an equal education. We rise for the family that fought to live an American dream and despite the realities, continued to contribute to a society that did not accept them. . .. We rise because we are the sons and daughters of those who believed in you and despite the betrayals, despite the torments, this is our home. We rise for those who live in silence, scared to bring their struggle to light. . ..” Still We Rise, excerpt from statement written by youth organizers from the FACE movement and Brown Berets in Salt Lake City, Utah

All across the USA, young people are organizing against state-sanctioned violence targeting Black and Brown people, calling for an end to attacks on undocumented immigrants and dignity for Dreamers and their families, and organizing walkouts demanding the right to safe schools and an end to gun violence. In Salt Lake City, Utah, youth activists organized the event “Still We Rise” at the State Capital on the last day of the legislative session to protest proposed anti-affirmative action and antiimmigrant legislation. As part of this public action, youth organizers rolled a giant banner of students’ rights down the steps of Capital, engaging young people in teaching circles focused on the proposed legislation (see Fig. 1). The banner included rights such as the right to small class sizes, the right to not be judged based on accent or English fluency, and the right to access to higher education for all students regardless of citizenship status. Inspired by Maya Angelou’s (1978) poem “Still I Rise,” youth organizers called attention to the historic and ongoing context of struggles for rights. As one of the youth activists explained, “We are still here. We are not going away. Our community has always had to fight for equal rights, and here we are still. We still rise” (Cahill forthcoming 2019a). Organizers of the “Still We Rise” action were informed not only by their own experiences as students, as undocumented immigrants, and as young people of color, but also by their participatory action research with other young people. At the forefront of social movements and struggles over the kind of world we are living in, young people are working to address urgent issues in their community and suggesting new ways of thinking about our collective future. With the wisdom of the anti-apartheid movement in mind, that “nothing about us, without us, is for us,” this chapter offers an overview of critical youth participation, considering the theory and practice of engaging with young people to address structural injustices through collective knowledge production.

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Fig. 1 “Still We Rise” public action, Salt Lake City, Utah. (© photo by Caitlin Cahill)

This is an exciting juncture at which to bear witness to the growing, multidisciplinary support for youth participation and more inclusive collaborative research practices in geography and the social sciences more broadly (Borda 1979; Cahill 2007a; Cameron and Gibson 2005; Cammarota et al. 2016; Cammarota and Fine 2008; Checkoway 2012; Fine 2016; Kindon et al. 2007; Maguire 2000; mrs. c- kinpaisby-hill 2011; Pain et al. 2011; Reason and Bradbury 2001; Tolman and Brydon-Miller 2001; Torre et al. 2012). In what follows, I consider how critical participatory action research (PAR) approaches might pry open a space for youth agency, making them “subjects [and] architects, of research . . . researchers [not just] the ‘researched’” (Torre and Fine 2006, p. 457). As Annissa, a Fed Up Honeys youth researcher from New York City explains: Knowledge truly is power. Historically, the winner of the war has determined the telling of its own history and that of the loser. . . Participatory action research is one of the most potent weapons against oppression, it offers an opportunity to gain both skills and knowledge, to conduct an investigation that roots out both the questions and the answers that expose injustice. In the process of simply learning how to ask questions, a researcher is able to find themselves at the heart of those questions.

Along these lines, Appadurai states (Appadurai 2006, p. 176), “the capacity to aspire and the right to research are necessarily and intimately connected. Without

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aspiration, there is no pressure to know more.” At stake in young people’s engagement with critical PAR is the relationship between imaginatively connecting one’s own personal experiences to a broader set of social, political, and economic forces and at the same time working collectively to transform them (Freire 1997). Placing emphasis upon the critical, I signal the commitment to “documenting the grossly uneven structural distributions of opportunities, troubling ideological categories projected onto communities, demonstrating how science has been recruited to legitimate dominant policies and practices” (Torre et al. 2012, p. 171, 2017). Challenging what Foucault (1980) identified as the “subjectifying social sciences,” critical PAR has profound implications for rethinking the politics of representation, what Fox and Fine (2013, p. 321) identify as an “epistemological violence” against young people. They argue: “Without romanticizing or essentializing the stance of youth, we believe that there is no other group that has been systematically researched and written about without their consent, wisdom, outrage or their right to re-present” (ibid.). This is especially true for working-class young people of color who are too often represented in scholarship as “at risk,” dangerous, criminal, and/or illegal (Cacho 2012; Cahill 2006; Kelley 1997). With a commitment to producing “counterstories” that “suspend damage” (Tuck 2009), in our work we challenge the hegemonic logic of what is understood as “natural” or “normal.” Working with young people, not on or for, critical PAR is not a method but an epistemological commitment to the belief that those most intimately impacted by an issue should take the lead in shaping research questions, framing interpretations, and designing meaningful products and actions (Torre et al. 2015, p. 540). As Paulo Freire (1982, pp. 30–31) suggests: The silenced are not just incidental to the curiosity of the researcher but are the masters of inquiry into the underlying causes of the events in their world. In this context research becomes a means of moving them beyond silence into a quest to proclaim the world.

In this way, young people’s engagement with critical PAR might be understood as a site of intense open-ended possibilities determined by whomever is involved. In this chapter, first I explore the neoliberal context for youth participation, discussing the contradictions young people negotiate in their everyday lives, while at the same time pointing out how the discourses of youth participation are also constitutive of neoliberalism. Next I offer an overview of youth participation, tracing the hallmarks of the field and its critiques, insisting upon a relational framework (Hopkins and Pain 2007) that erases the hard lines around the category of “youth” (Kelley 2014). Within this context, I explore principles of youth participation, placing emphasis upon a structural analysis. The second half of the chapter focuses on two projects that offer a specificity to the claims of critical youth participation, detailing the competencies and epistemological commitments involved. My intention is to offer texture to the blurred lines between pedagogy, research, and politics and in so doing, map the contours of critical youth participation in geography. In conclusion, I consider critical insights into the field and gesture at questions we need to consider as we move forward.

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Youth Participation in a Neoliberal Context I was walking. I had a hoodie on, and the cop just started looking at me weird. He came up to me, went in my pockets. And, like in my pocket, in my left pocket, he put his hand in there and then he started patting me down, putting the flash light around me, started searching me with the flashlight to see if he could find anything, and didn’t – so they left. The cop said I looked suspicious. I was like thirteen years old and I felt uncomfortable, it was, like, a bad experience. When the officers searched me that time I wish they could’ve talk to me first about how I looked suspicious, instead of just searching me. He could’ve just told me the reason why I look suspicious, and ask me if I had anything on me, things like that. . . (Jesus, age 15, Brooklyn, New York)

The police stopped Jesus on his way home from school. His encounter with the police did not escalate. No one was arrested and no one was hurt. Jesus’s story is not unique. More than a million young people were stopped by the New York Police Department (NYPD) between 2010 and 2013, mostly Black and Latinx young men, like Jesus. Encounters with the police are part of everyday experiences of securitization for young people growing up policed in New York City (Cahill et al. 2017; Stoudt et al. 2011, 2016). As Jesus’s testimonial for the Growing Up Policed critical PAR project (Cahill et al. 2017; Stoudt et al. 2016) suggests (discussed later in the chapter), this experience is fraught and raises critical questions regarding criminalization and the right to have rights that are at the heart of today’s social movements, including Black Lives Matter and the immigration rights movement to name a few, that demand an end to the aggressive policing of communities of color, including undocumented communities. Reflecting the state of racial and economic inequality in the USA, Jesus’s experience offers critical insights into the contemporary context of youth participation. While one of the most privileged places in the world, the US is among the most unequal, marked by extreme racialized socioeconomic disparities in health, housing, education, and employment sectors (Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change 2004; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). The widening gulf between the wealthy and working poor is felt even more deeply by young people, and young people of color in particular, as they are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be jailed, and have fewer rights than adults (Demos and Young Invincibles 2011; Ginwright 2015; Jafarian and Ananthakrishnan 2017; Lipman 2013; Males 2006). At the same time that young people and their families are under increasing pressure in a neoliberal context, anxieties about social and economic changes are projected onto young peoples’ bodies, bodies that have become key sites in political and cultural struggles over neoliberal global restructuring (Cahill 2006) (Fig. 2). This is the contradictory slippery ground upon which we must locate participatory theory and practice, not as an ideal, but as a fraught, urgent engagement of ideology, power, politics, and context. Questions raised in this analysis include how might youth participation shed light on the tricky positionings of young people as they tightrope a teetering economy in pursuit of the “American dream” while at the same time striving to create a sense of belonging in fragmented communities with foreclosed work futures and searching for a positive sense of identity in a minefield

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Fig. 2 “Filming youth testimonials for Growing Up Policed,” Brooklyn, NY. (© photo by Caitlin Cahill)

of racialized discourses. A critical analysis of youth participation suggests the profoundly different struggles of young people whose life circumstances vary widely while at the same time speaking to a shared desire for what we might call solid ground even as “everything melts into air” (Cahill and Katz 2008; Marx and Engels 1848/2002). As Robin Kelley explains (2014, pp. 92–93), while most of the laws and policies passed in the last 20 years directly target young people – from the policing practices just described to access to quality education, the privatization of public goods, and rollbacks in the social wage – young people do not have the right to weigh in on the political economic practices of neoliberalism. Kelley continues, “young people are coming through a system of education that is not designed for freedom. It is designed to take one group and put them away in prison, and take the other group and convince them that neoliberalism is the logic of modern society and that there are no viable logics outside of it” (Kelley 2014, p. 93) (this links to ▶ Chaps. 6, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives,” by Katz and ▶ 14, “Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era,” by Mitchell in this volume). Along these lines, critical scholarship suggests the rhetoric of participation has been appropriated by the neoliberal agenda to emphasize personal responsibility and local autonomy at the same time that the state offloads responsibilities onto young people (Bessant 2004; Cahill and Hart 2007; Fine and Ruglis 2009; Fox and Fine 2013; Harris 2004; Lipman 2013; Wilson 2004). As we discuss in more detail (Cahill and Hart 2007), US educational policies, including “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top,” offer illustrative examples. Students are held accountable for

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meeting high standards assessed through high-stakes tests, while ongoing structural problems in the public education system are left unaddressed. The policies cut both ways: schools are disinvested and students are blamed for the failure. The result is both an increase in student dropouts (better termed “push outs”) and insufficient funding for public education, dovetailing with the resegregation of schools. Here the discourse of “participation” goes hand in hand with “accountability” and serves to focus the problem at the scale of the individual while obscuring the loss of state supports and our collective responsibility for the next generation (Cahill and Hart 2007; Ayala and Galleta 2012; Fabricant and Fine 2015a; Lipman 2004, 2013; Picower and Mayorga 2015; Restler 2017). On the flip side, “participation” is encouraged in the form of “school choice,” in the form of vouchers and charter schools (Aggarwal et al. 2012; Fabricant and Fine 2015b; Lipman 2013). Recognizing that the discourses of youth participation are not coincidental but constitutive of global economic restructuring illuminates not only the increasing regulation of young people but also the creative ways young people understand, manage, rework, and contest the contradictions of neoliberal global capitalism in the intimate spaces of their everyday lives as they negotiate a shifting terrain of difference, inclusion, and aspirations for the future (Aitken 2001, 2018; Cahill and Katz 2008; Fine and Ruglis 2009; Fox and Fine 2013; Hopkins 2013; Kallio and Häkli 2013; Katz 2004, 2011; Skelton 2013). This, the focus on how the “intimate and global intertwine” (Pratt and Rosner 2012) in their everyday lives, is also the focus of participatory praxis, as discussed in the next section. PAR offers an epistemological approach for “widening the methodological imagination” in contentious times, stretching toward justice (Fine 2017).

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Overview: Youth Participation

Young people have always participated in everyday life – the home, school, work, and community – whether this is acknowledged or not (Ackerman et al. 2003; Chawla 2002; Hart 1992, 1997). Taking stock of the informal and formal ways that young people are already and always engaged in our world suggests a need to think critically about young people’s participation, what participation means, and why this matters. Much of the academic discourse and preoccupation with youth participation in civic life may be traced to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) which includes a series of articles on the rights of children to participate. Article 12 states that: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

The UNCRC has had an enormous impact in terms of delineating young people’s involvement in formal decision-making, and in many countries it has informed new policies and progressive practices. While there are many salient critiques of the

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limitations of the UNCRC, its influence upon both discourse and practice cannot be overstated (Aitken 2018; Skelton 2007). Significantly, the USA is the only country in the world not to ratify the UNCRC, and as a result, the question of young people’s “rights” has not been broadly debated. American institutional leaders and advocates for young people rarely refer to their entitlement to participate in decision-making processes that affect them (Bartlett et al. 1999; Cahill and Hart 2006, 2007; Hart 2008). In the US, we note (Cahill and Hart 2007) that the lack of awareness of the CRC has meant that young people have not benefited from the same kinds of experimentation and opportunities to participate that children and young people in many other countries have had, particularly in terms of formal political participation and governmental forms of representation and consultation (Bartlett 2005; Boyden 1997; Chawla et al. 2005; Hart 1992; Ruck and Horn 2008; although there has been some important headway made recently see for ex, cf Zeller-Berkman 2014b). Instead the most exciting examples of youth participatory praxis are framed by the pursuit of social justice through youth activism, organizing, and critical youth engagement broadly defined, including participatory action research (Cahill 2007; Cammarota et al. 2016; Cammarota and Fine 2008; Donovan 2014; Fox 2015; Fox et al. 2010; Ginwright 2015; Ginwright et al. 2006; Kelley 2014; Stoudt et al. 2012, 2016; Torre and Fine 2006; Tuck and Yang 2013; Youth Speak Out Coalition and Zimmerman 2006). One critical concern is that the term participation is often used indiscriminately to refer to a wide variety of practices. Roger Hart’s (1992) influential “Ladder of Participation” offers a useful way to differentiate between the very different roles and degrees of decision-making young people take up in various “participatory” projects (Driskell 2002; Hart 2008; London 2006) (see ▶ Chap.10, “Foundations and Impacts of Youthful Political Geographies,” by Skelton in this volume). Critical scholars suggest we need to be wary of broad applications of the term “participation” because it often masks tokenism and the illusion of consultation that may, in fact, advance dominant interests (Arnstein 1969; Cooke and Kothari 2001; Hart 2008; Mohan 2001; Skelton 2007). This concern is exacerbated when participation is presented as a set of techniques rather than as a political and epistemological commitment. Used in this way, “participatory methods” might reproduce rather than challenge unequal power relations (Cahill 2007a; Francis 2001; Kesby 2005; Kothari 2001). This critique is especially important as the rhetoric of participation dovetails nicely with the neoliberal agenda’s emphasis upon local control. As discussed earlier, the devolution of authority serves to offload social responsibilities onto the bodies of young people and their families who “participate” and take on the work of the state (DeFilippis 2001; Harris 2004; Herbert 2005; Purcell 2006; Wilson 2004). Thus we must articulate more clearly what we mean by youth participation in collaborative research and specify the degrees of participation in our practice (see Cahill 2007c for more discussion). In addition, we note (Cahill and Hart 2007) there is a need to take stock of the different ideological foundations underpinning the continuum of youth participation: from service and volunteer programs on the one end to activism on the other. At one end of the continuum are programs that try to foster particular sets of concerns among young people such as safe sex or care for the environment. These programs fit

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Fig. 3 Participatory action research team at the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective. (© photo by Caitlin Cahill)

comfortably within more traditional definitions of “good citizenship” and focus on bringing young people’s behavior in line with norms that lead to “responsible adulthood.” At the other end, young people come together to organize around and take action upon urgent concerns (see Cahill and Hart 2007 for more discussion) (Fig. 3). As we consider youth participation, critical scholars suggest the need to be mindful of the relational, intergenerational, and community contexts within which young people lead their lives (Hopkins et al. 2011; Hopkins and Pain 2007; Katz 2004; Kelley 2014; Punch et al. 2016; Taft and Gordon 2016). A relational framework suggests a life course perspective that understands young people in a social and geographical context, rather than in isolation (Hopkins and Pain 2007; Katz and Monk 2014). Indeed the Western construction of childhood, as something separate from adulthood, is, as Aitken (2001) reminds us, crucial to setting up the hierarchical relationships that modern capitalism depends upon. This has significant implications, as Tracey Skelton (2007, p. 174) argues: The focus on children as individuals is potentially important as part of debates about their rights but in poorer communities separating children from inter-generational networks in the communities can have disastrous consequences. Such networks are often part of complex reciprocal relations that are invaluable at times of crisis or insecurity.

Along similar lines, Geraldine Pratt (2012) argues for the urgency of “placing” young people with their families and community, as a challenge to neoliberal policies and discourses that segment and fracture family, young people, and communities. The significance of this issue is amplified in light of the current practice of separating children from their parents at the US-Mexican border, many whom are refugees of

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harm and civil unrest (fomented by US imperialism). At the same time, critical scholars remind us that the prison industrial complex in the USA should also be understood along these lines as a practice of family separation (Gilmore 2007; Loyd et al. 2013). Scholars also point to the importance of everyday intergenerational relationships between young people and elders in their communities to young people’s sociopolitical development (Cahill and Hart 2007; Flanagan and Christens 2011; Fox et al. 2010; Hsieh and Skelton 2018; Sanchez 2015; Sherrod et al. 2010; Watts and Flanagan 2007; Youniss et al. 2002). The civil rights movement in the USA is a case in point, as the strong social networks and partnerships between young and older community members were at the heart of struggle to challenge the racialized inequities and violence. In social movements, Kelley suggests (2014, p. 85) “the lines around ‘youth’ – where it ends and where it begins – are unclear,” and not meaningful when we are working in struggle together across generations. Dispensing of the category of youth as a “form of containment under the guises of preparing young people for democracy,” Kelley (ibid., p. 89) points out that young people were at the center of the civil rights movement working, theorizing, and interrogating what citizenship is, rather than being prepared for it. Likewise in South Africa, school children’s refusal to continue their education in the language of Afrikaans (which was made compulsory alongside English in 1974) triggered the Soweto uprising in 1976. It was organized, led, and sustained by the South African Students’ Organisation because it was their education that was being denied to them and their futures that were likely to be most negatively affected.

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Principles of Participatory Action Research

Rooted in grassroots and international, liberationist, feminist, antiracist, indigenous, activist, and social justice movements, participatory practices have been used widely around the world in intergenerational contexts. PAR draws from critical race and Latinx critical theory, decolonizing, and feminist theories (Ayala 2009; Bell 2001; Bernal 2002; Freire 1982; Gilmore 2002; Hale 2008; Kretzmann and McKnight 1996; Smith 1999; Torre 2009; Tuck and Guishard 2013). Tracing interdisciplinary lineages from around the world, we note (Torre et al. 2015) PAR is informed by wide-ranging thought from liberation theology to critical psychology and pedagogy, sociology, and geography (Bunge and Bordessa 1975; Bunge et al. 2011; Lewin 1946/1997; Torre et al. 2012; Zeller-Berkman 2014a). For scholars working with young people, Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s (1970) influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a key reference point. Drawing from Marxist theory, at the heart of his theorization, Freire conceptualizes conscientization (conscientizao in Portuguese), as a process of developing critical consciousness through a reflexive process of collective inquiry, reflection, and action. Inspired by these activist and theoretical traditions, some of the most prevalent examples of participatory practice include work by child rights advocates in development contexts and campaigns seeded by youth participation in nonprofits and community organizations addressing problems of educational inequities, media portrayals of youth, violence in the

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community, police brutality, and discrimination based on sex/race/class (Ginwright et al. 2006; Hart 1997; Stoudt et al. 2016). Building from this legacy, the last 15 years has witnessed a growing and expansive interest in engaging in participatory approaches in research from scholars across the social sciences who are working alongside young people to study issues that matter to them (Cahill 2007a & b; Cahill et al. 2016; Checkoway and RichardsSchuster 2004; Checkoway 2005; Fine et al. 2004; Fine 2009; Guishard 2009; Percy-Smith and Thomas 2009; Quijada Cerecer et al. 2011; Torre and Fine 2006; Tuck et al. 2008). This work builds upon important precedents in geography and the related social sciences, where scholars have worked closely with young people to investigate their everyday lives (Bunge and Bordessa 1975; Chawla 2002; Driskell 2002; Hart 1978, 1992; Lynch 1977; Williams and Kornblum 1994). Significantly, including young people as partners in research reveals an understanding of young people as not only assets but as “agents of change” (Ginwright and James 2002; Tuck and Yang 2013), reflecting contemporary conceptualizations of youth and the new childhood studies (Aitken 2001, 2018; Benwell and Hopkins 2016; Fox et al. 2010; Holloway and Valentine 2000; Hopkins 2013; Skelton 2010; Skelton and Valentine 1998). The burgeoning interest and excitement in the field is marked by significant edited collections that center what is called youth PAR (or YPAR) within the frame of critical youth studies (Cammarota et al. 2016; Cammarota and Fine 2008), honoring the particular line of analysis that people bring to our understanding of social issues and, at the same time, placing emphasis upon inter- or multigenerational collective work, led by the concerns of young people of color working together within community contexts to address urgent concerns. PAR offers a promising framework for researchers committed to social justice and change. Engaging young people in research may serve to challenge social exclusion, democratize the research process, and build the capacity of young people to analyze and transform their own lives and communities. Involving the “researched” in some, or all, stages of the research process PAR starts with: “the understanding that people —especially those who have experienced historic oppression . . . hold deep knowledge about their lives and experiences, and should help shape the questions, [and] frame the interpretations [of research]” (Torre and Fine 2006; cf Cahill 2007; Cahill and Hart 2007; Kindon et al. 2007; Pain 2004). Placing emphasis upon process, PAR recognizes the power of knowledge produced in collaboration and action. Creating a social space where young people can “make meaningful contributions to their own well-being and not serve as objects of investigation” (Breitbart 2003, p. 162), PAR shifts accountability to how research might be “of use” to communities (Fine and Barreras 2004) beyond the “ivory tower” and “beyond the journal article” (Cahill and Torre 2007). Expanding notions of expertise, PAR repositions those who have been traditionally “researched” and excluded from the academy (historically oppressed groups including people of color, young people, people with disabilities, LBGTQ, undocumented, incarcerated, poor, working class) as research partners. As we suggest elsewhere, “In this way PAR reflects a critical challenge to positivist epistemology and academic research traditions that assume knowledge to be produced by

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credentialed experts who are qualified to measure and analyze an objective reality” (Torre et al. 2015, p. 540). Drawing from situated knowledge, PAR takes seriously what it means to do social science (mrs. c kinpaisby-hill 2011). Recognizing the connectedness of knowing, doing, and being, participatory praxis destabilizes binaries of theory and practice offering “an alternative ontology of theorizing” that moves between social constructions and embodied and emotional experiences (Ibid; Torre et al. 2015, p. 541). As mrs. c kinpaisby-hill explains (2011, p. 223), PAR “is a relational bricolage of one’s own and other’s ideas. . ., an embedded and constantly ongoing praxis of coming to knowing through iterative cycles, moving between experiences of everyday social life and individual and collective analysis and reflection.” What this looks like with young people is a process that starts with the investigation of personal experiences and moves toward social theorizing and a structural analysis, and then a plan for action, as will be described in more detail in the case studies that follow. Centering an analysis of the relationship between power and knowledge production, critical PAR is committed to research as a transformative social justice project. As Maria Elena Torre et al. (2012, p. 171) explain, critical PAR documents “the grossly uneven structural distributions of opportunities, troubling ideological categories projected onto communities, demonstrating how science has been recruited to legitimate dominant policies and practices.” While placing emphasis upon the policies, institutions, and social arrangements that inform the dialectics of dispossession, at the same time, critical PAR focuses on how young people and their communities work collectively to document, analyze, and use scholarship to challenge the pernicious impact of neoliberal structures of racism, transphobia, xenophobia, and state and extrajudicial violence in their everyday lives (Torre et al. 2015; Torre et al. 2017; Fine and Ruglis 2009). Critical PAR draws inspiration from the long legacy of scholars who engage in “contesting research” (Fine 2017). Perhaps most well known is Black sociologist W.E.B DuBois (1898), who famously reframed the “Negro problem” as the “problem of the color line,” in his analysis of how race was produced in discriminatory patterns of housing, education, and labor force participation. A contemporary example along these lines, drawing from work with community-based PAR partnerships in Salt Lake City, Utah, we theorize what we call “the school-to-sweatshop pipeline” (Cahill et al. 2016) unpacking how the production of “illegality” (De Genova 2002) criminalizes, racializes, and excludes Latinx immigrant students in order to reproduce an economically polarized labor force. While all research ostensibly engages questions of purpose, PAR features these questions explicitly from the start, revisiting throughout the process how purpose, publics, and products reflect the commitment to produce research that addresses the urgent issues that inspired the project to begin with. Indeed, it is the purpose of a PAR project that informs the design of the research (Torre et al. 2015). In our article “Beyond the journal article,” Maria Elena Torre and I (Cahill and Torre 2007) call attention to how questions of purpose, publics, and products intertwine: What is the research trying to accomplish? Who is the research speaking to? What is it asking them to “do”? We ask (Ibid), how might the research effectively provoke actions that feed organizing campaigns, theoretically reframe the issues, nudge those in power, and/or motivate audiences to shift how they think and act in the world? Committed to

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making a meaningful contribution to social change beyond an “armchair revolution” (Freire 1997), PAR connects systematic inquiry with action in order to engage research for justice. In what follows, I share two research projects to explore these principles in more depth, offering texture to our understanding of the potential of PAR as a process of both personal and social transformation. Challenging the false dichotomy between applied research and theoretical engagement, I hope to demonstrate how engaging with young people in participatory action research might in fact create a more vibrant research agenda, new theoretical possibilities, and push scholarship in new directions. In my first case study, I draw upon a participatory action research project with the Fed Up Honeys, young women from New York’s Lower East Side who studied the relationship between stereotypes of young women of color and gentrification. I consider how through an investigation of the material conditions of their everyday lives the Fed Up Honeys came to see their individual experiences as shared, as social, and in turn as political. Second, I discuss Growing Up Policed, an intergenerational PAR project that explores the impact of current policing practices on New York City (NYC) youth, with NYC youth, and for NYC youth. My discussion considers young people’s engagement in PAR as a form of activism, connecting with policy-making and social movements to reframe the public narrative about broken windows policing (described below).

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Makes Me Mad! The Fed Up Honeys Challenge the Gentrification of the Lower East Side

(with the Fed Up Honeys) What happens when underrepresented perspectives (e.g., those of women and people of color) enter the academy and participate in the production of “official” knowledges? Not only might they transform themselves; they may also transform the academy (Cahill 2007a, 308; cf Harney and Moten 2013; Kelley 2018; Bernal and Villalpando 2002; Cherrie and Gloria 1981). Elsewhere I (Cahill 2007a) I discuss how this is the ground upon which new knowledge takes root, pushing scholarship in new directions, asking new questions, challenging old assumptions, and potentially moving beyond the privileged perspectives of the ivory tower. Participatory action research offers a “bottom-up” approach which is especially relevant to the critical study of youth geographies: recognizing young people’s agency and competencies, it directly privileges their voices, develops their capacities, and is potentially open enough for young people to challenge accepted points of view (Ibid, p. 308). In this case, as I shall discuss, the Makes Me Mad PAR project focused on exploring the relationship between stereotypes of young women of color and the gentrification and disinvestment of their community. Contesting the academic literature’s preoccupation with young women of color’s bodies, sexuality, and pregnancy, the Fed Up Honeys’ research highlights how the existing literature is founded on assumptions that pathologize young women as “problems” that need to be fixed. As Mike Kesby (2007) argues, self-analysis leading to a reworking of representation is potentially

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one of the most critical contributions of a PAR process. To this, I would add that it is through the collective participatory process of social theorizing that young people might not only rework but reclaim how they are represented on their own terms, as we shall discuss. This case reveals the potentially significant theoretical contributions of engaging in critical PAR with young people. The Make Me Mad project developed as part of a participatory action research (PAR) project focused upon young women’s experiences growing up in the city, specifically in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. While the contentious history of this neighborhood is well documented (Abu-Lughod 1994; Mele 2000; Smith 1996), there had been little research looking at what it means to grow up in a gentrifying/still disinvested neighborhood (cf Cahill 2000; Lipman 2002; Muniz 1998), and none from young women’s perspective. In order that the research be defined collectively with the young women involved, at the outset the study took a deliberately open theoretical and methodological approach, conceptualized broadly as “the everyday lives of young women in the city.” At the start of the project, the youth researchers documented their everyday geographies using multiple methods, including mental maps, behavior mapping, a guided tour of their neighborhood, and daily focused discussions on particular areas of concern (Fig. 4). The project followed a Freirian model starting with the issues identified by the young women and their critical investigation of their social contexts (Freire

Fig. 4 Fed Up Honeys, New York. (© photo by Caitlin Cahill)

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1997). While many subjects were of concern to the young women, the Fed Up Honeys decided to focus their research on how the community’s lack of resources (disinvestment) feeds into the stereotyping of young women (and their communities) and how this in turn connects with gentrification (Rios-Moore et al. 2004). The Makes Me Mad project was, in fact, inspired in part by an academic research report produced by a community-based organization serving young people in their community. The research report included a hypothetical profile of a young Latina woman living on the Lower East Side named “Maria.” Maria is caught shoplifting. She has a bleak future as a high school dropout and an unemployed single mother with HIV, and she has no job prospects unless, of course, this organization intervenes and “saves” her from her fate of certain self-destruction and delivers a productive member of society. Striking to us was the unabashed conflation of stereotypes in the character of one young woman, the embodiment of the “culture of poverty,” of an “at-risk” young woman (Cahill 2006). It was clear that young women who lived in the community were not an intended audience for the report. The report was written by academics/youth service providers – “by us for ‘us’ about ‘them’ not for ‘them’” (Alcoff 1995; Minh-ha 1989; Spivak 2007). Young working-class women of color were not imagined as potential interlocutors. What was especially upsetting for the Fed Up Honeys to come to terms with was that this report was produced by a youth organization in their community that was supposed to be serving them, and in fact several of the young women attended this organization after school. While the young women were familiar with navigating stereotypes in their everyday lives, the discovery of misrepresentations in academic research was surprising and distressing (Cahill 2007a, b). The Makes Me Mad project developed as a “response” project, as way to speak back to ontological violence, to stereotypes of young women of color and their community as a whole. As part of our research, we traced how racialized stereotypes serve to “place” young working-class women of color in the “inner city,” a location constructed in the American imaginary in the shape of a teenage mother, gang violence, homeless people, and other vestiges of urban decline and segregation, while at the same time erasing the production of structural inequalities, as I discuss in more detail elsewhere (Cahill 2006). We considered how discourses of the culture of poverty and the underclass (Coates 2015; Moynihan 1965) serve to project “the ghetto” onto the bodies of young women of color. In this sense, young women’s bodies become sites of accumulation, loaded with historical representations of “tangles of pathology” and “the welfare queen” (Cahill 2006, p. 347). In our analysis, we traced the connection of stereotypes to the disinvestment in their community, in order to understand the relationship between representations and structural conditions, connecting the dots between failing schools (e.g., the zoned high school in the neighborhood had a 4-year graduation rate of less than 30%) and “at-risk” stereotypes of being a high school dropout or teen mom (Cahill 2006). As Janderie, one of the researchers, said: “the whole spirit of what we don’t have affects our inner being.” Throughout the research the young women swapped “war stories” of disinvestment revealing a sense of pride at having “survived it” coupled with feelings of injustice and shame, as Ruby explains:

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For those of who don’t know the history, we just see the results of the disinvestment. We just see the results of the degradation and all we feel is that crater and that we’re just sinking deeper and deeper into it.

Pointing to young working-class women of color as “the problem,” the discursive construction of risk is “grounded” not only in disinvestment but now in the reinvested Lower East Side. As I discuss in the article “At Risk? The Fed Up Honeys Re-Present the Gentrification of the Lower East SIde” (2006), on the one hand, “atrisk” stereotypes justify the shrinking of the public, constructing young women of color as the “anticitizen,” blaming young women for the poverty of their communities. On the other hand, deficit stereotypes are critical in securing the consent of the public who witness the transformation of the community and accept the “social costs” of displacement as not only inevitable (Atkinson 2003) but even as a sign of progress (Freeman and Braconi 2004). Defined as a process of “upscaling” the neighborhood resulting in increased property values, gentrification’s “success” depends upon the removal (displacement) of young working-class women of color and their families from the Lower East Side (Cahill 2006, see also Angotti et al. 2016; Cahill et al. 2017; Moss 2017; Schulman 2013). In our scholarship (Cahill 2006) we argue that just as gentrification is made possible by a disinvestment in real estate, we trace how deficit representations of young working-class women of color as a “burden to society” might also generate “value” (in terms of real estate profit). We draw upon Melissa Wright’s (2004, p. 371) work; she argues: “as with any process of devaluation, there is value still to be gained from her, if her image as value’s antithesis can be put into motion towards the production of more value. . .following this logic, we find progress in the places where she once worked, in the spaces she once occupied, in the city she once inhabited.” Similarly, in our research on the Lower East Side, we traced how the “upscaling” of the neighborhood involves scrubbing “clean the working class history and geography. . . its class and race contours rubbed smooth” (Smith 1996, pp. 26–27), erasing the traces of the community established by the young women’s families. We argue (Cahill 2006), that aligned with the disinvestment of the “ghetto,” the social and spatial exclusion of the young women, and of their families, becomes “necessary” for the improvement of the neighborhood. In their place new establishments catering to young, trendy 20-something-year-olds with disposable incomes reflect the shifting resident base of the neighborhood. Their presence marks prosperity, just as the absence of young working-class women of color does too. In this way, the disappearance of young women of color and their families is understood as a sign of progress, what Neil Smith (2001) called “a social cleansing,” and that Sarah Schulman (2013) identified as a process of “replacement” (cf Cahill 2006; Cahill 2007b for more discussion). We conclude (Cahill 2006) with the critical insight the Fed Up Honeys identified in their research is that power lies in controlling how you are defined, as Annissa explains: What ultimately has to change is the way we view each other. Period. And I want to have an influence on that. . . . Because ultimately my great grandmamma, and my great grandchild, and my great grandma and I will suffer for my great grandchild. But ultimately I don’t want my great grandchild to have to have any differences in her life because she is black. Period.

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There’s no fucking negotiation! I don’t care whether she has a mansion or whatever, whatever else. She’s still going to be black! And if our society decides its still okay to fuck her because she’s black then nothing’s changed. What if she has all the money in the world? (Annissa, Fed Up Honey)

The young women focused their project on contesting stereotypes and changing “the way we view each other” because they understand that how they and their families are classified is deeply implicated in operations of power. “The stereotypes function as part of a discourse by which young working-class women of color are managed and produced – politically, culturally, ideologically, economically, and geographically – in the neoliberal context of the gentrifying/still disinvested Lower East Side” (Cahill 2006, p. 353). With this in mind, the Fed Up Honeys focused attention upon their own bodies as a principal site of discursive work, as exemplified in the stereotype sticker project (see Fig. 5). The stickers feature a female body, whose hand-on-hip stance expresses defiance, on top of which the stereotypes are printed in bold letters, “Uneducated,” “Lazy and on welfare,” etc., along with their website address: www.fed-up-honeys.org. Engaging a strategy Stuart Hall (1997, p. 274) identifies as “through the eye of representation,” the Fed Up Honeys situate the stereotypes within the material conditions of structural racism, plastering the stickers all over their neighborhood and other parts of the city, the young women engage in a very public spatial practice. Most advertisements seen on public transportation and around the city are discriminatory and sexist, so what we created is something mocking those ads but instead of selling you sex, we’re making you think. (www.fed-up-honeys.org, 2005)

In our scholarship (Cahill 2007d) we discuss how the researchers adopted and played with the stereotypes in their stickers, as Jackson suggests (2004, p. 263) “as Fig. 5 Stereotype sticker. (© Fed Up Honeys, 2002)

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a way to rob the discourse of its power. . . undermining and destabilizing racist stereotypes.” Confronting the public with an “in your face” strategy, the intention of the stereotype stickers was to reproduce their/our own consciousness raising. The Fed Up Honeys posted the stickers around the Lower East Side, calling attention to how representations are worked out on the ground and specifically in their neighborhood. Challenging assigned scripts of what it means to be young, female, “of color,” and working class, the Fed Up Honeys assumed positions as engaged agents (Cahill 2006; Cahill 2007d). They argue: “It is a priority to have young womyn who can feel connected and have a desire to contribute and be involved in their community” (Rios-Moore et al. 2004). With this in mind, as part of our action, we developed multiple ways of presenting research findings to engage various publics locally and further afield. Research products include a sticker campaign, a report (Rios-Moore et al. 2004), and website (http://www.fed-uphoneys.org). In addition, the Fed Up Honeys research team conducted workshops in local schools and community-based organizations (in addition to presenting research at academic conferences and co-authoring publications). Taking control of one’s self-definition is also about staking out a position in the community. As one researcher explains: People, most importantly young women, do not feel invested in their community or connected to it if they don’t have the positive aspects of their community, their lives and their personal strengths reinforced to them.

Collectively, “the Fed Up Honeys developed an interpretative framework for affirming their right to self-represent (the right to their bodies, identities, and subjectivities) and their right to the city as mutually constitutive” (Cahill 2006, p. 356, see also Cahill 2007b for more discussion). We argue (Cahill 2006) that the “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996/1968) implies not only an entitlement to housing but also a right to assert a public presence within urban space. As Don Mitchell argues (2003, p. 21), it “demands the redevelopment of the city in a manner responsive to the needs, desires, and pleasures of its inhabitants, especially its oppressed inhabitants.” To this end, the Makes Me Mad report concludes with a list of “Community building needs from a young womyn’s perspective” which emphasizes their unique standpoints as working-class young women of color and proposes a vision for a community that is responsive to their desires. Contesting the discourses of risk which construct young working-class women of color as a “burden to society,” the Fed Up Honeys questioned the valuation of the economic over their personal well-being while challenging the inevitability of gentrification and the rights of property. In so doing, the young women announced their sense of belonging and their right to not be socially and spatially excluded from their neighborhood and the city. To this end, we argue (Cahill 2006, p. 358) that the Makes Me Mad project reframed the public conversation about gentrification as a way of jumpstarting a dialogue about “the right to the city” that involves all of us.

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We Know Our Rights! Participatory Action Research as Youth Activism

(with the Growing Up Policed research team) Growing Up Policed is an intergenerational collaboration of researchers and organizers from Make the Road New York (MTRNY) and the Public Science Project (PSP). Our collective includes community organizers, young people, university professors, and students; together we were involved in studying young people’s everyday encounters with the police in NYC (Cahill et al. 2017; Stoudt et al. 2011; Stoudt et al. 2016, forthcoming). Informed by what Appadurai (2006) identifies as “the right to research,” our work is guided by the principle that young people of color can and should ask the questions that frame the research. Appadurai (2006) insists that within this political economic context of globalization, which for many is a state of ongoing crisis, research is a right to “systematically increase the stock of knowledge which they consider most vital to their survival as human beings and to their claims as citizens” (p. 168). This is the focus of our work in the face of statesanctioned violence. In this case study, I discuss the relationships between our right to research and our activism, reflecting on how our struggles against the carceral state inform our scholarship, and in turn how our research informs our organizing (Cahill et al. 2017; Gilmore 2007; Loyd et al. 2013). The Growing Up Policed participatory research project began in 2012, concerned about the escalating use of aggressive policing. Our research started the year after the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) aggressive policy of “Stop & Frisk” hit its peak of almost 700,000 people. With the desire for justice, originally we called ourselves the Researchers for Fair Policing, as we wanted to think through what a “fair” or “just” policing might look like in the neighborhoods of NYC, particularly in communities of color. In our scholarship (Cahill et al. 2017; Stoudt et al. 2016) we discuss how at the same time, our original name reflects the contradictions we engaged at the beginning of our project, as the quantitative evidence of nearly 700,000 stops was anything but just – it was patently unfair. With these tensions in mind, our goal was to document the human cost of the broken windows policing policies and specifically the impact upon young people. Broken windows policing was originally adopted by the New York Police Department (NYPD) as a strategy to “reclaim the public spaces of New York” in the early 1990s (Bratton 1994). We discuss (Stoudt et al. 2016) how broken windows policing relies upon surveillance practices such as “stop and frisk” and aggressively cracking down on low-level offenses such as jumping the turnstile, opening containers of alcohol, and biking on the sidewalk with the intent of maintaining order and “civility” as well as lowering serious crime (Wilson and Kelling 1982). The subject of much scholarly debate, critical criminology scholars argue that the broken windows theory of policing produces a racialized lens on “seeing disorder” (Camp and Heatherton 2016; Gilmore and Gilmore 2016; Sampson and Raudenbush 2004; Smith 2001; Vitale 2017). To this end, notably after we started our research, a Federal court decision determined that the practice of “stop and frisk” was unconstitutional and racially biased (Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, 2013). Our research confirms this, considering how the policy is

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experienced by young people of color in particular, as more than half of all people stopped by the police are under the age of 25 (Cahill et al. 2017). In our scholarship (Cahill et al. 2017; Stoudt et al. 2016) we discuss how the Growing Up Policed project developed in the context of the New York City police reform movement (see changethenypd.org) and a few years before national movements like Black Lives Matter captivated national attention and reframed the conversation on state-sanctioned violence (www.blacklivesmatter.com). Hence our research may be understood as part of a burgeoning movement. The young people who are part of our team, based at Make the Road New York, are first and foremost organizers. This informed our commitment to be accountable to, and in dialogue with, social justice movements and struggles. Many of the people involved in this project – young people and adults – were, and continue to be, on the front lines of protests and policy reform at local, state, and national levels. Our individual and collective engagements with activism informed how we understood the purpose and potential publics of our participatory action research (see Cahill et al. 2017; Stoudt et al. 2016 for more discussion). Working with those who are most impacted by policing, we collaborated with young people whose voices and perspectives have been conspicuously absent from not only the research and theorization about policing and criminology but also from the policy-making table (cf Stoudt et al. 2011, 2016). We began our inquiry with the stories of young people’s encounters with the police, to inform and shape research questions, methods, how we collect data, engage in analysis, interpret our findings, and translate our research into action. Our research was conceived as a project of “contestation” to “re-member the exclusions” in line with our activist commitments (Fine and Torre 2004). Over several years, our project developed to encompass both quantitative and qualitative methodologies addressing the “thickness” of our inquiry of young people’s experiences with the police. Our questions, concerns, and intentions have transformed in relation to the changing political context, the ongoing police violence, and hypergentrification of our communities (cf Cahill et al. 2017). Committed to shifting what we define as “problems” off the backs of individuals and onto structures, systems, and policies (Torre et al. 2012), we paid attention to how we framed the unit of analysis. In practice this involved designing multiple methods in line with our epistemological commitment to document young people’s experiences with the police in the historical present (see Stoudt et al. 2016 for more discussion of our participatory process, which we touch upon here). At the beginning, as the purpose of our research was to contribute youth perspectives to the NYC police reform movement, we focused on quantitative data (Ibid). To start, we reanalyzed publically available NYPD data, as we understand that the CompStat numbers-driven zero tolerance approach to policing is inextricably connected with not only documenting but producing the policing crisis (Vitale 2017). What we learned was that over half of all police stops were of young people between the ages of 14 and 25 and 83% of all people stopped were Black and/or Latinx. Devastating but not surprising, the data confirmed youth organizers’ experiences. Our analysis revealed at the same time how ineffective the policy is in terms

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of retrieving weapons, its ostensible purpose. Nearly all of the recorded stops of young people failed to uncover guns (0.18%). Based on this data, co-PI Brett Stoudt produced an animated map of the “Geography of Stop & Frisk in NYC” that reveals broken windows as a spatial strategy of control targeting poor and working-class communities of color and young people in particular. Mapping the data, young people noticed how the same neighborhoods that are aggressively policed are communities of color and are also gentrifying, offering us a new lens of analysis (Cahill et al. 2017). As Darian X, one of the youth researchers described when sharing an encounter with the police in his neighborhood: And the police, they were monitoring me. They were looking at us like we were bad people, like we were bad elements in our community. And they made us feel uncomfortable. That was, like, how police push people out of the neighborhood. . ..

At the center of our PAR project was a participatory survey. While most research done with young people is overwhelming qualitative (Holt and Evans 2017), PAR is critically not a method but an epistemological commitment to working with, not on or for young people (Kindon et al. 2007; Pain and Kindon 2007; Torre et al. 2012). As we discuss elsewhere in more detail (Stoudt et al. 2016) the original intention of our project was to inform policing policy, with this in mind we focused on numbers at the outset. The survey was created by and for young people, translated into Spanish, and distributed in schools and community centers across the city. Youth organizers did “Know Your Rights” trainings with young people after they participated in the survey; in this way the data collection process itself was an activist intervention. We collected over 1000 response surveys from young people of color across the city. Next, we developed an archive of video testimonials documenting young people’s encounters with the police. We report in detail on our survey findings elsewhere and how it relates to specific citywide policies (cf Stoudt et al. forthcoming, 2016). The survey offers an unparalleled data source of young people’s encounters with the police from a youth perspective. What we learned from the stories that young people shared is that the police were omnipresent in their everyday lives. A few notable findings include that 75% of the young people of color who took our survey reported that they regularly felt and thought about police surveillance, while 41% reported using coping strategies to negotiate the police surveillance. And a shocking 89% of the young people surveyed had contact with the police between 2010 and 2013 (see Stoudt et al. 2016, for more discussion). When we started the project, we came together as a team with the shared commitment to produce research addressing the policing crisis in NYC and the urgent concerns of young people of color. However, over the course of the last several years, there have been many social, political, and economic shifts that have had a dramatic impact upon how we understand the purpose of our research and its publics. Perhaps most significantly, we did not anticipate the powerful social movements in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson and, closer to home, the police killing of Eric Garner (and thousands of others) (cf https://mappingpolice violence.org/). The dramatic shift in public consciousness informed how we

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understood our research and our potential contributions to reframing the public narrative about policing from the perspective of young people of color (Cahill et al. 2017; Stoudt et al. 2016, p. 340). As we discuss elsewhere in more detail (Stoudt et al. 2016, p. 341), we positioned our research to contest the underlying logic and assumptions of broken windows policing offering a “counterstory” of young people’s experiences with police. One of our significant findings included that in contrast to the focus upon “order maintenance,” our documentation of broken windows policing demonstrates how it produces “disorder” by severing community relationships and creating a hostile environment in the public and private spaces of young people’s everyday lives. As one youth researcher, Markeys, explains in a video testimonial, “It makes me feel like I shouldn’t even come outside anymore if I’m just gonna get harassed by a policeman that’s supposed to be protecting me.” As one of our goals was to shift the public conversation, we developed multiple products for diverse publics, always foregrounding young people of color as our prioritized audience, including our website (researchersforfairpolicing.org), video testimonials (that we tweeted and put on Instagram), a pop-up exhibition (see Fig. 6), and spoken word performances by and for young people. Fig. 6 “More than a Quota” pop-up exhibition. (photo by Brett Stoudt)

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Another goal of the project was to engage young people in meaningful ways in the important policy decisions that directly affects their lives as we discuss in more detail elsewhere (Stoudt et al. 2016; Cahill et al. 2017). Stoudt et al. 2016, p. 342 explains this significance: the rigor of the Growing Up Policed project’s systematically collected data, combined with youth-oriented findings, has proven highly valuable in our team’s work to engage in the political process at the city and national level. For example, Darian X has effectively presented our statistical findings at both the New York City Council and several times at Obama’s Twenty-First-Century Task Force on policing (PAR was in the White House!). Drawing upon his experience as a young man of color who has been stopped relentlessly by the police, Darian also established his authority and expertise as a researcher, combining the weight of survey statistics “Our survey discovered that 66% of young people believe that the police discriminate,” with the intimacy of direct quotes from interviews and his own personal experience. In our chapter on youth activism and PAR (Stoudt et al. 2016) we share the example of a City Council hearing where Darian challenges policy-makers to rethink police reform within the frame of community development and investment: I feel like graduation rates [are] a great way to track outcomes. Are more of our young people graduating? Are less of our young people in prison? . . . Are the suspension rates going down? These are trackable ways of seeing if improvement is really happening in our community. Do more people have access to jobs then they did when we started this program? . . . Right now, we can see that people are underemployed, undereducated, overworked, under-accredited with humanity and dignity as a person. So can we track human dignity? No. We cannot, but we can definitely track a community’s progression and growth. Are there more institutions that support this community? Are there more banks that give loans to developers that build low-income houses in this community?

Flipping the script, Darian shifted the gaze back to state accountability, raising provocative questions as to how we might marshall evidence to document the impact of structural injustices upon community members’ well-being and access to opportunities. In so doing, Darian asks us to reimagine the possibilities of research as “public science. . . to interrogate the gap between dominant ideologies and human lives” (Torre et al. 2012, p. 171). This is an example of how PAR might open up a space to provide youth perspectives on decisions that directly impact their lives. Darian’s experience offers insight into another critical takeaway from the Growing Up Policed project: that the process of engaging in PAR is itself personally transformative, inspiring a sense of agency and efficacy for young people to make change in their own lives and the world (as we discuss at length in Stoudt et al. 2016). While often the benefits of PAR are identified in terms of its potential as a vehicle for social change and action, PAR’s role in personal change is less understood. While many of the young people involved in the Growing Up Policed project were already involved in organizing, the process of engaging in PAR informed their activism with a critical depth of analysis. Through the process of investigating their own everyday lives, the young people involved understood their experiences as political, engaging a structural analysis informed by their participatory research (Cahill 2007b; Stoudt et al. 2016).

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Conclusion: Critical PAR for an Emancipatory Future One of the interesting things is that this image has always been interpreted, and even called, ‘Caution, we have power.’ In reality, the conversation within the group never headed in that direction. It was more of a ‘we are peaceful and we care about each other, our communities, our families and we have a responsibility to each other. ’Estamos junt@[x]s pase lo que pase (we are together whatever happens). Which now that I come to think about it, could be interpreted as ‘Caution, we have power.’ (Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola, Youth Researcher (2008–2011)/Co-Director (2012–2015), Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective) (Cahill et al. forthcoming 2019b) (Fig. 7)

We are living in desperately unequal times characterized by what Jodi Melamed (2015, p. 78) describes “as a system of expropriating violence on collective life itself” within the framework of racial capitalism, what Ruthie Gilmore (2002) articulates as a “technology of antirelationality.” Inspired by the opposite impulse, critical PAR centers a process of connecting with each other, committed to struggling for another world that is possible. If this sounds optimistic, it is, in keeping with the sentiments of James Baldwin (1963) who argued that “To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” Within this context, critical PAR might be understood as a not only practical but life-sustaining practice or struggle toward our collective future of survival (as informed by Appadurai’s (2006) insistence on our “right to research,” described earlier). Informed by an “ethic of care” in its most profound sense, critical PAR reflects a deep respect for relationships, humanity, and collective well-being (Cahill et al.

Fig. 7 Caution @2009 Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective

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2007; Tuck and Guishard 2013). Social psychologist Erika Apfelbaum (2001) suggests that it is through sharing with others the pain of humiliation, isolation, and alienation that comes with racism, one comes to terms with one’s pain, and names it, though of course there is no pretense at resolution. What is crucial is the act of naming. Through praxis, what Freire identifies as conscientization, the process of engaging in critical reflection and action, he contends that one “becomes more fully human.” Freire continues “liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one” (Freire 1997, p. 31). Apfelbaum argues that what is significant is a willingness to become “part of the transmission” (Apfelbaum 2001). Within the context of critical PAR, becoming part of the transmission can be understood along the lines of “action,” acting upon the world in whatever form this takes (Cahill 2007b). Fox and Fine (2013, p. 321) argue that youth PAR is “grounded in the belief that young people have a collective right to research the punishing conditions of the neoliberal public sphere upon which they (and we) are profoundly dependent.” Growing up within the context of state violence, segregation, and dispossession, what this means in practice for young people is co-creating a social and shared context for the witnessing and reliving of each other’s private experiences of violence and discrimination and, crucially, taking action to transform oppressive conditions. For young people of color living at the forefront of structural inequalities, Shawn Ginwright (2015) argues that this is a process of “radical healing.” By reflecting and collectively taking action upon community problems, young people build capacity for self-determination. This is not, Ginwright argues, an individual act but must be crucially understood within a long history of struggle within communities of color. Along these lines, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres (2002, p. 25) describe the significance of Septima Clark’s “Citizenship Schools” for the civil rights movement. Set up under shade trees and in beauty shops across the South, they provided important collective spaces where Blacks learned to read while educating each other about their rights, inspiring the political will and capacity critical to the movement, as they explain (ibid.): “Certain promising political dynamics may be invisible to most of us at the moment because the categories we have for naming them make them invisible. Step outside the categories and suddenly there are new things to see.” From another perspective, Gibson Graham suggests that perhaps PAR is not so much about liberation, but instead its transformative potential is in “creating new discourses that subject in different ways, thus enabling subjects to assume power in new forms” (Gibson-Graham 2002, p. 36). But perhaps, as Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola describes in the quote above describing “Caution, we have power,” that is indeed liberating (Cahill et al. forthcoming 2019b). Acknowledgments I owe a debt of immense gratitude to Tracey Skelton and Stuart C. Aitken for their patience, support, and thoughtful feedback. Special thanks to Tracey for shepherding this work through to completion and her generosity of spirit above and beyond. I am thankful for the privilege to work with so many incredible people over the years who have informed my thinking and writing. Participatory praxis centers the belief that all knowledge is collectively produced, whether this is acknowledged or not. This chapter is no exception. Portions of this chapter also appeared in the following publications, some that were co-authored with others, including: “At risk”? The Fed Up

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Honeys Re-present the Gentrification of the Lower East Side; published in Women Studies Quarterly (Special Issue Edited by Geraldine Pratt & Victoria Rosner), 2006; “Re-thinking the Boundaries of Civic Participation by Children and Youth in North America” co-authored with Roger Hart in Children Youth and Environments, in 2007; “Young Americans: An Introduction,” in Environment & Planning A, in 2008, co-authored with Cindi Katz; “Participatory Action Research as Youth Activism,” co-authored in 2016 with Brett Stoudt et al.; “Doing Research with Young People: Participatory Research and the Rituals of Collective Work” published in 2007 in Children’s Geographies, “The Right to the Sidewalk” co-authored with B. Stoudt, A. Matles, K. Belmonte, S. Djokovic, J. Lopez, A. Pimentel, M. E. Torre, and D. X. published in 2017, and “Still We Rise: Critical Participatory Action Research for Justice” co-authored with D. Quijada Cerecer, L. Alvarez Gutiérrez, Y. Gonzalez Coronado, J. Hernández Zamudio, J. Martinez, and A. R. Reyna Rivarola. Finally, thanks also to Krithika Radhakrishnan and Mr. Vibin for their careful editing and patience!

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Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives Cindi Katz

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Social Reproduction and Accumulation Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Childhood as Spectacle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Children as Waste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Disposability, Creativity, and the Mimetic Faculty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion: Toward a Countertopography of Waste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Neoliberal capitalism is in the throes of crisis – crises actually – associated with overaccumulation and several decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other. These crises have profound consequences for the present and future that can be seen in the shifting discourses and material social practices concerning children and childhood. This chapter reframes David Harvey’s analysis of accumulation crisis around questions of social reproduction to examine its relationship to contemporary childhood and selected configurations of the child. It pays particular attention to the configuration of the child as waste, not only as the constitutive outside to those of the child as accumulation strategy, commodity, and ornament but also as a means of managing the current

Portions of this chapter appeared in ‘Accumulation, Excess, Childhood: Toward a Countertopography of Risk and Waste’ (Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 57(1) (2011): 47–60, by Cindi Katz.) C. Katz (*) Earth and Environmental Sciences Program, The City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_15

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political economic crisis discursively and materially. The chapter points to some key strategies of “waste management” around children and childhood, including such material social forms and practices as policing and the juvenile justice system, the military and militarization of children’s lives, and panics around youth and childhood focused variously on education, drugs, sex, and violence, teasing out some of their sociospatial implications. Connecting global north and south, the chapter traces a countertopography of childhood risk and waste from which current crises of accumulation might be reimagined and redressed. Keywords

Child as waste · Accumulation crisis · Social reproduction · Childhood risk · Play · Countertopography

1

Introduction

Insecurity riddles contemporary social life, often roosting in and around children and childhood. A welter of management strategies have been devised in a variety of quarters to mediate and manage these insecurities whether political economic, cultural, or political-ecological. This chapter grows out of my ongoing project, “Childhood as Spectacle,” and my enduring concern with social reproduction and what – as a theoretical formulation – it does for and to Marxist and other critical political economic analyses. After decades of Marxist-feminist interventions around these issues, symptomatic silences around social reproduction remain all too common in analyses of capitalism. Working through what is at stake in these issues and their occlusion, I offer what I hope is a useful and vibrant theoretical framework for examining geographies of children, youth, and families and demonstrating what is politically at stake and possible in doing so. Building this framework calls into play three overlapping issues: neoliberal capitalism in crisis and David Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession, my evolving ideas around childhood as spectacle as a cultural formation associated with contemporary political economic crisis and its figuration of the child as waste, and imagining how this figuration might be turned around to find liberatory potential in and from the site of children’s play and time.

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Social Reproduction and Accumulation Crisis

Global capitalism has been in serious crisis since late 2008. The experiential permutations of this crisis were shaped in the course of more than three decades of neoliberal policies and imperatives. Among them are the offloading of responsibility for social reproduction from the state and capital to individuals, households, and “civil society;” disinvestments in the social wage more generally; privatization of public and common goods, spaces, and services; the commodification of formerly free or shared goods and services; and a generalized marketization and financialization of everyday life and its

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customary material social practices. This much is well known, as perhaps is that these concerted policies and practices were accompanied by others that fostered and called forth an entrepreneurial and self-sufficient self. There were and continue to be fierce struggles over these changes and the variegated attempts on the part of those in power, whose interests they served, to naturalize them. This political economic situation meshes with David Harvey’s notion of accumulation crisis (2003). Harvey argues that capital’s periodic crises are crises of overaccumulation. In other words, there is a chronic tendency in capitalism to produce surpluses of capital in various forms – money, commodities, and productive capacity – along with surpluses of labor, but for a variety of reasons no apparent means to bring them together profitably. The key for capitalists is to find profitable ways to absorb and set in motion capital surpluses or face the sorts of devaluations associated with the crises they face. These crises are varied and ongoing – capitalism’s survival is neither seamless nor guaranteed. In recent years, we have witnessed the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, austerity crises that affect various European nations such as Greece and the UK in particular ways, and long-standing crises in the global south associated with the punitive measures associated with structural adjustment and debt. These crises and their proposed resolutions are interconnected globally and across scale. Harvey suggests three means to resolve such crises: spatial, which involves such strategies as opening new markets, developing new resources, or developing and deploying new pools of labor often through the practices associated with accumulation by dispossession; temporal, which might include long-term investments in infrastructure, public works, or the sorts of social investments, among them research, education, and support of the arts that take capital out of circulation for a long time; and spatiotemporal strategies, which combine the other two. While Harvey is clear about how dispossession occurs through familiar strategies like privatizing common resources, the “new enclosures,” or displacing people from resources, he is less clear on how class is interwoven with racialized, sexist, imperial projects to foster, enable, and naturalize dispossession while at the same time diminishing the prospects for any sort of social investment. The costs of labor to capital are routinely cheapened through disinvestments in the social wage and reliance on privatized strategies of social reproduction, which are constantly made invisible through their willed naturalization. Investments in children and children’s lives are thus a “temporal fix” and yet almost never the weapon of choice in defusing crises of overaccumulation. Making such questions central to discussions of accumulation crises alters the political possibilities such crises call forth. What if surpluses were absorbed by investments in public education and health care or renovated public housing and new playgrounds, or well-stocked libraries and vibrant community programs rather than subprime mortgages and other predatory gimmicks of finance capital? The scale of dispossession is witnessed not just in uneven geographical developments like colonialism, gentrification, suburbanization, or “urban renewal” but also at the intimate scales of everyday life. Foreclosure takes place – quite literally – at the very heart of people’s existence. Disinvestment in social reproduction is a key means of accumulation by dispossession. Global

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expansion is riddled with and enabled by intimate dispossessions that cross national borders and extract value from individuals and households (cf., Pratt and Rosner 2006; Feldman et al. 2011; Meehan and Strauss 2015). Theories that fail to attend to this realm of contradiction only capture part of the picture and neglect an enormous reservoir of political possibilities. These concerns drive my interest in children as waste and are at the heart of the cultural politics and countertopographies I will trace in my conclusion. Focusing on childhood is crucial to understanding the present conjuncture as crisis, a crisis more insidious and deep than one simply of overaccumulation or such things as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It is in the everyday practices around children and childhood and in the new commonsense around childhood that social differentiation – the panicky interface between waste and value – is advanced, managed, sedimented, and naturalized. Attending to these everyday practices enables us to understand the ways the contemporary crisis is experienced and intensified, often even amplified by the very strategies used to deal with it.

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Childhood as Spectacle

The crises in neoliberal capitalism outlined above – along with other social, cultural, and environmental crises – have understandably produced all manner of insecurities about social reproduction and the future. The concentration of wealth and thus gaps between rich and poor people have grown dramatically in the past decade since the financial crisis of 2008, and these inequalities exacerbate the proliferating insecurities associated with contemporary social life in the USA. Many of these insecurities play out around children and families’ everyday lives and are felt, albeit differently, at all points along the spectrum of economic inequality. If the everyday practices of social reproduction are a critical arena for reimagining and remaking social life, for making a world in which all lives matter, then childhood as spectacle is a key way to understand the present moment as one of enduring crisis. Childhood as spectacle marks an arena of accumulation of capital to the point of collapse (Debord 1977). Thinking of childhood as spectacle is a means to see the commodification of social life and the flattening of potential political responses to contemporary crisis into anxiety and panic alleviated by consumption, bunkering, surveillance, and various modes of distraction, all the while generating intensified insecurity. Childhood as spectacle can be seen in the interconnected figures of the child as accumulation strategy, commodity, ornament, and waste (Katz 2008, 2018). Following Debord, the writing collective Retort (2005) conceptualizes spectacle as a colonization of everyday life, provocatively suggesting that it is globalization turned inward. Along these lines we can think of childhood as a site of inward colonization connected directly to accumulation under neoliberal capitalism. As spectacle, childhood is simultaneously entwined in the production of what Retort calls “weak citizenry,” not only of children but among parents who succumb to “idiot fashions and panics” trying to make and live in what might thought of as a simulacra of community (Retort 2005, p. 21). These concerns have been addressed in greater

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depth elsewhere (e.g., Katz 2008, 2012, 2018); for present purposes, I note that childhood as spectacle calls forth four figurations of the child as accumulation strategy, commodity, ornament, and waste. These four figurations are analytically and experientially inseparable. While they inhabit particular bodies – classed, racialized, and gendered – quite distinctly, the lived resonance of these figurations varies across time, both in a biographical and historical sense, and space, in terms of both geographical location and specific site. They are experienced and embodied in overlapping ways that can be mutually reinforcing or contradictory in everyday life as much as over the life course (cf., Gill-Peterson 2015). These figurations haunt one another affectively, creating grounds for potential political engagement rather than the management of the insecurities they more typically call forth. Examining the affective politics and organizing concerns of these figurations, I have looked at children as accumulation strategies and as ornaments, focusing particularly on the modes of hypervigilant and precious parenting associated with them (e.g., Katz 2005, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2018). This chapter addresses the constituent outside of these figurations, the child as waste, which rests in part on a myth of their disposability because in a variety of ways detailed below, they are essential to capital accumulation and the disciplinary practices associated with race, gender, sexuality, and class (cf., Wright 2006; Gidwani and Reddy 2011; Tadiar 2013). Children as waste represent dispossession on the hoof as it were. Excessed, marginalized, and excluded by various regimes of capital accumulation and the structures and strategies that make them possible, these young people have a value analogous to an industrial reserve army. At the same time, they are a social body that must be contained and managed, and waste management around people as around things is big business. The child as waste is simultaneously a specter that haunts the figure of the child as accumulation strategy, and its management though relations and practices of social reproduction enables, maintains, and propels particular modes of capital accumulation while, at the same time, propelling an intensification of childrearing practices that cross class, race, and gender in a scramble to secure children’s futures in deeply insecure times and places. I will touch on three moments and means of managing children as waste, the “school to prison pipeline,” the militarization of childhood, and the super exploitation of child labor (here focused on the ship recycling industry). In these three realms, children are social actors and subjects of capital accumulation facing quite differentiated modes of power, but as I will note in the conclusion, there is a striking sameness to the discursive formations around them.

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Children as Waste

The “school to prison pipeline” is shorthand for the material and discursive continuities between schools and prisons in the lives of poor children in the USA – particularly young men of color – who commonly attend poor and under-resourced schools, which limit the possibilities that their educational needs will be met and increase the chances that disciplinary infractions will be dealt with more harshly than

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is the case in more privileged environments. The combination of undereducating, stepped-up policing and surveillance, and often-unforgiving punishment in certain school environments works to streamline the way to prison rather than other futures for young people in poor neighborhoods (e.g., Nolan and Anyon 2004; Krueger 2009; Nolan 2011; Meiners 2016; Fasching-Varner et al. 2017; ▶ Chap. 5, “Theorizing Youth Participation”). Michelle Fine and Jessica Ruglis (2009) convincingly analyze neoliberal education as a form of accumulation by dispossession. They demonstrate how students in poorer school districts – but others as well – are dispossessed from quality education and even a diploma as the funds for public education are siphoned into standardized testing, which includes the private businesses who produce, evaluate, and help prepare students for the barrage of tests they undergo through the course of their schooling, the days spent in testing, and things like security and policing measures in schools, even primary schools. Dispossession also takes place as responsibility for education devolves from the state to local authorities to the individual household and child. Under the Trump administration, the propensity for devolution has been stepped up with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s support for government funded vouchers to individuals to pay for private education and tax deductions for corporations that support private schools. Most of DeVos’s initiatives have fallen flat in Congress though the charter school movement continues a form of privatization in many school districts (cf., the hair-raisingly prescient, Wells 2017). The rhetoric of “personal responsibility” around education is problematic in all sorts of ways. Poor children’s disposability is all too frequently conveyed by the state of their schools, the quality and array of available equipment, and the qualifications and experience of their teachers (e.g., Woodson 1933, cited in Fine and Ruglis 2009; Krueger-Henney 2014). Fine and Ruglis astutely refer to these all too common conditions as “soft dispossessions,” marking among them high rates of teacher turnover, dependence on uncredentialed teachers, and long-term substitute teachers who are not necessarily qualified to teach the subjects they teach. These practices are correlated directly with the percentage of students who qualify for free lunch (a US government marker of poverty) (Fine and Ruglis 2009), and yet still the blame for students’ lack of academic success is all too often placed squarely on their shoulders. Meanwhile, the scaffolding provided to more privileged children and young people is often naturalized and thus rendered invisible (e.g., Gillies 2005; Demerath 2009; Katz 2018). Schools in poor neighborhoods may lack toilet paper or doors on restroom stalls, but they have metal detectors or sophisticated webcam surveillance systems. Some of them even have inserted RFID (radio frequency identification) chips in students’ school identification cards, which allow them to be tracked using GPS. Such schools may have disengaged or overwhelmed teachers but omnipresent security guards and even police (cf., Monahan and Torres 2010; Saltman and Gabbard 2011; Nguyen 2017). Such practices have become routine in many schools especially those in poor areas and criminalize youth, particularly youth of color, in ways that call to mind the ways “idle” members of the working class were disciplined during the early years of capital accumulation (cf., Linebaugh 1992; Thompson 1993; Federici 2004).

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After-school, arts, and sports programs – all of which are means of absorbing surplus capital – have been cut or eliminated entirely in schools across the USA, while vigorous expulsion and detention policies are on the rise. Children even increasingly face expulsion from preschools (Gilliam 2005; James 2008), which reveals a ratcheting up of demands for disciplined self-fashioning in educational environments of all kinds. Public universities such as my own, The City University of New York, are part of this process too. Where tuition had been free for all until New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s (associated not coincidentally with the rise of neoliberal policies and practices as well as growing numbers of nonwhite students), there are now tuition and fees, which increase routinely making higher education all the more inaccessible to poor people (Fabricant and Brier 2016; Brier 2017). All of these practices around education and its disinvestments and dispossessions can be linked to increases in high school dropout rates and increased time to complete graduation requirements, decreasing young people’s chances of going to college, but increasing the likelihood of their detention and imprisonment, particularly in a bleak labor market. These sites become containers for managing young people dispossessed from future education and employment by these policies, and they are policies. The statistics are horrifying. According to the New York City Mayor’s Office of Statistics, the 2017 costs to keep one youth in detention was almost $615,000 a year. To educate one student in a New York City public high school was $21,362 (Mayor’s Management Report 2018, pp. 201, 224). In other words detaining a young person costs the government almost 29 times more than educating him or her! There is not “no money,” though there is a lot of dispossession and waste, both of which are costly in multiple ways. With a daily average of 119 young people in detention for an average of 24 days during 2017, more than $73 million was spent in New York City on youth detention. These policies and practices make clear to certain young people that they are disposable and that their futures – except as contained – are of little concern to the neoliberal social formations in which they come of age. Another figure of waste is more explicitly violent and can be seen in the militarization of youthful lives, particularly in the lives and life spaces of child soldiers but also in everyday environments like schools (e.g., Saltman and Gabbard 2011; Cowen and Siciliano 2011; Nguyen 2017). In this realm the flattened construction of the child as innocent is not simply turned on its head as children are mourned and demonized as predatory and vicious, but children’s innocence is itself exploited by destructive practices that increase the blur between civilian and military life as much as by those strategies that prey upon children to recruit and retain them in military operations. Focusing on vulnerability, Peter Singer (2006) tracks the erosion of the boundary between civilian and soldier over the past century. Where 10% of the casualties of World War I were civilians, about 92% of those killed in the Balkan and African conflicts of the late twentieth century were civilian. He indicates that children – often quite young – figure centrally in those losses and not as “collateral damage” but as soldiers themselves. People younger than 18, and frequently as young as 6, are active combatants in about 75% of all conflicts these days (Singer 2006). Young people are commonly misled about the armed conflicts they

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are inveigled to join, but they are also abducted to serve in armies and militias or find their way in economic desperation as other means of employment are foreclosed. As a result, hundreds of thousands of children have fought or are currently fighting worldwide. Their disposability is clear, but so is the attraction of military service when all other paths to viable future employment are elusive. “Gang” membership often appeals to young people for similar reasons of belonging, purpose, camaraderie, and income all too often undercut with violence that can lead to incarceration, casualties, and death. During my research in Sudan in the mid-1990s, I witnessed the contours of this hideous relationship in formation as rural boys were displaced from meaningful survivable futures in the local agricultural economy. The state drew young men and teens into the military by requiring enlistment in order to proceed on many of life’s paths, among them the receipt of a secondary school diploma, an exit visa to work abroad, or a university degree. The fundamentalist Islamic leaders with whom the state was intertwined picked up where the government left off, framing what was then a civil war as a jihad, which held out the promise of paradise to all who were martyred in service. Meanwhile in Darfur in western Sudan, the governmentsponsored terrorizing thugs known as the Janjaweed were recruiting teens and unemployed young people largely from nomadic and transhumance communities with few options or resources for sustaining their livelihoods in the area thanks to environmental degradation, war, and government resettlement policies. Their destructive operations continue in 2018. Similar stories are repeated around the world, north and south. Many refract the global lure of ISIS and similar groups in these terms. Young people are dispossessed from viable futures by their exclusion from education through various means including the school to prison pipeline discussed above, lack of land, lack of credit, lack of legal status, persistent unemployment, war, famine, routine violence, environmental disasters, and other of the uneven effects of globalization and the policies that propel accumulation by dispossession. Under the presidency of Donald Trump, for instance, undocumented young people who arrived in the USA as children and had been covered by the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program under President Obama have become increasingly vulnerable to criminalization and deportation as the policy’s revocation and reinstitution work their way through court. Without the protection of DACA, these young people can be excluded from higher education opportunities because they are ineligible for in-state tuition and denied legal forms of documentation such as driver’s licenses, which then limit their access to a variety of economic and social opportunities (cf., Wells 2017). These wretched circumstances – which cross national boundaries – leave many young people open to recruitment by statesponsored military service but also non-state militias, terrorist groups, liberation and rebel armies, and street gangs. While military service often provides recruits with valuable training and opportunities for future employment, it remains the case that many military operations, formal and informal, waste children’s lives while they manage them as waste. It is important to note here that when children survive the often extended and revolving wars in which they are taken up, they are often wasted

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psychologically and emotionally, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at an age when there was little, if any, “pre-traumatic” time to build on. The final figure of waste is the child involved in extreme and debilitating labor. There is much discussion in the literature and in labor and human rights activism around children recruited into various forms of indentured labor, including sweatshops, gang labor, sex work, domestic labor, and hazardous labor of various kinds. One of the most wasting forms of child labor, which has received some attention recently in the field of international law and labor regulations, is ship recycling. As the name suggests, ship recycling involves the dismantling of ships such as oil tankers and freighters and the recycling of their materials as scrap and mechanical parts for use in other industries. While in the past ships were dismantled mechanically in dry docks in the global north, they are now commonly beached in Southeast Asia where they rest in shallow water and are dismantled piece by piece into recyclable commodities – materials, machines, and spare parts – and scrap. In a poor economy the number of ships put out of commission for scrap rises as does the demand for recycled products, which are less costly than new. Much of the arduous and hazardous work of dismantling ships and tankers has fallen increasingly to children in Asia, most centrally in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but also China, Vietnam, and Turkey. I consider this work here for three key reasons: it is extremely dangerous; it is itself about waste; and it is tied directly to the ebbs, flows, and uneven developments of global capitalism (Sibilia 2018). Shipbreaking is extraordinarily debilitating, hazardous, and toxic work scorned by all but the poorest of the poor who have no choice but to engage in it. Many shipbreakers are under 18 years old with an untold number essentially indentured because of household debt. The shipbreaking industry is built upon a viscerally embodied form of accumulation by dispossession, and many of the bodies involved are children’s. Characteristic of this industry, young people are recruited to shipbreaking with an advance paid to their parents, so that the youthful workers are essentially captive, toiling without wages under terrible conditions over which they have little control (FIDH 2008). The work itself involves dismantling heavy machinery, which can and does fall on workers – crushed and lost limbs are a routine occurrence – and working in blazing hot and humid environments filled with airborne toxic materials including heavy metals, asbestos, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), rust, and fumes from acetylene cutting torches (FIDH 2008). Young people who endure these brutal work conditions are especially vulnerable to noxious environmental conditions and potentially disabling injuries. In Bangladesh, where about 60% of all large ocean vessels are currently dismantled, estimates vary, but between 12% and 25% of the shipbreaking workforce of 30,000 is under 18 years old, with another 41% between 18 and 22 (YPSA 2005; FIDH 2008). The value of the waste of so many young bodies accrues to both transnational corporations and underdeveloped debtor states in reduced labor costs and savings in materials, while its long-term physical and psychic costs are borne individually in illness, injury, and premature death. The work of shipbreaking is itself about waste being recycled and repurposed. The industry basically cannibalizes whole ships and tankers and recycles most of

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their materials, parts, and machinery. In some lights, ship recycling can be imagined as a “green” industry. According to Greenpeace (2005), for instance, about 80%, of the steel needed in Bangladesh is provided from shipbreaking. However, the hazardous labor conditions and environmental residues of the industry would make any claim to “green” designation laughable if the very thought were not so tragic. It is indeed cannibalizing, but not just of materials. Finally, the demand for recycled products in the poorest countries is crucial given their often dire financial circumstances and the uneven terms of trade and debt servicing associated with global capitalism. While scrap metal and recycled machinery such as generators cost substantially less than new, the hidden cost of these savings is taken in children’s and other workers’ lives and well-being. There is no metric in which these costs and savings are comparable, but here again the alchemy between waste and value turns on occluding the intimate dispossessions of global practices of accumulation.

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Disposability, Creativity, and the Mimetic Faculty

Waste management – of all different kinds – is a big business. It is a key site of social investment through the prison system, military, and other operations of organized violence, through debilitating and highly exploitative labor practices, and through more routine management strategies such as the everyday corrosive violence of neglect, disease, debt peonage, and poverty. These material social forms and practices are means of channeling and containing excessed populations whose labor may be of little use to capitalists in the present but might be profitably tapped at another time or place. These bodies must not only be managed and contained, but their visible containment serves to discipline those who are not waste (see Katz 2008, 2012). In other words, the debilitating effects of state or street violence, policing and detention, or chronic unemployment and school leaving are examples of the sorts of waste indicated here, but their palpable resonance in everyday life creates a realm of insecurity that can haunt and manage others coming of age. Waste management is also a way of not seeing (and naturalizing) the production of waste and its thick bloody integument with the production of value. Jesse Goldstein (2009) argues compellingly that human waste management stages a “violence of erasure.” Wole Soyinka famously referred to his generation and their creative potential as “wasted” in the destructive political exigencies of postindependence Nigeria (Wilkinson 1992). In a lecture I was privileged to attend at Rutgers University, Soyinka (1999) spoke with passionate rage about the magnitude of the loss to the individual, the collective, the nation, and the world when young people’s creativity is derailed and wasted. This thought is haunting around these generational questions of lost opportunities and possibilities in Africa and beyond but also currently in the USA and elsewhere around the losses spurred by drug addiction, state violence, or the derailments associated with “stop and frisk” and zero tolerance policing, which criminalizes young people, particularly young men of color.

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These thoughts on waste and the violence of erasure spur me to think about recuperation – and its political possibilities – in and from the site of waste, what we might think of as a mobilization of culture under the sign of erasure. The political question at stake, then, is how to recuperate and lay claim to all of the lost potential – flesh and mind – from the searing waste delineated here (cf., Goldstein 2009; Hawkins and Mueck 2003). I attend to these concerns via the mimetic faculty, drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin and two of his contemporary interlocutors, Susan Buck-Morss and Michael Taussig. In a parallel to shipbreaking, which is wasting but has the recuperation of waste (to capital) as its object, the mimetic faculty is creative and has the potential to recuperate creativity wasted. Fittingly the mimetic faculty crops up in play, which some consider a “waste of time.” The mimetic faculty is at the heart of much of children’s play. In my ethnographic research on children’s work and play in rural Sudan, for example, I documented the many ways that children played while they worked, engaged in playful work and “workful” play, and played at things that at other times they worked at. For example, they played vivid “geo-dramatic” games of “fields,” “store,” and “house,” wherein they created miniature landscapes which they animated by enacting the tasks and social relations associated with agriculture, commerce, and domestic life. In these activities, the children transformed local debris – domestic waste, agricultural detritus, scraps of fabric, shards of china, and piles of goat dung into amazing imaginary worlds of farming and economic and social exchange in which they had a place, even a future (Figs. 1, 2, and 3) They internalized, worked out, and expressed the social and economic relations they saw around them, but with an almost magical tweak – a gesture toward utopia – no one went broke, everyone had at least a few assets, and the exchanges were relatively equal, often riotous, and always exuberant. The mimetic faculty was everywhere (Katz 2004).

Fig. 1 Playing “store” using ‘china money’ (shards of broken china) to buy and sell

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Fig. 2 Playing “house,” women visiting for tea

The mimetic faculty, Walter Benjamin tells us, is not simply the ability to see resemblances and create similarities between things but is the flash of insight read off of or made in the process that impels a moment of invention. Playing at something has a fugitive or fleeting aspect that can spark a recognition that even the original is made up – a performance – and might be made different (Benjamin 1978, p. 333; cf., Taussig 1993; Buck-Morss 1989). Children play at all kinds of social roles but also pretend that they are trucks, trees, monsters, and animals. Each act is a “becoming other” and a way of coming to consciousness (cf., Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The fluidity of the “becomings” as much as the fictions, stagings, and restagings of play is vital to its pleasures and at the heart of the mimetic faculty. This kind of play is identity-making. It is also world-making. In play children learn about and toy with the meanings and practices of their social worlds, but as Benjamin reminds, it is also where received meanings and relations are refused or reworked. Benjamin is especially insightful in thinking about playing with debris and the ways it grasps the social and historical. It stages a sort of tactile knowing that is in all of us, and its “wild imagining” (Taussig 1993, p. 21) has revolutionary potential. Such fantasies and reveries are reservoirs for thinking and making new ways of living. The dialectic ricochet between debris and value is exact and potent here (cf., Gidwani 2008; Gidwani and Reddy 2011).

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Fig. 3 Playing “fields.” The version pictured here is “subsistence fields”

Play – children’s and others’– is intrinsic time, time lived as “disposable,” though not at all a “waste of time” as it is so often constructed. Marx saw “disposable time” as the basis of social wealth in the sense that it is time for creativity, for art, science, and invention, but also because it is consumption time, an arena where surpluses can be sopped up and desires quenched (Marx 1973, p. 398 cited in Goldstein 2009; cf., Lefebvre 1991). For Marx disposable time marked a social resource garnered in part from shortening the working day, whether through class struggle or created by workers’ strategies to make time for themselves rather than their bosses. Like any resource, time – disposable and otherwise – can be “wasted,” although what constitutes “wasted time” is an historical geographical, social, and political economic question. In pointing to its potential as a realm of creative practice, a reservoir of dreams and imagination, I mark again the dialectical relationship between waste and value. Childhood is full of disposable time. “Doing nothing” is one of its great hallmarks; its pleasures and fluid openness to everything are perhaps the greatest joy (and potential) of childhood. Play and playtime can be understood as a non-instrumentalist states of being and openness to becoming. They are generative and full of possibilities (cf., Philo 2016). If, as Marx tells us, “the whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time,” isn’t that time – children’s time, playtime, and thinking and imagination time – something not to be wasted? Something to be found and treasured in adulthood?

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At one level Marx was being elemental. Without time that exceeds bare survival – that is, disposable time – there’s no potential for building surplus. Nonproductive time and time out of work are needed to expand and potentially make good on production time and its myriad surpluses through the material social practices of social reproduction, consumption, and leisure. A lot of the disciplining associated with capitalist production is focused on channeling that time and how it is “spent” by whom, so that idleness is reserved for some and punished in others (cf., Thompson 1967). At its core, then, disposable time is social time; it is both a source and outcome of the creation of wealth. Disposable time is best understood not as waste but as value, as wealth and potential wealth, as something to be shared, to be played with, and to be reimagined as the very fiber of what it means to be a person, to be social. Goldstein (2009) suggests that “fund” of time is also when art, science, and creativity happen. The best of work, we in academia are privileged to know, is like play, but beyond that “wild imagining,” why not think a politics that builds upon, expands, and shares disposable time? And while I recognize that time can be “spent” and stolen in all kinds of ways and that those rendered disposable in capitalist social formations may have a lot of “time on their hands” and may experience their disposability temporally as biding time – as waiting for something – it remains that time is a resource that can be mobilized in all kinds of ways to fulfill desires; produce and exchange knowledge; make and remake the necessities, pleasures, contours, and possibilities of everyday lives; create new things; and imagine possibilities to live otherwise and act on them. It is possible, for example, to restructure work time and meaning so that their logic is no longer that some work to the bone – whether through excessive hours, protracted commutes, or intensified productivity demands, while others are idled and made into waste that must then be managed and contained. The children with whom I worked made whole beautiful vibrant worlds out of shit. If that is not an inspiring metaphor for politics now, what is? Taking a leaf from the sorts of utopian gestures and imagination of these children’s play, but well exceeding it; an imagination that would refashion debris to make toys of garbage and elaborate worlds of waste is somewhere in almost everyone. That imagination – a revolutionary imagination, if you will – is always ready to be released into making something else. That something else is something to think about – to “play with” – politically. It might be realized in making disposable time the social resource that it is through insisting on and making times and spaces for creativity, research, writing, playing, art, music, drama, thought, dance, and the like. This is not dream talk though its relationship to reimagining time – disposable time – as a social resource is dreamy. The current crises of uneven development at all scales, marked by some of the greatest disparities in wealth in the history of capitalism could be redressed at least in part by rethinking and restructuring the working day. Production time could be reallocated so that more people would work fewer hours for living wages, thereby expanding the “fund” of disposable time alongside security rather than precarity. More people working fewer hours would extend employment and rework leisure in ways that expanded wealth in the deepest sense of the term. This sort of openness is perhaps the deepest lesson to learn from children’s play and also the promise and peril of understanding childhood time in tension with the deep injustices associated with constituting certain children as waste and hidden

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by the ruthless, global management of that waste. We are all in this together and the loss of anyone’s creativity or creative potential is a tragedy of the commons, a loss to our common future. No one is disposable, and disposable time is a collective and expanding resource that has all kinds of possibility for making change. Change that cannot happen when the privileges of some are built on the dispersed waste of so many others (cf. Wright 2006; Tadiar 2013).

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Conclusion: Toward a Countertopography of Waste

Countertopography is a concept and methodology I developed to connect disparate places and social formations by virtue of their analytic relationship to a particular material social practice, social relation, and/or cultural form (Katz 2004). It is a way of making good on simultaneity, of making visible what is too easily ignored or hidden by space and distance (cf., Berger 1974). With countertopography I wanted to produce a geographical imagination for a more associative politics – one that was scale and place crossing with practical entailments that could work across and against received distinctions of “us” and “them,” of place-bounded notions about problems and their possible solutions. My intent is to mobilize an abstraction for understanding the work done by dispossession and the making and managing of waste (human and not) around social reproduction. What sorts of countertopographies might be imagined, produced, and even traveled around the figure of the child as waste, children made excess, and social reproduction as an arena of accumulation by dispossession? What sorts of geographies and political possibilities would they bring into view? In looking at children as waste, I was struck by the common language of disenfranchisement, of dispossession, and of children’s self-production and sober awareness of their own unfitness for productive futures. These material social practices create a field for exploitation and further dispossession – that is, for a willed wasting of lives constituted as wasted. These wastes and their “management” can be seen in the “recruitments” of young people into what is a surveillance apparatus at once global and intimate that includes the school to prison pipeline, the military and other structures of organized violence, the separation of young children from their families as a means of thwarting international migration and asylum seeking at the US-Mexico border, and deadly forms of labor. These strategies of waste management with common grounds are descriptively different and experientially varied, but in many key ways are analytically similar. Recognizing these similarities and the common grounds of these practices is a way to start working against the violence of erasure; both the children’s own and the constitutive role of waste in making capital accumulation and capitalist discipline work. Making that waste and the violence of its management everywhere visible, and making it impossible to hide the waste by naturalizing it or displacing it onto racialized, gendered, classed others or elsewheres, or occluding it behind the tenuous glitter of children as accumulation strategies, commodities, or ornaments is crucial. It marks important grounds of what it means to take seriously the historical geographies of children and young people and the cultural politics that calls forth. Such formations

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Fig. 4 Making worlds out of scraps

and politics around childhood – what I am calling “childhood as spectacle” – turn the possibility for rethinking waste and disposability as material social practices so that “disposable” time, playtime, becomes our time to change the world (Fig. 4). As Marx (1973, p. 111) himself tells us: “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naiveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?”

That charm is something to organize around.

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Engaging with Bourdieu: A Review of the Utilization of Bourdieu Within Children and Young People’s Geographies Christina R. Ergler and Bronwyn E. Wood

Contents 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Section I: Bourdieu’s Intertwined Key Concepts: Field, Capital, Habitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bourdieu and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Section II: Engaging with Bourdieu in Children’s Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Section III: Applying Bourdieu’s Conceptual Triad: Two Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Ergler’s Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Wood’s Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Concluding Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

While the work of Pierre Bourdieu has had a significant impact on the fields of anthropology, educational research, and cultural studies, his ideas have much less commonly been used by geographers. In this chapter, the authors review Bourdieu’s central concepts and ideas and then examine how Bourdieu has been utilized within research in children and young people’s geographies to enhance understandings of children, space, and social justice. This analysis reveals that singular concepts of Bourdieu’s (social and cultural capital) have been applied with some frequency but that his integrated conceptual triad or complete theory of practice has much less commonly been used. The chapter concludes with some examples of how more in-depth approaches through C. R. Ergler (*) Department of Geography, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] B. E. Wood Faculty of Education, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_13

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Bourdieu could support richer understandings of children and young people’s geographies. Keywords

Bourdieu · Social capital · Cultural capital · Habitus · Children’s geographies · Space

1

Introduction

Pierre Bourdieu is regarded as one of the foremost social philosophers of the twentieth century, contributing insights into fields as diverse as economics, politics, art, and theology (Grenfell 2008a). Yet, while the work of Pierre Bourdieu has had a significant impact on the fields of anthropology, educational research, and cultural studies, his ideas have much less commonly been used by geographers (Bridge 2004; Popay et al. 2003; Stetten 2009). Notable exceptions include Harvey (1987, 1989), Gregory (1994), and Pile and Thrift (1995) who were some of the earlier geographers to recognize the potential of Bourdieu’s contribution to improved understandings of society, inequalities, and space. Yet, although Bourdieu provides a complex and fine-grained conceptual framework for analyzing the social and physical world, he is, according to Painter, a “social theorist whom geographers cite frequently, but rarely engage with in any depth” (Painter 2000, p. 246). The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Bourdieu’s theories and concepts have been applied within the subdiscipline of children’s geographies and to consider the impact and contribution of Bourdieu’s ideas on understandings of children and space. This chapter is subdivided into three sections. Section I briefly introduces Bourdieu’s triad of capital, habitus, and field – aspects of the conceptual triad in his theory of practice (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). Section II provides a review of a selection of research that has engaged with these concepts in the subdiscipline of children’s geographies and considers the contribution that these studies have made to deeper understandings of children, space, and social justice. The final section, Section III, illustrates two further examples of Bourdieusian applications in two different fields of research drawing on the authors’ work, concluding with a series of implications and notes for future research.

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Section I: Bourdieu’s Intertwined Key Concepts: Field, Capital, Habitus

Bourdieu’s work is characterized by two features: first, a particular understanding of the link between theory and practice, and second, a set of conceptual tools which can be applied to diverse fields of study in the course of analysis (Grenfell 2008a). The attention Bourdieu drew to the link between theory and practice centered in

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particular upon the question, “what motivates human behaviour?” (Hillier and Rooksby 2002, p. 4) Rather than turning to psychology for an explanation, he proposes that the actions of individuals are a reflection of the interaction of different social fields that combine to transform or reproduce patterns produced by the interplay of structure and agency. Bourdieu describes his approach as a “constructivist structuralism or structuralist constructivism” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 112). Thus, the practices of individuals and groups can be seen to be a result of the dialectic interplay of objective and subjective structures. His approach is sometimes therefore referred to as having a “middling tendency” (Threadgold 2010) and trying to unpack people’s “points of view” in relation to their structural life circumstances (Bourdieu et al. 1999). This implies that actors can influence and transform their social realities within the structures that shape their everyday life and that they are also able to hinder, contribute to, or foster social change (Bourdieu 1984). The second feature of his work is the development of a set of analytical conceptual tools: habitus, capital, and field (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). Bourdieu referred to the concepts he developed as adaptable “tool kits” to help him solve problems: The peculiar difficulty of sociology then, is to produce a precise science of an imprecise, fuzzy, woolly reality. For this, it is better that its concepts are supple and adaptable, rather than defined and calibrated and used rigidly. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 23)

His argument is that there is a need for “supple” and “adaptable” concepts which are to be applied and reapplied in differing theoretical and situational frameworks and to be tested again and again. Thus, in his view, concepts are always to be wedded to theory and research as a form of “fusion of theoretical construction and practical research operations” that causes them to “interpenetrate each other entirely” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 34–35). While these concepts are closely intertwined, they will be artificially taken apart in the following paragraphs to provide a brief introduction to each one individually as a foundation for the critical review of studies applying Bourdieu’s work in section II. We cite Bourdieu’s book with Loic Wacquant (1992) on many occasions in the remainder of the chapter as this dialogical book between Bourdieu and Wacquant provides a very useful analysis and summary of Bourdieu’s ‘reflexive sociology’. We see this book as a good resource for starting to engage with Bourdieu’s tool kit as Bourdieu outlines his thinking in an accessible way. Bourdieu contests that to understand social life, a focus upon the social space or field (the term he uses) in which interactions, transactions, and events occur is necessary. Such a field has its own “cosmos” determined by particular (arbitrarily defined) regulations and patterns of operation; its own sets of belief in “appropriate” actions, which have been developed over time (Thomson 2008). For example, Bourdieu refers to artistic, religious, or economic fields, each one containing its own logic, networks, and practices that are specific to that field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Hence, each field has its own logic of practice, its own “conflicts and competitions” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 17). Bourdieu often referred to this concept of field with an analogy of a game in which the inhabited positions of

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agents in this social space reflect their knowledge of how to play “the rules” of the game or how to use their capital endowments to pursue their desires. Agents with “more” power hold the knowledge that is “valued, sanctioned and rewarded” (Crossley 2008, p. 96). In this way, a field can be seen as “a site of struggle over a particular form of capital” (Harker 1990, p. 97). Hence, Bourdieu’s fields are not static. They are the result of contested position-taking and processes of distinction, but chances of success are higher the more familiar one is with the rules structuring the field in relation to one’s capital. Broadly speaking, capital is effectively the resources which actors take to the field (Hillier and Rooksby 2002). Bourdieu proposes a variety of “capitals” that individuals can possess: these include social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capitals (Bourdieu 1986), which are resources that agents accrue during their life course (Holt 2008, p. 234). For example, cultural capital refers to the knowledge, skills, and information people acquire through formal or informal education, while economic capital refers to the income and assets people own. Bourdieu proposes that cultural capital can exist as an embodied state (such as jargon, music), an objectified form (such as books, scientific instruments), and in an institutionalized form, most often represented by educational credentials (Bourdieu 1986). Social capital is another asset that holds relative advantage in society. Bourdieu refers to social capital as the sum of resources (actual or virtual) that accrue to an individual or group as a result of social connections and relationships (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). According to Bourdieu, one form of capital is necessarily understood within the context of other related capital: “it is in fact impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in one form” (Bourdieu 1986, p. 15). Bourdieu points out that these forms of capital are not valued equally in society. Instead, a system of exchanges differentiates between these and awards, some forms of capital with greater value – or symbolic capital – than others (Bourdieu 1986). Therefore, the capitals of some groups are arbitrarily deemed more valuable than others and conferred with social advantage as they come to be understood to hold “qualitative differences in forms and consciousness within different social groups” (Moore 2008, p. 102). Moreover, Bourdieu (1977) suggests that capitals need to be understood to exist within the logic, networks, and practices of a field – or the social space within which individuals operate (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and the habitus (or dispositions people embody as a result of social conditioning) (Bourdieu 1977). In other words, capital endowment structures not only the power and agents’ social position within a field but also the interests and attitudes an agent possesses (habitus), which in turn affects how actors react when confronted with different social situations. Habitus is the concept Bourdieu developed to describe the dispositions that embody both individuals and groups as a result of their social conditioning within that context of a group. It is the thinking tool with which Bourdieu attempts to provide the “mediating link between objective social structures and individual actors” (Painter 2000, p. 242). Habitus can be understood as partially, unconsciously developed embodied dispositions (e.g., norms, patterns of behavior, taste) through which the world is perceived, experienced, evaluated, felt, shaped, and acted upon (Bourdieu and

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Wacquant 1992). These dispositions are inscribed in bodies and “schemata of perception, appreciation, and action” and move beyond the conscious sphere of everyday life (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 16) as they ease the mastering of the complexities of a field or the world in general. Through these embodied schemata, agents draw unconsciously on the “right rationale” for acting in the appropriate way in the majority of situations. Thus, agents’ practices or pre-reflexive actions become a so-called second nature as they respond intuitively with a sense of the “social game” that corresponds with their social class or position in society. This means the habitus can be understood as a feel for the regularities appropriate to the field in question formed by and forming dispositions that mark social distance and social position. Habitus therefore serves as the classificatory basis for individual and collective practice, while (re)producing the structures (social and physical aspects) from which it is derived. Or, in Cresswell’s (2002, p. 381) words, “the habitus represents the internalisation of the social order, which in turn reproduces the social order.” This means that the habitus of an individual is bounded and constructed within the limits of personal experiences (past), socialization processes, and the historical conditions of its production (history). These ideas describe how social reproduction, or the tendency for social class patterns to reproduce in the next generation, can occur – which has led many (e.g., Jenkins 1992; Butler 1999) to accuse Bourdieu of fatalistic determinism. However, Bourdieu is quick to point out that: Being the product of history, [habitus] is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures. It is durable but not eternal! (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 133)

Despite Bourdieu’s assertions of looking at structural and agentic dimensions simultaneously, he has frequently been viewed as a structuralist and dismissed by poststructuralists and others; possibly because he never developed a theory of agency as clearly as he developed a theory of social reproduction, even though through his concept of habitus, it is possible to see such potential.

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Bourdieu and Space

Although the social space – as outlined in the previous paragraph – is always the starting point for Bourdieu’s thinking, the physical and social space nonetheless build a relational entity in his understanding of the creation of inequalities within a field. Although both spaces build an entity, it has nonetheless to be noted that in Bourdieu’s eyes physical space only mirrors (at least partially) the social space (Bourdieu 2000, p. 134). He simply translates the positions occupied in social space into the physical space both literally and symbolically. Thus, social patterns engrave themselves into the physical space as exemplified already in his earliest writings about the everyday practices taking place in an Algerian Kabyle house. The physical layout of the house mirrors the spatialized practices such as cooking,

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farming, eating, sleeping of a Berber family and reflects on a more abstract level their cosmological beliefs about gender, life, and death (Bourdieu 1990). Thus, the physical space for Bourdieu is only a symbol for the embodied structures of society cementing potentially the distinctive role of the physical space in producing social inequalities (Bourdieu 1999, p. 134). This idea is particularly well developed in his edited collection The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al. 1999). Here he describes a place, such as Jonquil Street, with a great deal of sensitivity to the local residents’ lives in the context of industrial decline and the limited life chances. Nonetheless, although Bourdieu uses a “spatialised vocabulary” (Painter 2000, p. 255), he does not richly theorize social or material space in his writings and nor were geographic ideas strongly present in his primary period of writing (before the 1990s). Although geographers such as Cresswell (2002) praise Bourdieu for his attention to “social space” and inequalities throughout his work, they critique his limited contribution to a deeper understanding of “space” (Bridge 2004; Gregory 1994; Painter 2000). Some even warn of a spatial trap embedded in his spatial understanding (Lossau and Roland 2004; Holt 2008). In particular, the children’s geographer Louise Holt (2008) criticizes Bourdieu for treating space as a static, preexisting “given,” rather than engaging with and encompassing the critical and complex conceptualization of space and spatiality forwarded by geographers such as Massey (2005). Feminist scholars have also critiqued Bourdieu for underestimating the ambiguities which exist in the way that men and women occupy gender positions and for how these gendered positions are being remade in new ways (Kenway and McLeod 2004). While Bourdieu only published a handful of direct references outlining his thoughts on the interaction between social and physical space (Painter 2000), Cresswell (2002) suggests that this absence can be viewed as an opportunity for geographers to offer a less instrumental interpretation of Bourdieu’s work. It provides freedom for children’s geographers to operationalize and extend Bourdieu’s thinking in fresh and unexpected ways. This approach was endorsed by Bourdieu himself, who encourages his readers to extend his work theoretically, practically, and methodologically by utilizing it in new research questions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). This quest has been taken up by a handful of children’s geographers, introduced in more detail in the next few sections. Nonetheless, the majority have only applied his concepts lightly and often in isolation for unpacking the production, reproduction, and experience of inequality and thus neglect the opportunities a full engagement with his triad might offer a fuller understanding of children’s (non)participation in particular spaces of society in relation to their “points of view” and wider life circumstances.

4

Section II: Engaging with Bourdieu in Children’s Geographies

In this section, we examine the scholarship of some of the researchers who are working at the intersections of children/young people, space, and Bourdieu. We focus on papers which have applied Bourdieu’s theories and concepts to contexts

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which relate to children and young people and space in the broadest sense. Many such papers appear within journals such as Children’s Geographies, Children, Youth and Environments, and Urban Studies and in key publications (e.g., Aitken 2001; Holt 2011; Hörschelmann and Van Blerk 2012). The papers discussed here provide a taste of some of the ways Bourdieu has been applied. Given the space constraint selectivity had to be exercised, but there were more works that could have been included. When we examined these articles, we were interested in how researchers had applied Bourdieu’s concepts and to what end. It was apparent that many studies only cite Bourdieu in passing or engage with his concepts and theories lightly. The examples included in this section tended to have a more robust application of Bourdieu, although most of them still choose to focus on one or two aspects of his theory rather than the interlinked conceptual triad presented earlier. Thus the following sections trace and reflect the operationalization of his two most popular concepts, social and cultural capital, and his notion of habitus in children’s geographies. This section concludes with an analysis of the nature of engagement with Bourdieu within geographies of children and young people. Social capital: The most wide-spread application of Bourdieu by researchers working within children’s geographies has been the use of his concept of social capital. Holland (2008) explains that social capital is a controversial but surprisingly popular concept. One reason for the prevalence of this concept is that social capital has been more widely theorized than many of Bourdieu’s other “capitals.” Beyond Bourdieu, Robert Putnam (1993, 1995, 2000), James Coleman (1988) and Fukuyama (2001) have also contributed to defining and exploring social capital. While the focus of this chapter is upon Bourdieu’s conceptualization of social capital, it is important to acknowledge a significant body of work by researchers exploring children, families, and geography who have applied Putnam’s conception of social capital (for examples, see Reynolds 2013, Goodwin and Armstrong-Esther 2004, Turner and An Nguyen 2005). A further reason for the popularity of social capital was the integration of notions of social capital within a number of social policies in the 1990s associated with the “Third Way.” These were popular in the United States (under Bill Clinton) and the United Kingdom where it was closely linked to the rise of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government (Giddens 1998). Such policies placed a strong emphasis on promoting social inclusion and community responsibility for social issues, marked by a parallel shift of governmental responsibility away from provisions previously made through state welfare. During this time, social capital became a common feature of policy discussions and research, especially as it provided noneconomic solutions to social problems (Portes 1998). Accordingly, it has become a key feature of research in subsequent years, including within research in geographies of children and young people. One of the earliest utilizations of Bourdieu’s social capital concept for children’s research was Virginia Morrow’s seminal work in community development, health and wellbeing, and citizenship participation (1999, 2000, 2001). Morrow’s work has been drawn on by researchers of children and young people’s geographies as it illustrates how children themselves hold and develop social capital, thus critiquing

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the passive way that theorists such as Putnam viewed children’s social capital (Morrow 2000). Her work also importantly contributed to widening the definitions of children’s well-being by focusing on broader aspects such as community participation, informal social networks, and belonging (Morrow 1999, 2001). While Morrow uses both Putnam and Bourdieu in her work, she argues that Bourdieu’s concept is stronger as it can encompass wider definitions of social and health factors than Putnam’s definitions can, and also provides opportunities to connect with other capitals and wider economic and political structures (unlike Putnam’s conceptualization) (Morrow 2001). Building upon Morrow’s conceptualization, researchers investigating children, young people, and space have considered the ways in which children themselves generate and build social capital. For example, Susie Weller’s (2006) research examining the citizenship practices of young people on the Isle of Wight shows how social capital provides a framework for not only analyzing the “disadvantages” of young people but also the resourceful ways in which many use their social capital to overcome these disadvantages. She proposes that many young people were “active social capitalists” (p. 572), using their social networks and connections to revitalize their facilities and improve their neighborhoods. This notion is in contrast to prior research where children were viewed as inheritors of social capital but not contributors. Similarly, Weller and Bruegel’s (2009) research concluded that children are “active agents in the development and maintenance of social capital at the level of the family and neighbourhood” (p. 641) through “hanging out,” helping neighbors, and building social networks, thus contributing toward neighborhood social capital. Other researchers with a focus on cohesion and integration have also found social capital a valuable theoretical concept to explain the development (or failure to develop), community, and social relationships. For example, Holton (2016) shows how the social capital held by tertiary students provides them with a way to navigate and “fit in” to university halls of residence. Drawing on Bourdieu (1986), his research shows how halls of residence can perpetuate disadvantages in social capital, yet he highlights how non-traditional students can also transform or adapt contingent behaviors to maximize durable relationships with others. Social capital is also found to be an important (financial) asset for child domestic workers in Bangladesh, who were able to gain employment through networks they had made with former employees (Jensen 2015). In a similar vein, a number of authors have also found social capital a useful theory to examine children’s experiences of migration (Ní Laoire 2011; Wells 2011; Devine 2009). For example, Ni Laoire (2011) describes the gendered nature of children’s social interaction patterns of returned Irish families to Ireland, and Wells (2011) examines the social networks refugee children use to access resources and friendships in London. Devine (2009) examines the social (and cultural capital) that immigrant children in Ireland use and generate as they attempt to “integrate” into Irish schools. These include making friends, learning the Irish language and sport, minimizing aspects of cultural difference relating to accent, diet and dress in order to position themselves in a manner that enabled them to integrate into existing social networks or create new ones. These

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studies all highlight the complexity of social relations and the explanatory power of social capital to help untangle how it is utilized and generated by children. Fewer researchers have applied social capital to discuss the reproduction of social privilege. Raffo and Reeves (2000) provide an example of such an approach to social capital in which they argue that young people’s transitions from school to work and adulthood are conditioned by interplay of material and symbolic resources available through social networks. They propose that young people have “individualised systems of social capital” which are in turn spatially, culturally, temporally, and economically embedded within their social relations. Another example is Holt’s (2010; Holt et al. 2013) work on “embodied social capital” which primarily focuses on the experiences of (dis)abled children with mind-body or socioemotional differences. Her research illustrates how the social groups these children (re)produced were formed at intersecting practices of inclusion and exclusion, which were based around notions of similarity and difference (Holt 2008, 2010). These aspects of identity carried a form of “symbolic capital” in terms of highly valued commodities, showing how bodies are components of broader socio-spatial relationships which are valued differently in different contexts and by different groups (Holt 2008, p. 242). In this way, Holt’s work provides an excellent example of the potential value of social capital for geographical analyses of inequality and privilege. In sum, these applications of social capital in research in children’s geographies reveal a number of dimensions to their social relations. In this suite of discussed studies, social capital provides a lens to examine children’s interactions, friendship, and engagements. Social capital is therefore a useful tool or heuristic device for exploring social processes and practices around children’s experiences of their environments, and in doing so, has highlighted young people’s social resources (or lack of them) to shape and actively participate in their surroundings (Morrow 2001, p. 58). Applying Bourdieu’s concept of social capital “enables potential but largely invisible power relations to be recognised” (Weller 2006, p. 571) and hence can be used to understand the life constraints of children and young people better. This analytical approach is enhanced when considering Bourdieu’s other capitals (economic, cultural symbolic) and his concept of a “field” of activity (Holt 2008), a point returned to later in the chapter. Cultural capital: Cultural capital has particular currency in the field of education; those who hold “recognized” cultural capital are deemed competent and rewarded by long-term benefit for their educational pursuits (Devine 2009). In turn, the prevailing way in which cultural capital has been applied within geographies of children has been in the context of education (for examples, see Asplund and Prieto 2013, De Hoop 2017, Hollingworth et al. 2011, Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2011, Sparks 2016), but also migration – which is frequently linked to education as well (Waters 2006, 2015, 2017; Devine 2009; Weenink 2008). Cultural capital is a key influence on young people’s identities, aspirations, and subjectivities, as de Hoop (2017) demonstrates through her Bourdieu-informed study of south Indian young people’s environmental subjectivities in the context of schooling, home life, and understandings of modernity. Access to cultural capital, or knowledge, skills, or information, provides young people with a resource with which to position

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themselves in a way to maximize the exchange value of their knowledge or education. Johanna Waters’ research on family migration for children’s education in the context of East Asia illustrates this well (Waters 2006, 2015). She describes the practice of middle class families in East Asia relocating some of their family in countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a strategy to accumulate cultural capital to ensure the inter-generational reproduction of a family’s social and economic status. While an initial glimpse reveals a picture of an archetypal transnational family for whom “children’s education” is an over-riding concern, her analysis also describes a more complex, gendered pattern of experiences with mothers bearing the brunt of the burden of global householding and children playing a much more central role in the process of educational migration than previously assumed, and indeed, becoming a form of intergenerational capital themselves that enhances positioning in a global economic marketplace (Waters 2015, 2017). This close link between social and cultural capital in education and migration is made by a number of other authors (Weenink 2008; Devine 2009). Devine’s (2009) research on first-generation immigrant children in Ireland describes how children with well-educated parents were able to draw on valuable cultural and social capital in order to navigate the educational system in a new place. This included utilizing considerable parental and community support for learning (for example, additional learning at the Muslim cultural center). In contrast, immigrant children who had less well-educated parents often had more difficulties in school, although many were still able to draw on rich social networks derived from ethnic and religious groups in the community. Importantly, Devine also illustrates how children across all backgrounds were not mere receptors of their family’s capitals but also contributed to processes of capital accumulation in families through, for example, coaching younger siblings, childcare, and translating for families. Similarly, Weenick’s research in Dutch International schools points out how families were strategically positioning their children within the internationalized streams in order to for them to gain “cosmopolitan capital” in the form of languages, knowledge, and dispositions that could equip them for future employment in the global field (see also Waters, 2017, for a description of “linguistic capital”). In sum, these studies highlight how Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital has been applied to show how children can gain advantage and relative position through their access to knowledge or information or their application of skills. This has served children from middle class families especially well, as it has enabled them to convert forms of cultural capital into economic advantage. In this way, the studies contribute to understandings of the tendency towards social reproduction in society, even to the extent to which aspirations have class-based origins (Grant 2017; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2011). However, the studies also illustrate how children can be seen to be active in the production of cultural capital and not merely passive receptors (Waters 2006, 2015; Devine 2009; De Hoop 2017). Waters (2015) points out that this enables children to be seen as “sites of accumulation” (Katz 2008) as they are central to the “accumulation strategies” of migrant families, enabling a more agentic position for cultural capital to be seen.

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Habitus: A smaller number of geographies of children researchers have utilized Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus.” This theoretical tool has generally been applied along with a close consideration of social class and how this influences the dispositions and orientations of individuals and groups. Allen’s (2004) research with both “privileged” and “deprived” visually impaired children illustrates how habitus also has a sociospatial impact. His analysis showed that social class and disadvantage had a significant impact on children’s embodied experiences of disability and space, with children and parents from less affluent backgrounds developing a “deprived habitus” with reduced expectations of socio-spatial access and fewer practical strategies to resist the difficulties for visually impaired children. In contrast, Sparks (2016) describes how privileged young people express particular messages through their consumption patterns (economic and cultural capital) and displays of an embodied habitus of privilege. Researching children’s future aspirations for employment, Pimlott-Wilson (2011) similarly found that familial habitus had a strong influence on the types of jobs children aspired to, with children frequently replicating family traditions, as illustrated by Wayne: “I’d like to work at a quarry like my dad coz, his granddad used to work there and he was a driver” (Pimlott-Wilson 2011). Grant (2017) extends upon Pimlott-Wilson’s study to demonstrate that habitus is also shaped through spatial (community) experiences as well as a sense of “hope” which Grant argues can be a form of capital which in turn influences aspirations. His work shows the tight connection between Bourdieu’s notion of capital and habitus and how together these shape young people’s hopes and aspirations. These authors also found examples where these groups of children and their families moved beyond their expected habitus and adapted or changed their aspirations and expectations, illustrating that children are not passive recipients of socialization but also need to be seen to hold the potential to change their actions and aspirations, which resembles Bourdieu’s understanding of reproduction and change outlined above. Similar to studies on cultural capital, research on habitus also often had an educational focus. This is in keeping with Bourdieu’s alignment understanding of the potential of habitus to be transformed through the actions of schooling (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). This finding is confirmed in a number of educationally focused studies, which explore this tension of social reproduction and structural determinism against the liberating potential of education through schooling (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2011; Holt 2008; Holt et al. 2013; Walker and Clark 2010). In sum, habitus, while a less commonly applied concept of Bourdieu’s, has the potential to combine the complex interrelationship between dominant social norms, individual socialization experiences, and actors’ symbolic capital endowments. As a theoretical tool, it offers avenues to expose both the socially deterministic aspects of social practice but also the more transformative ones. The overview above of some key papers which have applied Bourdieusian concepts shows that his theories have held a significant and growing role within a geographical analysis of children’s lives. However, it is also possible to conclude that in some cases, the use of Bourdieu is “light” and not as fully integrated or applied as it might be. Researchers tend to use a single concept from Bourdieu (such

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as social capital) and only a few apply his conceptual triad or fuller theoretical model (theory of practice) in a wider way. This is despite Bourdieu’s (1986) insistence that an account of the structure and functioning of the social world necessitates an understanding of capital in all its interrelated forms. In relation to studies of children, Morrow (2001) argues that social capital in particular needs to be conceptualized in relation to other capitals if we are to examine children’s resources in any depth, and Holt (2008, p. 240) similarly suggests that social capital needs to be seen as a constitutive component of “wider socio-spatial processes operating on a variety of intersecting spatial scales to reproduce/transform inequalities.” The work of researchers applying Bourdieu to studies of children and space has nonetheless contributed to theoretical developments in this area. Nicole SchaeferMcDaniel’s (2004) framework for examining children’s social capital helpfully proposed three dimensions that need exploring: social networks and sociability (children’s interactions and relationships), trust and reciprocity, and sense of belonging/place attachment (the sense of community and symbolic attachment to place). In her framework, these three elements are grounded in the physical, everyday environments in order to: . . . identify areas that enhance or foster social interactions as well as recognise areas that restrict or prohibit such activity. Spaces that enhance social interactions and a sense of belonging [. . .] thus can contribute to building social capital. (Schaefer-McDaniel 2004, p. 166)

Importantly, Schaefer-McDaniel urges that social capital must be explored by talking to children themselves rather than their parents or teachers (see also Morrow 2001). Such research suggests the potential for a more explicitly spatialized and integrated use of Bourdieu’s theories which we illustrate in the following section.

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Section III: Applying Bourdieu’s Conceptual Triad: Two Studies

In the final section of this chapter, two further examples are illustrated that show how the application of Bourdieu’s conceptual triad in two different contexts elicited fresh insights into research on children and space. For each study, an overview of the research focus is provided, followed by a specific examination of Bourdieu’s application, concluding with a summary of the analytical distinction through Bourdieu that the study provided.

5.1

Ergler’s Study

5.1.1 Focus of the Study Children’s declining physical activity levels and independent mobility in light of urban intensification and sustainability debates were drivers for Ergler’s study on

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Auckland families’ practices, experiences, and feelings of playing in the outdoors during summer and winter. Data for this exploratory case study were derived from 72 semistructured interviews, drawings, neighborhood walks, and GPS logs with 20 children (8–11 years) and interviews with their parents. An urban/suburban contrast was made within the study between families from low socioeconomic backgrounds who lived in high-rise apartment complexes in the inner city of Auckland and families with detached houses and gardens in the coastal suburb of Beach Haven in order to explore the socio-spatial differences and similarities in the utilization and appreciation of outdoor activities within intensifying urban environments (Ergler 2011; Ergler forthcoming). The choice to use Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a guiding theoretical tool kit was made early in the research process. Prior studies in this area have tended to conceptualize the built environment as a container space that either provided or lacked resources to foster or hinder participation in healthy activity levels (Pearce and Witten 2010), while explanations for the differences in behavioral patterns have largely neglected societal influences (e.g., axes of difference, norms, and rules) and institutional structures (Swinburn et al. 1999). Similarly, seasonal and weather conditions were viewed as fuzzy moderators structuring outdoor activities from above (Tucker and Gilliland 2007), rather than features which could shape embodied practices in the social and physical fabric of a neighborhood. Bourdieu’s theory of practice was therefore chosen as it could account for, and make sense of, the complex lived social realities of participants that previously had only been reported as “outliers” or an inconsistency in findings, thus contributing to the limited success of many interventions promoting active play (see also Blacksher and Lovasi 2012). Operationalizing Bourdieu’s theory of practice in the context of active play provided an opportunity to move beyond narrowly viewed context-related explanations for the decline in families’ physical activity levels and unpack the deeper meaning of placebased determinants and social structures that shape, and are shaped by, families’ lived social realities of engaging in outdoor play. It also provided opportunities to account for the interplay of structural and agential dimensions of social play realities in different places rather than focusing solely on one or the other.

5.1.2 Applying Bourdieu’s Conceptual Triad Bourdieu suggests in his essay “Sport and Social Class,” that peoples’ embodied dispositions and their (non)participation in different sporting activities are the result of the complex interrelationships between social struggles and aspirations in this field, actors’ capital endowments, and their habitus (Bourdieu 1978). Applying this to the context of active outdoor play meant getting an idea about how struggles in the field of “play” developed over time, awarding some forms of “play” with greater value or, in Bourdieu’s terms, symbolic capital. Findings showed that the exposure to a certain habitat (neighborhood, lifestyle) cultivated particular affinities in families for outdoor play. These in turn reflected locally constituted beliefs about which child activities are “appropriate” in different seasons (e.g., spending time on the playground, staying indoors) (Ergler et al. 2013b). While independent outdoor play across seasons was deemed possible

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under certain circumstances in the suburb, in the central city it was seen as largely “inappropriate.” In the commercial environment of the inner city, parents showed a greater preference for interior and supervised pastimes. Outdoor play was less valued all-year-round due to perceived dangers (e.g., traffic, stranger-danger) and also due to the “looks” families encountered when being out and about. These looks signaled them that the inner city has been designed for adults rather than families with children. As a consequence, children were enrolled in extracurricular activities and/or after school programs and when children wanted to play in a park or playground they needed to rely on parents to take them. In contrast, independent outdoor play in summer was commonplace for the majority of the suburban children after school. Parents (and sometimes also children) saw such activities as facilitating children’s “environmental literacy” and future health and therefore were weighted with high symbolic capital (Ergler et al. 2013b). For a minority of families in the suburbs, this symbolic value was replaced by safety concerns. Nonetheless, summer for these families carried the connotation of a long play time, of being out and about, and of spending afternoons and weekends playing in parks and beaches with friends, families, and relatives. For both inner city and suburban families, play was regarded differently in winter, with more marked differences apparent for the suburban families from summer play. It seems that even in a mild climate like Auckland, a practical sense developed in which winter is the time to relax and stay indoors with the exception of some children who had an “outdoor habitus” all year round. Many families saw playing outdoors as a way to equip children with environmental, social, and cultural capital. With these accounts, parents echo scholarly findings that children learn through play (Malone 2007; Harker 2005; Moore 1986). They gain confidence and self-esteem as well as cognitive and mental capabilities, but they can also build and further their “imaginary” capital through creatively transforming their play environment (e.g., a rock becomes a pirate ship). This also enhances other forms of symbolic capital (e.g., social capital, cultural sensitivity). For example, children can increase their cultural capital by being exposed to ethnic and socioeconomic diversity when being out and about, which in turn raises their awareness to difference in, for example, social practices, dress styles, and interactions not only between children but also in the adult world. In families with an outdoor habitus, parents had often been “free ranging” kids themselves triggering the embodied belief that independently mobile children get “streetwise” and will benefit later in life from their ability to handle the complexities of a multifaceted world (see also Malone 2007). In contrast, in the eyes of the many families (especially in the central city) with a curtailed habitus, independent play was deemed not suitable for maximizing children’s development. Their aspiration was to offer their children a “better” life through enrolment in extracurricular activities. For these families, playing was discursively linked to institutionalized learning in order to provide their children with the necessary cultural and social capital for a better start in their adulthood life and an upward social mobility (Ergler et al. 2016). While these findings are not novel in themselves, viewing them through a Bourdieusian lens allowed for an opportunity

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to embed this study within broader power trajectories of the social space (field) – as a site and product of struggle – within which families operate in, comply with, or resist. It is possible therefore to view the changing value of play over time as the outcome of broader market forces, and local and national policies, and not just personal decisions (Ergler et al. 2013a).

5.1.3 Summary Bourdieu’s theoretical toolkits of field, capital, and habitus offer a framework to explain how and why children in different neighborhoods and from different family backgrounds engaged (or did not engage) in outdoor play during summer and/or winter in an intensifying urban environment. This enabled a nuanced and placebased view on the complex social and environmental determinants shaping “obesogenic environments” (environments that help, or contribute to, obesity mainly on a structural level, e.g., design of cities, policies). It alerted the researcher to pay attention to the complex and recursive relationship of locality, seasonality, and (historical) practices that inform and are shaped by different play dispositions, symbolic capitals, and the seasonally “appropriate” play activities in the field of “play.” This study also highlighted the importance of understanding families’ logic of practice and their embodied familial, societal, and locational history, rather than trying to “fix” narrowly defined social and environmental determinants.

5.2

Wood’s Study

5.2.1 Focus of Study The focus of Wood’s research was on New Zealand young people’s perceptions and practices of active citizenship in light of a curriculum requirement for them to “take social action” as a result of their learning in the social studies curriculum. Applying a comparative case study approach, she purposively selected four schools from a variety of cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic contexts. Teachers (n = 27) and students (n = 122) were invited to participate at each of these schools and data collection involved classroom observations, focus groups interviews, participatory visual methodologies, and poster creation (students only). The decision to apply Bourdieu was not made until the research was well underway, as it became apparent that there were significant differences in how active citizenship was perceived and practised between schools from lower and higher social economic backgrounds. In particular, there were differences in the spatial orientation with lower socioeconomic schools holding more locally focused beliefs and practices, and higher socioeconomic schools demonstrating more nationally and globally focused spatial orientations. This finding was not in itself novel: citizenship research has previously shown that landscapes of citizenship participation are far from even, with young people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds having lower rates of civic and political participation (Lopes et al. 2009; Black 2011; Spring et al. 2007). Moreover, there is also evidence that the structured lived experiences (class, gender and ethnicity) significantly affect the way young people

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negotiate their citizenship identities (Marsh et al. 2007). However, the theoretical challenge was to find a way to explain how and why these school communities held different ways of thinking and doing. Bourdieu’s conceptual triad and his concept of doxa became a way to explain these varying outcomes.

5.2.2 Applying Bourdieu’s Conceptual Triad Bourdieu suggests that an individual’s dispositions and actions (practice) can be seen as a reflection of the inseparable interplay of habitus, capital, and field (Bourdieu 1984). Applying this to the context of citizenship participation meant looking at how the assets and resources or “capital” (in the form of social networks, knowledge, skills, and dispositions) held by children and teachers in school communities could explain the differences in the nature, practices, and spatial outlook of active citizenship. An analysis across and within schools using Bourdieu’s idea of a “field,” or the social space within which individuals operate, showed that each school community had its own logic, networks, and practices that were specific to that field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Viewing a school or department as a social field on a microlevel (Mutch 2006) provided a way to examine how the interaction of capital and habitus in that field created differing outcomes in terms of perceptions and practices and active citizenship. One key way to explain the differences in civic knowledge and dispositions observed within these school communities is to examine the differing levels of cultural capital held by community members. In relation to citizenship, less advantaged backgrounds and lower levels of civic knowledge have been found to result in lower levels of civic participation, though not necessarily less interest in political issues (Schulz et al. 2010). Similarly, McFarland and Thomas (2006) found that young people from wealthier, higher educated families as well as young people from all social backgrounds who had participated in political and social volunteering as youth both had higher levels of “political capital” as adults later in life. In Wood’s study, these differences in cultural capital mirrored this pattern in the spatial orientation and focus of social issues studied. The students and teachers in the two higher SES schools discussed global issues more than local and often were involved in global initiatives and organizations (such as the Red Cross), while the poorer school communities tended to focus on immediate issues and action in their own community (Wood 2012, 2013). This was further reinforced by varying opportunities to gain new knowledge and skills of civic understandings and actions through opportunities provided within the school. In the higher socioeconomic schools, students were offered school trips to developing nations to undertake service- and compassionrelated activities. The economic capital in these schools enabled students to do this, while these opportunities were not even offered in poorer schools as it was unlikely parents could afford such trips. Such distinctions were not so apparent with the levels of social capital in the different school communities. Social capital is held to be an important driver of civic action “because it facilitates the development of the type of co-operative social relations that are a prerequisite of collective action” (Fahmy 2006). Across all the four schools, young people’s social networks and sociability, levels of trust and

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reciprocity, and sense of belonging within their neighborhoods and communities shaped their civic participation. Unlike cultural capital, there was less apparent symbolic value attached to certain forms of social capital, although further research could reveal that wider international social networks could carry greater value than more locally focused ones. Wood (2013, 2015a) surmises that the combined and interrelated social, economic, and cultural capital related to the logic, network, and practices of citizenship participation within a social field can be viewed as “participatory capital” (Wood 2013). The social context which occurs in this (field) then operates to distinguish between forms of participatory capital that receive distinction, resulting in differing forms of symbolic participatory citizenship dispositions and actions. In light of the current educational imperative to prepare young people towards global flows of capital and employment, it is likely that young people holding more globally oriented participatory capital would have a form of symbolic value (Bourdieu’s symbolic capital) in that it could be traded and marketed as a more powerful economic asset than locally focused active citizenship. While less of a focus was made on habitus in this study as familial data was not collected from students, it was apparent that school communities shared unquestioned beliefs, or, in Bourdieu’s (1990) terms, doxa within a specific field. In this study, the diverse perceptions and practices held by these four schools were socially and culturally constituted and reinforced by a shared set of unquestioned beliefs or doxa within these school communities (Wood 2015b). The findings highlight the significance of teachers’ shared identities within school departments and communities and how these identities shaped their own and their students’ understandings and spatial interpretations of citizenship curricula.

5.2.3 Summary Bourdieu’s conceptual triad (habitus, field, and capital) provides a broad conceptual framework through which to explore youth participatory citizenship. These three concepts alert the researcher to pay particular attention to how young people’s interactions with family and teachers with spatial communities, as well as their exposure to aspects of participation through their school programs, informs their citizenship actions, dispositions, and identities.

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Concluding Thoughts

The analysis in this chapter reveals that while Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of habitus, capital, and field have not been ignored by researchers of children and young people’s geographies, they have generally only been applied lightly or singularly, rather than integrating his full conceptual triad. This is not surprising given that children’s geographies only gained currency and acknowledgement as a subdiscipline in recent years (Holloway 2014). Working with children and young people in order to inform existing or develop new socio-spatial conceptualizations is still relatively novel. While Bourdieu’s conceptual tools have been advanced and

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modified to deal with the complexities of everyday life of adults in the twenty-first century, this chapter has shown the operationalization of his tool kit in children’s and young people’s geographies is still in its infancy. The chapter also shows that the work in children’s geographies has begun to open new and different conversations about the social, physical, and spatial nature of children’s lives through engaging with Bourdieu, and that this holds great potential for further developments in this field. In particular, studies that have placed children, rather than adults, as the central focus, and through the integration of Bourdieu’s conceptual triad, have sharpened the gaze on to the life circumstances of children, as well as the role children themselves play in shaping and reshaping socio-spatial axes of inequality. Bourdieu’s notion of social capital has provided a way to see the role that children play as agents in creating and advancing social capital (Holland et al. 2007; Schaefer-McDaniel 2004; Weller 2006; Weller and Bruegel 2009), as well as enhance familial social and cultural capital through, for example, decision-making about educational migration (Waters 2006, 2017). Other studies applying Bourdieu have shed light on the ongoing structural constraints of children in education or urban environments as a result of their habitus and the social, cultural, and economic capital they inherit, alongside the potential for children to also resist or break free from these constraints (Allen 2004; Grant 2017, Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2011; Wood 2013; Ergler et al. 2013b). As Holt (2008, p. 241) highlights, Bourdieu’s theory of practice is able “to reconnect broader embodied differences to wider socio-spatial processes including the political economy, without entirely reducing such differences to the realm of historical-materialist relations.” Theoretically this provides an opportunity to move beyond solely viewing children as autonomous social actors, or alternatively, viewing them solely as products of institutional and sociopolitical structures. Bourdieu’s theory of practice can therefore account for the multiple and diverse struggles of children, their families and communities, the norms and rules that structure the value of their different symbolic capitals and how in turn these shape their dispositions and actions (Ergler and Wood 2015). Or in other words, Bourdieu’s theories draw attention to children’s doings and beings, their place-based experiences, the deeply social nature of their agency, and their ability and constraints to transform and bring about social change. This approach not only allows a reconnection between placebased experiences and wider global processes in their historical trajectories but also provides a powerful theoretical and explanatory toolkit to move beyond the “how” and conceptualize “why” these seemingly arbitrary logics create socio-spatial inequalities that are then maintained and entrenched. In concluding we suggest two further ways that Bourdieu could be utilized more extensively and deeply within children’s and young people’s geographies thus taking up Bourdieu’s invitation “to transcend the circumscribed intellectual context and empirical terrain of its initial enunciations. . .to out-think” him (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. xiii). Firstly, as the discussions on symbolic capital showcased, there is a great deal of potential to advance Bourdieu’s ideas further. For example, in her reflections on Bourdieu and children’s geographies, Mayall (2012) suggests that his work on “field” offers a great deal of potential for geographers who are looking to

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integrate ideas of space and place, and structure and agency. Indeed, the welldeveloped notions of place and identity in geography offer many possible avenues to account for and further develop fine-grained understandings of socio-spatial inequalities. For example, by combining the diverse nodes coming together within places (Massey 2005) and different groups’ experiences of the layers of history in places (Panelli et al. 2008) with Bourdieu’s theory of practice could provide an opportunity to conceptualize children’s place-based beings and doings within the micro and macro “fields” of their lifeworlds. Secondly, while children and young people’s geographers have developed diverse and complex methods to gain insights in children’s mundane everyday experiences and have worked to overcome or minimize the influence of power relationships between child participants and adult researchers during the research process (Johnson et al. 2017), these methodological discussions rarely are integrated with theoretical and empirical discussions. However, as Bourdieu (1996, p. 8) highlights, to make full use of his theory of practice, these components cannot be viewed separately: The notions of social space, symbolic space, or social class are never studied in and for themselves; they are tested through research in which the theoretical and the empirical are inseparable, and which mobilizes a plurality of methods of observation and measurement, quantitative and qualitative, statistical and ethnographic, macrosociological and microsociological.

Thus, only by applying more sensitivity to the engagement with and reflexivity of all three components simultaneously, it is possible to realize the advantages of a Bourdieusian way of thinking to its full “potential” (Grenfell 2008b), to reflect not only on the researchers’ and participants’ positionality but also disciplinary positionalities and methodological principles and how these influence the micro and macro theoretical conceptualizations and empirical findings. Such an approach in turn may open up new and interesting avenues to inform and advance children’s socio-spatial axes of inequalities and move beyond narrow discussions on power relations and the “right” child-friendly methods. To conclude, this chapter has provided a snapshot of the disciplinary engagements of children’s geographies with one of the foremost social philosophers of the twentieth century. This review has highlighted a number of growing strengths in the subdiscipline and also opportunities to enrich this research further. It has opened up discussions for developing Bourdieu’s theory of practice further and building on the fine-grained tool kit his theory of practice offers for analyzing the social and physical nature of social realities in and beyond children’s and young people’s geographical spaces.

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Approaching Child and Youth Geographies Through Darwin Stuart C. Aitken

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Darwin’s Legacy, and Piaget’s Distorted Understanding of a Child’s Spatial and Environmental Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Thinking Child Development Through Post-Enlightenment Critiques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Psychoanalytic Mappings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Potential Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Politics of Potential Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Re-Reading Darwin Through Reproduction and Revolutionary Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter offers theoretical and philosophical reflection on development and post-development approaches to the study of children and young people. It begins with Charles Darwin and then follows neo-Darwinian influences and Enlightenment-based thinking through Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Jaques Lacan as their work applies to child development. The continued importance of these psychoanalytic theorists’ thinking is considered with its post-structural reinvigoration through work by feminists Some of the ideas in this chapter on Darwin began in Aitken (2001), and developed in more recent work that coalesces with the ideas about Winnicott and post-Development presented in Aitken and Herman (1997). Some of Elizabeth Grosz’s ideas about Darwin are discussed in Aitken and An (2012) and Aitken (2014). In addition, the ideas on the reinvigoration of Freud and Lacan, prior to this publication, are only available in Portuguese (Aitken 2015). S. C. Aitken (*) Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_24

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such as Jane Flax and Elizabeth Grosz, and neo-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. These reinvigorations provide a decidedly post-developmental feel to the study of children and youth, in addition to a focus that problematizes space and scale. The chapter ends with a return to Darwin and Grosz’s re-reading of his work through Henri Bergson, and with her emphasis on sexual selection and difference rather than natural selection and dominance. Thinking about sexual selection leads Grosz to contexts of transformation and aesthetics rather than selectivity and supremacy, which in turn re-orientates approaches to child and youth geographies away from immanence, development, and prediction and towards tendency, emergence, dislocation, and surprise. Keywords

Darwin · Development · Post-child · Youth activism

1

Introduction

The increasing academic appreciation of affects and emotions, and embodiment and physical/biological activity on the ways children and young people change has led to efforts that relate children’s cognitive development to physical processes, hormonal changes, and brain maturation (Marshall 2013; Thomas 2014). Some of this work, and particularly work related to cognition and neurophysiological changes, has returned to Jean Piaget and evolutionary theory for inspiration (Montello 1995; Bjorklund and Ellis 2005; Feldman 2008, 2016; Gopnik 2016). The central questions posed in this work relate to “how the experience . . . of consciousness could possibly occur in a brain, central nervous system, and body that consists of no more than the physical elements that are found in its living matter” (Feldman 2008, p. 199). In challenging this question and particularly the problematic “no more than the physical elements” assumption, this chapter offers theoretical and philosophical reflection on the experience of consciousness and development, with an emphasis on development and post-development approaches to the study of children and young people. It begins, appropriately, with Charles Darwin before chasing neo-Darwinian influences and Enlightenment-based thinking through Piaget, but also Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Jaques Lacan as their work applies to child development. The continued importance of these psychoanalytic theorists’ thinking on consciousness and development is considered with its post-structural reinvigoration through work by feminists such as Jane Flax and Elizabeth Grosz, and neo-Lacanian geo-philosopher Slavoj Žižek. What feminists offer is, among other things, a rethinking of human (and cognitive) development with a focus on emotions, difference, and sexuality rather than rationality, competition, and survival-of-the-fittest. Neo-Lacanians, and particularly Žižek, broaden our understanding of what, precisely, pushes against consciousness and the psyche from, for want of a better concept, the outside. Žižek transforms Lacan’s big Other into pressures motivated by economic and political insidiousness. These perspectives provide a decidedly post-developmental feel to the study of children and youth – if not a post-child and post-human perspective (Braidotti 2013; Murris 2016;

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Aitken 2018) – in addition to a focus that problematizes space and scale in ways that should intrigue geographers. The chapter spends some time pondering the implications of a post-developmental perspective and ends with a return to Darwin and Grosz’s re-reading of his work through Henri Bergson, with emphasis on sexual selection and difference rather than natural selection and dominance. Bergson is an appropriate theorist for considering a different way of embracing consciousness and development, which does not negate embodiment and physicality, but nonetheless challenges the “no more than the physical elements” assumption of Feldman (2008, p. 99) – and other developmental and evolutionary theorists – as rooted in methodologies that do not necessarily reflect Darwinian thinking. Specifically, following a close reading of Darwin’s later writing on sexual selection, Grosz contends that transformation and aesthetics rather than selectivity and supremacy push evolutionary theory. In turn, I aver, these ideas appropriately reorientate approaches to child and youth geographies away from immanence, development, and prediction and towards tendency, emergence, dislocation, and surprise. Why is this theoretical and philosophical reflection important and what constitutes its geography? The concepts underpinning infancy, childhood, youth, and adolescence are necessarily linked to that of maturation and adulthood but the varied conceptualizations of these words are complicated through disempowering and depoliticizing webs of meaning that forefront, for example, precocious infants, terrible 2-year-olds, pubescent children, and gangly youths. Nearly 20 years ago, Gill Valentine, Tracey Skelton, and Deborah Chambers (1998, p. 4) reflected on contextualizing adjectives such as these by arguing that that much of current scientific concern derives from “anxiety about the undisciplined and unruly nature of young people (particularly working class youth) [that] has been repeatedly mobilized in definitions of youth and youth cultures for over 150 years.” Sharon Stephens (1995, p. 13) famously argues that although there is a growing consciousness of children at risk, there is also a growing sense of children as risk. In stories of street-children from Cairo to Beijing to Rio de Janeiro to Los Angeles, young people are often represented as malicious predators unshackled from moral and social responsibilities. In a dangerously Rousseauvian vein, neoliberal pundits tell us that these young people need to be educated and disciplined into sensible adults (cf. Rousseau 1962; Mitchell, this volume). Moreover, and disconcertingly, they are disciplined through space. In an early geographic study of seemingly dangerous youth in Los Angeles, Sue Ruddick (1996) argues that terms such as delinquent, punk, and runaway conflate into apodictic geographies that disenfranchise homeless young people from the spaces that serve their needs. That this penchant to declare truth in the adjectives used to describe the place of young people in society is essentializing and depoliticizing only raises more critically the need to understand their continued disenfranchisement. That this crisis takes place simultaneously in Rio de Janeiro, London, and Los Angeles is an important point. Activist young people – from the Rolezinhos in Brazil, the April 6 Movement in Egypt, the Pinguinös in Chile, the DREAMers in the USA (Aitken 2018), the Sunflower Movement in Taipei (Hsieh and Skelton 2018), and youth “occupiers” in a myriad of global cities – are seen by some as saviors and revolutionaries and by others as

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terrorists, thugs, and louts. As Stephens (1995, p. 8) pointed out, the “[c]rises – in notions of childhood, the experiences of children, and the sociology of childhood – are related to profound changes in a now globalized modernity in which the child was previously located,” but no longer finds a secure hold. Of course, in terms of children’s political aesthetics and youth activism, this lack of footing is not at all a bad thing if it is uncoupled precisely from spatial frames that herald political foreclosure (Massey 2005; Aitken 2014). To the degree that academics are intrigued by young people they attempt to gain a foothold on what is a slippery slope with a myriad of developmental, structural, evolutionary, immanent, and emergent ways of knowing children’s place in the world. The prevailing wisdom is that young people experience the world as it is manifest and they often push against its mores and criticisms, but they are also intimately part of the ideology, war, and corporate greed exported from the neoliberal boardrooms, nationalist/populist political rallies, and strategic command centers of Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, and London. The plasticity of terms such as child, teenager, and adult begs for more nuances than offered by traditional educational, cognitive, neurophysiological, and developmental theories as well as those emanating from contemporary children’s geographies. In what follows, I do not have too much to say about educational, cognitive and neurophysiological perspectives on child development per se; rather, I want to recognize forms of being and transformation that do not assume “consciousness [as] a kind of awareness of the results of successful stabilization of representations into relative equilibrated, stable structures” (Feldman 2008, p. 196, see also Montello 1995). To do so, I assume that all representations are a form of stasis (Massey 2005), and that healthy transformations and change (including forms of consciousness related to maturation, evolution, and development) emerge from an openness that appreciates serendipity, differentiation, and surprise, which are all factors that play into Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection. To that end, this chapter begins with Darwin and then pursues neo-Darwinian and Enlightenment ideas in the works of Freud, Piaget, Klein, Erickson, Winnicott, and Lacan before considering the development of young people as an “emergentist evolution” (Miquel 2007).

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Darwin’s Legacy, and Piaget’s Distorted Understanding of a Child’s Spatial and Environmental Development

To begin, I look at Darwin’s legacy for children’s geographers and the ways neo-Darwinian thinking influenced Piaget’s and others’ developmental theorems as a straightforward scientific mapping, and then consider how developmental and post-developmental thinking moved through the ideas of Freud, Lacan, Klein, and Winnicott by reconsidering the context of child development. Darwin’s complex influence on geography through the first half of the twentieth century is well documented (Stoddart 1966; Livingstone 1992). It is perhaps best to assume that Darwin’s contribution to contemporary understandings of child development is appreciated with a focus on how he conceived the human mind. For Darwin, the

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mind does not exist independent of the body, and is connected with identity and personality. He argued further that both humans and animals experience a range of emotions and reasoning capabilities, although he believed that the sense of aesthetics and ethics was more fully evolved in humans (Darwin 1998, p. 74). Darwin sought the evolutionary link between human minds and animal minds through empirical science, but he also assumed that his evolutionary hypothesis was traceable in the child’s ascent to adulthood. As part of his later work, Darwin (1887, A Biographical Sketch of an Infant) made a study of his son, the basis of which he described as observing a human child under the same terms and conditions as other “species.” Valerie Walkerdine (1984, p. 170) notes this conflation of human development with species evolution set the stage for the modern idea of “natural child development”; but was it something that Darwin elaborated or was that left to some of his students and what has come to be known as neo-Darwinianism? Neo-Darwinism is a modern synthesis of Darwin’s work that focuses on evolution (a term that Darwin did not use until the fifth edition of the Origin of the Species in 1859 (Stoddart 1966, p. 683)) through natural selection. Darwin supports his early thinking on natural selection by pointing to the role of artificial selection in the formation of domestic breeds, but this intervention is exercised by humans and in no way indicates that nature acts intentionally (Miquel 2007, p. 43). For Darwin, nature has neither purpose nor consciousness, so mapping species evolution onto beings with purpose and consciousness is at best a miss-application of his ideas. Although Livingstone (1992, p. 182) points out that reading an anthropomorphic element into the workings of natural selection “was a temptation that Darwin found hard to resist,” it is worth pointing out that this idea was reworked and revisioned by the scientists who followed in ways that would have distressed Darwin. That the development of the species may be, even metaphorically, read in the development of a child’s mind suggests a belief that children develop towards adulthood out of animality, and this is clearly not Darwin’s focus (Archard 1993, pp. 32–33). The conflation of species evolution and child development advanced into the theory of recapitulationism wherein an individual lifetime reproduces the patterns and stages of development in the species in a vastly scaled-down period (Davis and Wallbridge 1981). Livingston (1992, p. 187) notes that the most influential extensions of Darwin’s work into the social sciences came from a rejuvenation of the earlier evolutionary doctrines of Jean Baptiste Lamarck (which Darwin took for granted) into neo-Lamarckianism. Neo-Lamarkianism postulated that the response to environmental influence can be inherited and transmitted through the action of natural selection and came up with two connections between evolution and society. First, the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics held that the qualities gained by an organism in its life experience would be passed on and, second, the directive force of organic variation was attributable to will, habit, or environment. Neo-Lamarckianism provided an account of natural variations based upon environmental differences and the force of will and reason in equal amounts. Perhaps more intriguing for what will be argued later in this chapter is not the conflation between species evolution and child development but the eliding of emotions and environmental affects. Teresa Brennan (2004, p. 5) argues that subtle revisioning of

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Darwin’s early focus on emotions is evidenced through how his followers came to conflate affects with emotions: “Because of their observational bias, the lists descended from Darwin do not reckon with more complex affective states such as envy, jealousy, and love.” Darwin’s physiological consideration of environmental affects and emotions were reworked in what is called the William James-Carl Lange theory, which dictates that bodily responses give rise to affective states (Brennan 2004, p. 4); that is, emotions are derived solely from internal processes. The idea propagated the Cartesian belief that emotions are passive perceptions of bodily motions and changes, and so they can be causally tied to maturation and development. Descartes developed this foundation for modern science, which required the separation of mental discipline from the seemingly irrational and certainly unruly passions of the body. He inscribed on the body a modernist trope that structures corporeality as a mechanical substance reducible to itself (Aitken 2009, pp. 78–79). In geography, neo-Lamarckianism provided a set of principles upon which environmental determinism and possibilism could comfortably reside through the 1940s, but it was Piaget who took Darwin’s ideas and empiricism most stridently into a coherent child development theory where the importance of emotions and affects are dismissed as simple bi-products tied to hormones and bodily maturation. As the most influential developmental theorist of the twentieth century, Piaget was persuaded by the Darwinian notion that children enter the world with a genetically transmitted nature and the neo-Lamarckian notion that this nature enables them to adapt to their environments in rational and coherent ways. He also borrowed from John Locke’s related belief that a child’s first experiences are exclusively sensory and that although some capacity to reason is inborn, for the most part it requires education, maturation, and experience as the child grows older. At infancy, however, “consciousness arises after sustained efforts on the part of the subject to transform sense information into representations of objects, experiences and memories” (Feldman 2008, p. 196). According to Piaget (1952), reasoning about the environment is acquired in a well understood and seemingly normal course of human development. Where he differs from Locke is in his dismissal of the idea that a child’s ability to generate knowledge incrementally unfolds with experience. Piaget had problems with any notion of a continuous and fluid accretion of environmental knowledge because he favored the idea of qualitatively distinct and structured stages of development. As a structuralist, then, he believed that there exist specific stages of cognitive development and although this has raised important critiques over the years, there is a constructivist aspect of Piaget’s work that bears noting. As a constructivist, he believed that what we take as real is a construction of thought (Piaget 1971), and this aspect of Piaget’s work may be traced forward to the new sociology of childhood and to some contemporary thinking in children’s geographies. Like Locke, Piaget believed that ways of knowing are less likely to be inherited and more likely to form through complex interactions between maturation and socialization, between children and their environment. By adapting to change, intelligence develops for Piaget through the child’s active participation in the physical, social, and political environment, and this participation becomes an important springboard for Western ideas on childhood during the last third of the twentieth

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century, and particularly the policies that grew out of the new sociology of childhood (see ▶ Chap. 3, “Global South Research in Children’s Geographies: From Useful Illustration to Conceptual Challenge” by Ansell in this volume) and the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (see Aitken 2018). Piaget’s constructivist and structuralist leanings notwithstanding, clearly what was most appealing about his theories to geographers, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, was their founding in, and mutual support of, a Darwinian/Lockean empirical philosophy of science. In his methodological work, Piaget was critical of the empirical foundations of psychology based upon Freudian case studies and preferred, instead, methodologies involving experimental designs that leant themselves to statistical testing. Through a startling battery of novel experiments and innovative laboratory tests that included toys, ball games, hide-and-seek, sketch-maps, geometric manipulations, mapping exercises, and tests for motor speed and agility, Piaget and his students amassed empirical evidence that eventually developed into his four qualitatively distinct stages of intellectual growth: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational (Piaget 1952, 1954; Piaget and Inhelder 1956). By so doing, Piagetian theory prescribes for most children a linear, normal, and natural form of development where each stage is quantitatively and qualitatively different from that which precedes it and creates a formation wherein emotions and affective states have little or no bearing. From his experiments, Piaget asserted that infants construct only limited representations of their world, and it is only towards the end of the sensorimotor stage that any intelligence begins to form. In terms of spatial orientation, infants in their early stages of cognitive development are exclusively egocentric wherein all things are located relative to (or even as part of) the child. In Piaget’s pre-operational stage (from 2 to 7 years old), children begin to evoke mentally things that do not actually occur. For example, he argues that a child can imagine what will happen if a ball is dropped and it disappears under the couch. For Piaget, imagination abstracts the reality of the ball from the immediate presence of the child to where it exists but cannot be seen. Piaget’s example of abstracting the reality of the disappearing ball is curiously given, as it simultaneously reflects and dismisses Freud’s account of his 18-monthold grandson throwing small objects, including a wooden-spool with an attached thread, out of his cot, to be retrieved with great delight: “he beamed with an expression of interest and gratification” (Freud 1920). Freud coined this action, which his grandson repeated ad nauseam the fort (“gone”) and da (“here”) game (Freud 1920, cited in Kingsbury and Pile 2014, pp. 27–28) and argued that its repetitive nature stimulated pure pleasure. If for Freud, the fort/da game insinuates repetition and pleasure, then for Jacques Lacan it heralds entry into the mirror-stage. For Lacan, the child situates him or herself in the field of being because she or he “chooses being, jouissance, rather than sense” (Copjec 1994, p. 182, cited in Kingsbury and Pile 2014, p. 28). For Piaget precisely the same game is about maturation and the beginnings of apprehending the environment through cognitive abstraction. If for Freud there is part of his grandson in the wooden-spool as he becomes a subject of desire, and for Lacan the child thus situates herself or himself in the field of language ( fort/da), then for Piaget the child can now represent the world in purely symbolic terms and it can then operate upon them at an intuitive level.

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Spatially, the Piagetian child is still egocentric in that she has difficulty decentering herself from any one aspect of a situation. Nonetheless, children at this stage are able to operate within simple “topological geometries” and, as a consequence, may think of places in terms of so-called spatial primitives such as proximity and connectedness. That said, Piaget was at pains to distinguish his work from that of behaviorists who constructed children as separate from spatial stimuli. In his view, children actively participated in their environments but he nonetheless believed that space was a container for their activities, and in so doing, the power of space is lost: Doreen Massey (2005) poignantly asserts that when space is delimited in an absolute sense, it is no longer part of a world of wonder and surprise, and the political projects of infants, children, and young people are lost to abstractions. At the concrete operational stage (approximately 7–11-years old), Piaget tells us that the intuitive constructions of the pre-operational period become stabilized into higher forms of mental representation. Accordingly, children at this stage are now capable of linear thought. As a consequence, they can also abstract knowledge beyond self and no longer fuse or confuse their own point of view with those of others and, importantly, their connection with the environment loses its intuitive intimacy. Environmental relations, where place may be thought of in terms of linear projections of straight lines, are encompassed with notions of reversibility, composability, and association and are ultimately replaced by Euclidean metric relations (where the child can use a fixed coordinate system and distance measurements). At the formal operational stage, children are not only capable of linear thought but also discursive and logical reasoning. Reasoning is freed from “reality” in this stage so that children can abstract to new and novel contexts that they have not yet experienced. Hart and Moore (1973) elaborate Piaget’s qualitative stages as a progression from “action-in-space” to “perception-of-space” to “conceptions-aboutspace” (not to be confused with Lefebvrian notions of the political production of space, Hart and Moore are positing internal constructs and schemata). Spatial coordination and expansion are core elements in Piaget’s developmental ideas, and, at the height of the spatial quantification in the 1970s, geographers were quick to appropriate his model. To the degree that terms and concepts like reversibility, composability, and association mirrored those used in the nascent field of Geographic Information Science, it is wholly appropriate that they were applied to how scientifically oriented geographers approached the study of children and culture (cf. Montello 1995). Waves of empirical researchers weaned on Piaget and excited about GIS gathered evidence to suggest that successive levels of cognitive development related specifically to the child’s orientation in space, environmental competence, and “mapping accuracy” as they became able to handle more and more sophisticated and abstracted geographic concepts (Matthews 1984a, b, 1986; Golledge et al. 1985, 1993, 1995; Downs et al. 1988; Downs and Liben 1989, 1991, 1997). A suggestion that relates to both children’s spatial knowledge acquisition and their environmental mastery is the scale-based notion that competency and capacity increases as the child’s horizons expand from the crib to the home, garden, neighborhood, city, nation, and so forth. In his theory of development and environmental

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mastery, Erik Erikson (1969, 1977) argued that competence comes through an expanding relationship between a child and three successive scales of environmental contact: the autospace, the microsphere, and the macrosphere. The autosphere is an egocentric sensory environment, or the “first geography,” that then expands with age (Erikson 1977, p. 11). The notion of a child’s expanding horizons articulates a particular kind of scalar geography onto Piaget’s developmental sequence. Borrowing from Erikson, Robin Moore’s (1986) ecological framework suggests nested fields or overlapping territories – rather like Russian-dolls – that expand with age. He also borrows heavily from biological metaphors to suggest that children occupy a particular kind of ecological niche, which is originally tied to parental care and then neighborhood supervision before the young person gains autonomy. These kinds of neo-Darwinian perspectives dominated developmental theories from the 1950s onwards. Most, like those emanating from the work of Piaget and Erikson, simply avoided Freud’s and Lacan’s concerns about the fragmented self, repetition, and difference. A notable and yet somewhat problematic exception is prescribed by the work of John Bowlby (1951, 1988) who took on Freud by focusing on contexts of proximity, care, and attachment from an asexual perspective. Bowlby argued that proximity and attachment rather than separation and fragmentation are the key to understanding how a child develops. He developed a series of developmental psychoanalytic theories that were anti-Freudian in the sense that they offered a biological rather than a sexual motive for attachment to the mother, care, and development. He saw the new-born infant as an unsociable creature whose “proper” socialization and development necessitate proximity and a mysterious process of attachment to the mother. Ethology provided an inspiration for Bowlby’s work and, from this base in the scientific study of animal behavior, he argued that attachment has little to do with sexuality. Anguished by the extreme effect of separations that he observed in various species of animals as well as people, Bowlby (1988) notes that the person who matters most is neither the feeder nor the sexual partner but the one who stays near and offers protection against danger, the unknown, and loneliness. Bowlby joined with developmental psychologist, Mary Ainsworth, to experiment with what they called “attachment patterns.” Through observations of mother-child interactions around the globe, Ainsworth (1972) suggested that the child’s exploration of the environment beyond the mother is a negotiated developmental process for both the parent and the child, but that attachments are nonetheless enduring. Like Bowlby, she claimed that care attachments are natural, instinctive, and that their disruption can cause permanent psychological damage. A recent critique of this framework relates to geographies of care and dependence that are tightly connected to proximity wherein there is a hegemonic and problematic understanding that we care for first, and have our first responsibilities towards, those nearest in, which then moves out in a persistent Russian-doll nested geography of ethics, care, and responsibility (Massey 2005, p. 186). This scale dependency is problematized in a different way by studies of mothers migrating away from children for long periods and the havoc that these extended separations perpetrate on mother-child relations and the mental wellness of both mother and child (cf. Pratt 2012). In sum, the nested hierarchy of Russian-dolls relates to Erikson’s and Moore’s ideas of children fitting

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particular ecological niches at particular stages of development and suggests a hugely problematic neo-Darwinian connection to environments wherein the niche also exerts naturally selected and scale-dependent pressures on the child. The work of Bowlby and Erikson is of consequence if we want to connect natural child development to Darwin’s ideas about survival of the fittest and natural selection, but what if we are more concerned about difference and sexual selection, sometimes referred to as Darwin’s “other theory” (Workman and Reader 2015)? Bowlby’s work notwithstanding, many Freudian and post-Freudian theorists speculate upon the sexual nature of attachment and its relationship to how a child is gendered, although many feminists are rightly suspicious of talk about a natural development or the seemingly sacred bond between mother and child. Nonetheless, some are convinced by the Lacanian notion that the dynamics of desire in the mother-child relationships underscore the mother’s desiring subjectivity as well as her pivotal role in producing a desiring subject in the child. For Lacan and Freud, this desire focuses on the phallus, which comes to signify loss, division, and a fragmented identity that can only be reforged through connection with the maternal. The child contrives to recover its place in the natural/maternal and to overcome its loss by attaining what the mother wants, namely, the phallus. Of course, the phallus is symbolic in a Freudian world of power and dominance, but it is also the fatal flaw of desire. For Lacan, this connection – the child’s place – is only pursuable indirectly through the order of language (Blum and Nast 1996, pp. 570–571). The order of language and culture preempts the order of the phallus. Lacan’s order is also about desire and power, but it uncouples some of Freud’s problematic sexual tautology. Freudian theorists see the development of childmother separation solely in terms of sexuality, and divisions and losses around the recognition of the power of the mother figure. With all that said, it is misleading to suggest that either Freudian or Lacanian theorists are readily prepared to see children in sexual terms because childhood is still represented as a period of asexual innocence and this innocence is one of the aspects of loss with development. Mary Thomas (2014) challenges this idea from the perspective of child sexuality, and an important and missed developmental context. She argues that “children’s geographies must broaden sexuality as a concept, away from the practices of identity and sexual activity, and beyond discourse” (2014, p. 202). Thomas pushes a perspective that respects and does not diminish children’s sexuality. Using psychoanalytic theory from Laplanche and Pontalis, Thomas notes that sexuality embraces a range of activities, desires, and excitations from infancy onwards, and that it is the infant’s, child’s, and young person’s own intimate process for grappling with how to find a place in the world of parents and, latterly, peers. The infant/child/youth forms “its own theories, desires, and even its own ‘language’ of sexuality, through unconscious processes that can be inaugurated through encounters with adults, but never can be reduced to the reality of those relations, times, or spaces” (Thomas 2014, p. 202). What she means by this is that maturation is not about a Freudian loss of sexual innocence but rather it is about finding a place of sexuality that might be different from earlier places. It is about becoming other in a world that does not try to contrive the sexualities of others, whatever their ages.

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Lacan’s locating of identity in language stands in opposition to the biologism of Bowlby, Ainsworth, and others that pervaded developmental theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and it stands in counter-distinction to Thomas’ ideas about sexual language. As Blum and Nast (1996, p. 569) note, Lacan’s anti-biologism leads him to locate subjectivity entirely in language which obviates bodies and spaces as effects and containers, respectively. The “real” – some form of pre-discursive natural space or primordial connection with mother/nature – is lost for Lacan during the crisis of loss of omnipotence that accompanies the mirror stage. Lacan’s mirror stage is likened to Freud’s Oedipal stage as the time when a child recognizes itself as different from others and, importantly, not omnipotent. The child, metaphorically, looks into a mirror and sees themselves for the first time as different and separate: a monadic being. For Freud and Piaget, prior to this stage there is an egocentric stage when the child believes that she or he is the center of the world. Thus, when deprived of a favored blanket or bunny, or the mother’s breast, the infant believes that it is losing part of itself. There is a curious geography to this that suggests an existential distance, which only develops as a child becomes aware that she or he is separate from the blanket, the bunny, the mother, the environment. Existential geographers argue that after this separation, there is a loss that we spend the rest of our lives trying to find again and to reconnect with; a vaguely remembered and imagined wholeness (cf. Samuels 1978). Language, for Lacan, is what the subject embraces to connect with culture and society as an aid to help come to terms with this existential distance and the crisis of loss of omnipotence. This crisis leaves the individual unable to recapture the real except through fantasies that are constructed in and mediated by language. With Lacan, language fulfills the function Freud attributed to the condensation and displacement of original desires during the “... mirror stage, which can be viewed as a chain of signifiers (having primacy over the signified) that connect the speakers to the real” (Walkerdine 1988, p. 191). Although they note that Lacan’s real is anything but a naïve notion of “reality,” Blum and Nast (1996, p. 561) point out that there are times when this order resembles “nature” in a way that both opposes culture and is connotatively linked to the maternal. Importantly, for Lacan, the real is regulated and controlled not only by language but also (occupying the same position as language) by the symbolic presence of a third party, the father, capitalism, religion, the big Other. If children do not separate from the real – through something controlled by language and the big Other – they are subject to the invidious and psychotic lure of the maternal. Abiding by paternal laws (the Law-of-the-Father, patriarchy) through religion, for example, ensures the prohibition of incest and the consequent punishment (of castration) guarantees the developmental transformation of a child into the symbolic chain of signification. Without understanding why or overtly choosing, the child – both girls and boys – become complicit with patriarchy and the big Other. For Lacan, then, difference/alterity is founded in renouncing the mothers’ body and problematically embracing the big Other as part of ourselves. Of course, many feminists point out that the writings of Freud and Lacan are androcentric and misogynistic, positioning feminine sexuality as the dark continent, the forbidden place of the Oedipal myth, and women as deviations from the male norm (Grosz 1990). Alternatively, some feminists find promise in Lacan’s account of the formation of subjectivity because “his problematization of what psychology usually

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takes for granted enables us to shift the axis through which we pose our questions” (Urwin 1984, p. 275; but see also Grosz 1990). Constituting the critical processes around which subjectivity is produced, Lacan suggests that language acquisition provides continuity in society since the complex of signifiers that is transferred is, in effect, reproductive. That is, the relative stability of language foments reproduction through successive generations. This proves an intriguing platform from which to address the persistence of dominant and repressive systems of knowledge, but Lacan’s account of the use of symbols is problematic for some feminists because it grows out of the essentialist and apolitical view of human nature elaborated above. For Freud, narcissism is positioned as an irreducible aspect of human nature, the quality of which necessitates selfidentification and the splitting of the subject. For Lacan, language rescues the ego in a way that is preferable to direct submission and dependency (Bondi 1996). Nonetheless, individuals are henceforth split by the need to voice their needs to an other who is independent; language’s persistence and relative stability across generations establishes independent forces in religions, capitalism, the big Other. To further complicate things, Lacan’s language chain of signification is rooted in the narcissistic stage and operates as an independent force through subsequent stages of development. Language, then, is not only relatively stable between generations it is stable through the individual’s lifespan. Lacan argues that language and the big Other provide symbols that pre-exist the individual and, thus, structure object relationships that are formulated throughout life, even although the individual labors under the illusion that he creates his own symbols. In Lacan’s framework, the symbolic is patriarchal and the social order is regulated by an abstract father whose position of power is inviolable. Individuals cannot appropriate or manipulate symbols but are confined by a preexisting system of signification. This denial of agency leaves culture as a static entity hovering somewhere above but also part of the developing child; and culture as a static entity disables any opportunity for discourse reproduced between the child and culture. So, although the transference of signifiers through language acquisition is the basis of reproduction, what is reproduced is fixed by heteronormative assumptions. Feminist and post-structural critiques of Piaget’s child-centered position, Freud’s Oedipal journey, and Lacan’s mirror stage point out that they are forms of knowledge that are instrumental and masculinist to the extent that their social and cultural construction is hidden in claims of universal truth. Sexual and racial identities are either not considered at all or are thought to be irrelevant or subsidiary to the “true” process of development. The “plasticity” of sexuality and racial development provides a focus for many theorists who down-play the universality of psychological and social phenomena and focus rather on their creation as personal, cultural, and affective products (Henriques et al. 1984; Walkerdine 1988; Nast 2000; Thomas 2014). For poststructuralists there is no “true nature of the child.” Adherents to this perspective are not comfortable placing children into particular developmental or sexual stages, or racial categories, although important characteristics and traits may be evident at certain ages and under certain laboratory conditions, such as those set up by Piaget, Erikson, and others. Post-structural perspectives de-center grand-scientific theories and metanarratives in favor of discourses which take into account not only the social construction of their own knowledge base but also their emotive and affective contexts.

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As noted above and to provide a conduit to the next section, it is important to remember that Piaget was hugely influenced not only by John Locke’s empiricism but also his theory of the mind. Locke is best known for his rational empiricism, but his theory of the mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity, and particularly political identity and contemporary conceptions of “the self.” Although he had read Locke, Darwin’s influences came in larger measure from Scottish Enlightenment historian and philosopher David Hume who is best known for reworking thinking about human nature and the mind away from divine determinism to a product of reason and insight. Presaging the basis of science for the next century and a half, Hume’s understanding of the world is predicated upon radical skepticism, rational insight, and empirical validation. But his conception of reason is not that of Descartes or even Locke. In his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/1955), written when he was only 26 years old, Hume counters the prevailing Western notion of reason by famously arguing both normatively and positively that “[r]eason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them . . . A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification” (ibid., p. 415). Arthur Herman (2001, p. 199) argues, albeit somewhat polemically, that Hume’s “ought only to be” stood 2000 years of philosophy on its head. The “ought to be” points out that although reason has a role, that role is purely instrumental (not casual) in that it teaches us how to get what we want, but it is hugely important to recognize that what we want is determined by emotions. Given that Darwin found in Hume’s Treatise “a theory by which to work” (Huntley 1972, p. 457), it is surprising how little evolutionary theory was couched in emotional and affective contexts, and how little developmental theorists like Piaget, Erikson, and Bowlby were influenced by this work. If Hume’s “ought only to be” stands preceding philosophies and Enlightenment thinking on their heads, then re-reading Darwin’s ecological theories from the standpoint of difference and sexual selection turns on its head the tension between niche-related maturation and the idea that children are born with the desires and affects that will determine their fate. This tension is at the heart of some of the ways geographers think about children as connected to their environments in inseparable ways and/or as orchestrators of their own fates. I’ll get to that tension more explicitly soon, but in what follows, and to presage the turnaround from Darwin’s ecological theories, I want to focus on the coherent critique of developmental theory through post-Enlightenment assessments of psychoanalytic theory that lead to post-development thinking.

3

Thinking Child Development Through Post-Enlightenment Critiques

Twenty years ago I wrote a paper entitled “Gender, Power and Crib Geographies” with Tom Herman, which spoke to some of the problems of Piagetian theory as it was used by geographers and environmental psychologists at the time (Aitken and Herman 1997). Tom and I were concerned that Piaget’s theories and his empirical

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laboratory experiments with Inhelder, as just elaborated, were used as the primary means to understand and verify the development of young children within the context of their spaces and environments. Consummate harbingers of the benefits of mapping, place identity and knowing how to get around, geographers and environmental psychologists were keen to explore how children grew into their understandings of the world, but the focus seemed too instrumental and dependent on specific categories of existence, which is clearly now seen as hugely influenced by Darwin’s ideas of natural selection. Tom and I voiced our concerns about this focus with some of the well-trodden critiques of Piaget famously laid out by Valerie Walkerdine and Erica Burman, and then looked at some of the problems of rationalization, compartmentalization, naming, and objective distancing that shows up not just in Piaget but also in Freud and Lacan. We argued that D.W. Winnicott (1971) and his notion of “transitional space” was a much more fruitful way forward in terms of a post-Enlightment view of play and creativity rather than logic and rationality as the qualities most indicative of our being. It seems to me that Grosz’s re-reading of Darwin from a post-Enlightment perspective that focuses on difference and sexual selection rather than the masculinist robustness of natural selection and survival of the fittest also has some bearing on how we can approach the study of children. In this section, I revisit some the ideas of Winnicott (as well as Freud and Lacan) as they relate to young children with an eye to the last 20 years of post-structural critique of developmental theory, which takes me into psychoanalytic and geophilosophical thinking from Walter Benjamin, Jaques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek and then resolves into Cindi Katz’s idea of counter-topographies and (from Benjamin) children’s play as transformative and revolutionary.

3.1

Psychoanalytic Mappings

Recently, the psychoanalytic mapping practices that dominated a lot of the early work in the study of the development of a child’s consciousness have been reassessed to make the point that movement through the world is an emotional and not necessarily a rational or sequenced development. Freud’s 1933 map of the psyche (caricaturing the Ego, Id, Superego, preconscious, unconscious, conscious, repression, desire, and so forth), for example, can be considered in an emotive, playful, and spatial way. In the words of Kingsbury and Pile (2014, pp. 1–2), “Freud seems to propose that psyches are . . . tied to geography, that desires can be thwarted by geography and that geography intervenes in even the most intimate human relationships.” Freud’s writing is filled with elaborations of emotions, spatial thinking, and geographical imaginings in addition to worldly descriptions of nodes, paths, areas, and maps. His map of the psyche is clearly topographical, dividing the mind into three regions: the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. Within these areas, there are spatial understandings of the relationships between the “agencies” of the Id, Ego, and Superego. The two important points that Kingsbury and Pile (2014, p. 2) make in their interrogation of Freud’s writing is that, first, he uses spatial metaphors like hill country, plains and chains of lakes to describe the varied configurations of

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the psyche’s landscape (a forest of dots traverses the Ego) and, second, that this map should not be “pictured with sharp frontiers like the artificial ones drawn in political geography” (Freud 1933, pp. 72–79). Freud’s psyche, then, although structural, is less a “clearly marked territory, than a jumble of ill-defined terrains and intermingled peoples” (Kingsbury and Pile 2014, p. 3). It is nonetheless a topological landscape where certain things are close and others are further away, and although there are no clear boundaries or demarcations somehow all are capable of connecting with each other in some way. Additionally, for Freud, the energy of the drive-forces flow through this landscape like water flowing through a valley, shaping and sculpting the psyche as they go. This kind of movement and indeterminacy is the very stuff of contemporary poststructural geography. Kingsbury and Pile (2014, p. 3) assure us that Freud’s model is developmental, but in a non-linear way: the landscape changes over time and the course of the river is constantly modified, “probably by repression, but certainly by upbringing, mainly [through] family life and social conventions.” For Freud, development is not necessarily predictable or rational in terms of some kind of sequence or progression. Not only is the psyche developmentally fluid, it is also open, as suggested by bulges and the lack of closure at the bottom of the 1933 map. Although Freud’s daughter Anna was the first psychoanalyst to work with children, Melanie Klein was the child psychologist whose work ties most closely with contemporary children’s geographies. Klein (1932) developed a theory of “positions,” which may be thought of as “situated knowledge” (cf. Haraway 1988) in terms of how a child experiences objects, with the accompanying conflicts and anxieties between the impulses and defenses that the ego sets up against the intervention of the external world. According to Klein – in language that anticipates later feminist engagements with differentiation and alterity – children employ actions such as projection, introjection, splitting, and idealizing parts of themselves in order to cope with the conflicting relations between the outer world and inner life. Klein’s “positions,” then, refer to the ways the ego is organized in terms of internal object relations, anxieties, and characteristic actions and defenses. Children’s oscillations between “positions” continue throughout life and make up the movements between periods of emotional integration, disintegration, and fragmentation. Developed as an attempt to revision regressive and individualistic aspects of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Klein’s notion of object relations was originally conceived to render the self as social and playful. Her depiction of object relations is richer than those developed by Freud because other subjects are not converted into objects (e.g., mothers) and the recalcitrant material of narcissistic drives. Some feminists find object relations theory less androcentric because it de-emphasizes the role of the phallus in child development and it downplays the role of the unconscious in the development of sexual identity (Bondi 1996). Jane Flax (1990, p. 110) notes that much of what constitutes object relations theory is more compatible with feminist post-structuralist views of the body than Freudian or Lacanian analysis because it does not require a fixed or essentialist view of “human nature.” Going beyond the notion that Freudian id-instincts are problematic for the adaptation to some form of reality, object relations analysts focus on the experiencing person, the self or ego, which becomes identifiable in the child as she

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or he receives the emotional effect of the id-demands. That effect is managed and manifest in the relationships that the child has with objects, loosely defined to include both people and places. The wrenching processes of self-identification that Lacan portrays as intrinsic aspects of desire and the crisis of the loss of omnipotence – illusion, alienation, and self-estrangement – are treated by object relations analysts as expressions of self that can be inspected and transformed. In her concern with the development of the social self, for example, Klein suggests that infantile desires – some of which are violent, sadistic, and paranoid – are associated with discomfort and so, countering Freud (and Lacan), she notes that mothers are not responsible for infantile fantasies or the emotions of their children. Rather, the infant’s earliest experience of social relationships is when a caregiver provides comfort against hunger, cold, and so forth. Moreover, any pre-oedipal one-ness with the mother is lost during the existential distancing described earlier when the child sees itself metaphorically in a mirror as separate, and develops a sense of borders and self-hood, and a sense of the social.

3.2

Potential Spaces

Winnicott was a student of Klein, but his notion of potential or transitional space takes our understanding of children in a different direction from Klein’s focus on integration, disintegration, and fragmentation because he emphasized, very specifically and with intent, the freedoms that come through play. Unlike Klein, Winnicott does not separate the child from her environment in terms of self-discovery, objective distancing, existential angst, naming, rationalizing or compartmentalizing. Instead, he proposes a fluid, recursive process of separation involving intuition, experimentation, and play. Rather than seeking fundamental categories of relations, Winnicott’s (1965) perspective illuminates infinite possibilities for personal development by attempting to describe, at least in part, the creative processes through which children establish perspectives that reconcile the inner reality of the self with the external reality of society. The infant trauma that Freud and Klein recognized as a crisis of reality and omnipotence is thought by Winnicott (1988) to open up possibilities for positive contacts with people and places. Winnicott believed that recognition of a world beyond the self (and the disillusionment brought about by the realization that she may be powerless in that world) initiates for the infant a realignment of “self” and “object/other.” For Winnicott (1971), objects can be “annihilated” or “erased” by the child with removal from selfcentered knowledge, but when the objects continue to exist independent of the child’s awareness of them, they may engender a new significance in relation to the child. What this means, and Winnicott (1971) was quite precise about this, is that the child creates a safe space where the favorite blanket, the bunny, and/or the mother can be killed. The potential or transitional space then is a place for creativity and play but also for the child it is a place where darker notions can be experimented with; that the favored object or person can be killed through the child’s seeming god-like omnipotence. When the blanket/bunny/mother remains intact, then the child’s lack of omnipotence is realized and a new relationship to the object is possible. Moreover, the object’s new significance

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indicates to the child some quality of the self that is left after the annihilation of the object. Within this framework, transitional spaces are defined as spaces where connections are maintained between an external world and an internal conception of self. They are safe places for experimentation and play. Jane Flax (1990, p. 116) argues that Winnicott’s notion of transitional spaces is one of the most important contributions to post-Enlightenment thinking because it decenters reason and logic in favor of “playing with” and “making use of” as the qualities most characteristic to being human. In addition to highlighting play and affect over logic and reason, Winnicott suggests that it is out of transitional spaces that culture arises, which is very different from Lacan’s notion of language/culture (see Aitken and Herman 1997). In a recent study, I suggest the importance of transitional spaces in the context of relations to the body politic and the state (Aitken 2018, see also Flax 1993). If Winnicott’s “good enough” mother enables a child to play and explore relations in transitional spaces, what then constituted the good-enough state? I use examples of from Slovenia, Romania, Brazil, Chile, and the USA where young people push against state laws, strictures, repressions, and erasures to argue that at some level Winnicottian notions have some currency, although I re-theorize them through Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism and locatable feminist politics (2013) and Lauren Berlant’s (2011, 2012) feminist ideas about cruelty, optimism, desire, and love. Like Piaget, Freud, and Klein, Winnicott’s primary concern was with how a child negotiates between an egocentricism (and one-ness with the world) that characterizes infancy and recognition of an external world, and the distinctions between self and other through the process of separation and individuation, but he did so with a concern for emergence and play rather than immanence and omnipotence. For Winnicott, separation means establishing a sense of differentiation with a primary caregiver, usually the mother, and with care environments. According to Winnicott (1965, 1988), the process is the creation of a self that is different from and simultaneously in relation (rather than in opposition) to a caring other and environment. Unlike Freud (and like Piaget), Winnicott believed that separation between the child and their external environment is generated by the child’s need for knowledge. Separation involves a sense of boundaries, including a body and a sense of self with access to three realities: inner, transitional (or potential), and outer. This is fundamentally different from Klein’s idea of “positions” because it articulates the coalescence of three spatial spheres that are overlapping and interdependent. Individuation involves establishing a constellation of personal and unique characteristics, experiences, and skills in conjunction with impressions, values, beliefs, and a relatively coherent inner world in relation to fluid outer experiences. Taken together, these aspects of individuation are the creative core of being and aliveness. For Winnicott, unlike Freud and Klein, separation is not necessarily painful or a blow to the infant’s narcissism or illusion of omnipotence. Rather, it is characterized as a transition into a productive period of self-realization. Of course there is a problematic penchant for reductionism in Winnicott’s account of separation and individuation as well as the possibility of hiding power relations within a perspective that suggests a softer, less traumatic split between subject and object. Hidden power relations can be dealt with adequately from more politically

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focused engagements with Lacan and Žižek, but first it is important to make a crowning point for the post-structural power of Winnicott’s idea. The important point of Winnicott’s object relations to post-structuralism is that the nature of “childhood” necessarily changes as the objects around the child – societal politics, social relations, and family structures – change. Although Winnicott’s notion of transitional space may seem overly reductionist, it nonetheless offers the possibility to mess up and make fuzzy attempts to establish categories of existence. Transitional space, he argues, “. . . is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the individual, but it is not the external world . . . Into this play area the child gathers objects or phenomena from external reality and uses these in the service of inner or personal reality” (Winnicott 1971, p. 51). Existing as a space that simultaneously separates and unites internal and external existence, transitional space represents “a neutral area of experience which will not be challenged.” Certain objects such as teddy bears or security blankets may be part of transitional spaces because they are the first area of experience that is neither self nor mother. Objects of this kind are important as part of the caring environment because they help reduce anxiety, and they are of great importance to the development of early geographies in that they serve as an aid to the child’s exploration away from the nest of the crib and the arms of the mother. A new relationship is established with the mother when she survives destruction beyond the awareness of the infant. What does this mean? As noted above, one of Winnicott’s paradoxes is that the infant must “destroy” or “annihilate” their primary caregiver in order to enter into a relationship with them. This is true of all objects and it happens within the safety of the transitional space. The child removes objects from self-centered knowledge through agency. The survival of the object enables the child to perceive that she is not omnipotent and that the object has an existence outside of her awareness (like the wooden-spool of Freud’s grandson disappearing outside of his crib), and this is not necessarily a traumatic experience, indeed it is more-often-than-naught joyful. In this way, the world is shared and a meaningful reality is co-created. This can only occur once the object has successfully “survived” the child’s destructive fantasies. And the child also survives in the sense that Lauren Berlant (2015) means when she talks about “living in ellipses” (a metaphor with an uncanny resemblance to transitional spaces). Berlant defines her ellipses as spaces where what is known meets what is unknowable. The problem with objects, she avers, is that they are always inadequate, which then turns back on the inadequacy of the self because the conditions of belonging cannot be presumed. For Berlant, a transitional space is not only playful but comedic in the sense that the child also falls apart without ceasing to exist. To the degree that the child is part of the object, as noted above, part of the child’s identity is destroyed during the object’s annihilation. For Berlant, there is something quite comedic about losing part of the self in this kind of way. The failure of omnipotence for the child does not precipitate a crisis but, rather, a comedic episode filled with laughter, giggles, and frivolity. For the child, the survival of the object – whether a person, a place, or a favorite teddy bear – means that it can be safely hated, repudiated, and rebelled against, but it can also be joked with, loved, and accepted in a new way. Within Winnicott’s framework, events of this kind strengthen the

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child’s self-esteem and independence while fostering care and dependence. Trust is the confidence gained by the object’s survival of the child’s destructiveness. The trust foments from the safety of the transitional space and pushes towards more creativity and imagination. Unlike Freud (and Lacan) and more like Deleuze and Guattari, Winnicott’s perspective outlines active and positive experiences with objects, environments, desires, and fantasies. Rather than a world in which there are only significant tensions between self and other, a world dominated by lacks that are debilitating and gaps that can never be bridged, Winnicott’s world is one of desire, play, frivolity, fun, connection, and imagination. Importantly, from poststructural formations and assemblages that involve the child, the non-child and the more-than-child interpretations emerge from neither the child nor the object but from the movement of child to object and object to child in a world where desire is positive and desiring is not about trying to reestablish something that is lost forever (Aitken 2015, 2018). For Winnicott, transitional space is a safe place for experimentation and play because it lies beyond the challenge of society’s rules, and it is a place from which society’s rules may be safely challenged. The idea of transition through space describes a space within which both the child and society are treated as dialectically interrelated moments of human action. Culture, politics, and symbolism are not immutable structures that necessarily define children, but rather children contest these structures in the process of creating future cultures, politics, and symbolisms (Aitken and Herman 1997). Culture is not seen as Freud’s external and coercive “law of the father,” which forces the child to separate from the mother and embrace an abstract and immutable patriarchal culture through complicity with the big Other. Rather, there is the possibility of the child bringing something of her inner self to the traditions and practices of a culture in order to be able to make use of them. In this account, the agency of the child shapes her cultural practice and vice versa. Also, according to this account, the infant’s ability to choose and utilize transitional objects begins the process of symbolization. For Winnicott (1971, p. 102), the capacity to play and the process of symbolization expand “...into creative living and into the whole cultural life of man [sic.].” Culture and politics, like play, are not only something that the child can “make use of,” but they are also traditions to which she can bring her inner self. As a post-Enlightenment perspective on something that is not always or even rational, Winnicott nonetheless does not help unpack the political potential of transitional spaces, and for this I return to the work of Jaques Lacan and, one of his most vocal and rhetorical interpreters and champions, Slavoj Žižek (cf. Aitken 2014).

3.3

The Politics of Potential Spaces

Lacan’s (1992) “topology of subjectivity” explores how psychic life takes place. For Freud, the splitting of the subject occurs with the Oedipal stage, and omnipotence and narcissism are irreducible aspects of human nature and are necessary precursors

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to self-identification. Lacan moves beyond this with his attention to symbolism, particularly language, in relation to self-identification. A child goes through the famous Lacanian “mirror stage” at around 6-months of age whereby she recognizes a distinct physical body, both in herself and the person of the mother. Imperfect mirroring by the (m)other, which is inevitable with growing self-awareness (and without the aid of a transitional space to safely dispatch the mother), forces the infant to recognize her dependence and induces a crisis of self-esteem. As noted earlier, for Lacan, language rescues the ego in a way that is preferable to direct submission and dependency. It induces meaning, which creates some structure and stability for the infant who is stuck in a place of non-meaning. For Lacan (1978), a child’s selfidentity emerges through this existential process of “alienation” and is situated in a shadowy place of “non-meaning,” which results from a forced choice between being and meaning, which is a far-cry from Winnicott’s playful potential space. Nonetheless, the child is henceforth split by the need to voice her needs to an “other” who is independent. For Lacan, subjects do not have identities but are beings created in the fissure of a radical split during the mirror stage. The identity that seems to be that of the subject is, according to Lacan (1983, p. 5), a mirage that finds form when the subject fashions an image of itself by identifying with others’ perceptions of it. The child’s grasp of her boundaries becomes firmer with the separation of objects and other people, but these others retain an aura of presence (what Lacan calls object petit autre). Constituting the critical process through which subjectivity is produced, Lacan suggests that language acquisition provides continuity in society since the complex of signifiers that is transferred through language is, as noted above, reproductive. Because language provides symbols that preexist the individual, they structure object relations that are formulated throughout life, even although the child labors under the illusion that she creates her own symbols. This does not mean that language is immutable and intractable but is, rather, a structure that organizes transformation and manages transitions. If this is kept in mind, then Lacan’s account provides an intriguing platform not only to address the persistence of domination and repressive systems of knowledge but also their overthrow. Herein lies an important political move beyond Winnicott. Obviating the nested ecological niche and Russian-doll metaphors described earlier as a problematic scaling of worldview with maturation and contexts of care based solely on proximity, Žižek (2006) raises questions that relate to scaling up the question of othering and transitional spaces to larger political issues such as neo-liberal capitalism, and the seeming tensions between nationalisms and globalization. In considering a Lacanian perspective on global economic restructuring and capitalism, for example, Žižek suggests that our unconscious is moved from position S (subject grappling with non-meaning) to position $ (a void of negativity in the form of the big Other). How do children and young people become-the-same (e.g., negative, cynical, bored, paralyzed, non-responsive) under the tutelage and strictures of capitalism or nationalism? And how do they push back against this tutelage of the big Other to become other? For Žižek (2008, pp. 67–68), raging against an anonymous socioeconomic assemblage (the chimera of capitalism) that deprives “the large majority of people of any kind of cognitive mapping” is an

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“utterly senseless” form of protest. His use here of the term “cognitive mapping” comes from Fredric Jameson’s reworking of the idea in his Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992) away from the formal and rational processes famously described by Kevin Lynch (1960) to the idea of the politically unconscious that pushes against capitalist urges. Žižek (2008) argues that most forms of protest are not political acts because nothing changes; they are acting out in the form of a spectacle that addresses the figure of the big Other, but leaves the big Other undisturbed in its place. The big Other is almost always an unconscious figure of an authoritarian super-ego whereby the symbolic order and spectacle of capitalism governs the formation, at least in part, of the subject’s self-identity (but this can also be populism, nationalism, or neo-liberal ideals). To the extent that with language the other is lost and the self is found, it is nonetheless a self where the presence of les objets petits autre is palpable and so, for Lacan, the child is transformed into a subject of history, geography, and language through the mirror stage and, as a consequence, is inculcated into and develops along lines prescribed by the law of the father and the big Other (becoming-the-same). In this sense, the big Other is a network of symbolic (e.g., patriarchal, religious, capitalist, nationalist) relations that are part of everybody’s subjectivity, irrespective of whether they are appropriated by individual or collective subjects. Žižek (2010, p. 326) embraces the Lacanian psychoanalytic distinction between acting out and le passage à l’acte. The former is an inconsequential fart whereas the latter is “a violent explosion” that “destroys the symbolic link” with the big Other. For Žižek, and other neo-Lacanians, le passage à l’acte is a radical ethical act that heralds the demise of the big Other, which comes not so much from violent protest (although it can) but through an act that requires a radical transformation of the subject. Toppling the big Other is only possible when there is simultaneously change from within that also changes ensuing and pursuant external forces through une passage à l’acte. This is a radical ethical act that transforms the subject and all her contexts, including the big Other. This assemblage, this transformation, may be thought of as a Jamesonian cognitive map that is a charting of the political unconscious, but one more constructively and specifically related to reproduction and play, as a countertopography. As noted above, Fredric Jameson (1992) engages Kevin Lynch’s idea of the cognitive map, but deploys is in a much less mechanistic way. Whereas Lynch uses cognitive mapping to reveal the image of the city in a very structured way, Jameson suggests that it is possible to map a political unconscious – as a form of collective subjectivity – that can effectively rage against and topple the big Other. This requires a revolution that is simultaneously on the inside and the outside. The idea of play as a radical space of becoming other (on the inside) and topping the big Other (on the outside) may be understood in children through Walter Benjamin’s (1978) idea that play is not just mimetic. Play is not only the sense of copying something but is also a radical flash of inspiration and creativity when something is performed or used differently. Cindi Katz (2011, ▶ Chap. 6, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives,” in this volume) argues that this puts the idea of play on a revolutionary footing (as a counter-topography) where received meanings and relations are

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refused and reworked. Jacques Rancière’s (2009, 2010) much heralded work relates to counter-topographies in important ways because it suggests the possibility of spontaneous transformations through a post-structural understanding of aesthetics. Rancière’s view on aesthetics pushes traditional ideas of beauty, landscape, and artistic sensibilities to a consideration of the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2009, p. 1) (hegemonic topographies) in terms of relations “between what people do, what they see, what they hear, and what they know” (Rancière 2010, pp. 15–17), and how those relations might be disturbed (countertopographies). Rancière argues that politics occur when there is a disruption of a hegemonic or dominant mapping of the sensible. For Rancière (2005, p. 13), aesthetics is not “a matter of art and taste,” refinement of language, or acceptance of children’s drawings and abstractions as emotive rather than instrumental, but rather, “it is a matter of time and space.” Aesthetics, for Rancière (2010), are about the spatial and temporal distribution of the senses – what is done, seen, heard, and thought, where, when, and by whom – and hegemonic sensibilities that arrange themselves in ways that children easily (but not without cost) disrupt. David Marshall (2013) notes that to the degree that these relational and radical political aesthetics reside most potently among young children, they conjoin with Katz’s (2004, 2011) focus on radical play and the way children use things dispensed with by adults (cracked bricks, broken blocks, and other bric-a-brac) creatively and spontaneously. In One Way Street, Benjamin (1996) notes that “[i]n waste products [children] recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things, they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely different kinds in a new, intuitive relationship.” In terms of the movement of the child in the movement of the object to the child that I referred to earlier, Benjamin goes on to note that “[t]he dining room table under which [the child] is crouching turns him into the wooden idol in a temple whose four pillars are carved legs. And behind a door, he himself is the door” (see also ▶ Chap. 9, “Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect,” by Curti in this volume). Children’s play is mimetic not just in the sense of copying something but also as a radical blaze of inspiration and creativity that embraces, connects, performs, or uses something differently. Each act is a becoming-other and a way of coming to consciousness. The fluidity of the “becomings” are fictions, stagings, and re-stagings of play, and are key to its pleasures, and at the heart of mimetics. Play is identity making. It is also world making. In play, children learn and toy with the meanings and practices of their social worlds, but as Benjamin reminds us, it is also where received meanings and relations are refused and reworked (Katz 2011, p. 56). Play is also about differentiating self and material objects from a world that is oriented elsewhere and elsewhen. It is about reproduction and constituting difference in a homologous world of seemingly incontrovertible neoliberal market structures and trenchant nationalisms. It is not about the child situated in the sandbox’s ecological niche, it is about reproducing the box in a fundamentally reconstituted way. It is about maturation and development that is thoroughly focused on toppling the big Other by becoming other. And in a curious way, this brings me back to Darwin.

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Re-Reading Darwin Through Reproduction and Revolutionary Play

Darwinian evolutionary concepts such as adaptation and natural selection are the cornerstones of modern ecological theory, and as such the field is closely related to evolutionary biology and genetics. In what follows in this section I have little to say about evolutionary biology and genetics, which are more indebted to neo-Darwinism and Medelian genetics than to the writings of Darwin himself, but I am interested in what ecology does through what I call affective ecologies (Aitken and An 2012). I want to speak to the place of children and young people in light of ecological affects that reproduce our world in a way that is different from suggested developmental structures. And I understand that certain developmental structures (and especially the work of Winnicott, Freud, and Lacan) can be read with fluidity and they may be rendered to political effect, as just noted. As an entry point to this discussion, I pick up on Elizabeth Grosz’s re-working of Darwin, which very much changes how I think about evolution and becoming. Grosz (2011) re-reads Darwin (1859, 1871) with a focus on sexual selection, difference, and art. She believes that something was lost to biology and ecology when the followers of Darwin pursued the avenues he opened on natural selection using analytic methods and scientific empiricism, which pushed a reductionist form of socio-biological science rather than the more organic, humanities-based intuition that also permeates his work. As a consequence, the contemporary wisdom from neo-Darwinian thought is that with natural selection certain biological traits that aid evolutionary ascendency become predominant in a population through differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment over a long period of time. Sometimes referred to parochially as “survival of the fittest,” natural selection weeds out the potentially weaker evolutionary forms of a particular species. Darwin’s later work on sexual selection, according to this prevailing wisdom, is a mode of natural selection that focuses on certain members of a population’s ability to attract mates and dominate reproduction; while natural selection results from the struggle to survive, sexual selection emerges from the struggle to reproduce. The focus on reproduction is key, as it underpins the previous discussion on Lacan read through Žižek and culminating in Katz’s counter-topographies. Followers of Darwin focused on uncovering the specific biological traits of competition and domination in an explanatory framework dominated by genetic determinism. In re-reading Darwin, Grosz (2011) argues that rather than a subservient mode of natural selection, sexual selection complicates it by introducing aesthetic factors and the expression of individual wills, desires, and pleasures. In the first edition of The Origins of Species, natural selection is connected to variability and “divergence of character” (p. 114). What is maximized by natural selection is not the survival of the fittest – and neo-Darwinian conceptualizations of this term – but “the greatest amount of life supported by great diversification of structure” (Miquel 2007, p. 47). Given this reappraisal of the importance of natural selection, Grosz expands further how Darwin’s theory of sexual selection transforms our understanding of humanity, our ideas of political relations, and our concepts of art. Connecting the naturalist’s work

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to the writings of Henri Bergson, Grosz outlines a post-structural Darwinism that embraces all of life through competing and coordinating forms of reproductive openness rather than through development and domination. She elaborates his writings as a rich resource for developing a more politicized, radically open, and far-reaching feminist understanding of nature, biology, and becoming. In re-reading Darwin’s work as an elaboration of life and evolution by way of forms of openness rather than domination, Grosz advances a more politicized and radical understanding of emergence rather than development. Questions about evolution and transformation deserve consideration from what Grosz (2011) describes as a new kind of feminism that disturbs ideas of difference and identity through a Bergsonian understanding of affect and emotion. At one level, Grosz’s new feminism focuses on a mobile “freedom to” rather than a more static, rights-based, “freedom from,” which relates to Bergson’s notion of intuition and motion, but at another level it fundamentally transforms how we understand processes of reproduction and places young people’s growth and maturation on a much more radical and politically open footing. The ideas begin with intuition, movement, and Bergson’s struggle to divert the followers of Darwin away from strict and formal analytic reductionism and towards evolution as an expression of “some psychological force, which has nothing to do with physics” (Miquel 2007, p. 42). Written about 30 years after Darwin’s treatment of sexual selection, Henri Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1909/1999) is one of the first distractions from science’s focus on evolutionary stages. And in Time and Free Will (1913), Bergson engages the psychophysics of the day, arguing that intellectualization was taking the life out of experience (Massey 2005, p. 21). For Bergson, reality is fluid and can never be understood thoroughly through a reduction into component parts or stages, which he argues is a form of analysis where we “go around” an object, gaining knowledge only from various perspectives and constrained viewpoints. Instead, reality can be grasped absolutely through intuition, which Bergson expressed as “entering into” the object. Arguing against the Newtonian and Cartesian extraction of metaphysics from science, Bergson offers intuition not as a replacement for analysis, but as a way of placing more metaphysics in science and more science in metaphysics. Bergson’s view that life is a conscious and emotional activity is not antithetical to Darwin’s views of the human mind (as elaborated by Hume, discussed earlier) nor is it antithetical to Darwin’s notion that nature has neither purpose nor consciousness. Bergson understood nature as a metaphysical and finite force acting in the world: it is “a part of the effect that it produces” and “has to come into existence with it” (Bergson Creative Evolution 164). Nature then, is a “tendency” rather than a final cause (Miquel 2007, p. 43). Bergson was one of the first to look carefully at what Grosz (2011, p. 1) calls “imperceptible movements, modes of becoming, forms of change, and evolutionary transformations that make up natural, cultural and political life.” He was primarily interested in the limitations of scientific analysis and the implications of its break with metaphysics; his point was that static positions for viewing the world are absolute and do not represent well the relationality of the material world. Biological science resolves objects, he argues,

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which are given to it initially through intuition. Whereas we gain a sense of something through chimera and/or aesthetics, science and empiricism reify objects into things that are static and immutable, and thereby explainable and controllable. By taking a rose apart petal by stamen by pistil in order to understand how it works, we lose the essence of the rose. Bergson’s point is that rather than looking at something from the outside and trying to represent it in absolute but fragmented terms, we can look at it from the inside and get in motion with it. By joining with the fragrance and beauty of the rose we move with it, perhaps poetically or musically, as it opens and closes through the world. As such, Bergson elaborates a philosophy of mobility and relationality. This is precisely what Darwin did in his voyage on the Beagle when he became embedded in nature/evolution as a fluid, slow moving process of change and transformation while at the same time cataloguing and analyzing species’ parts (and, by his own admission, not very well). Bergson’s project to conceptualize life so that it comes to include the material universe in its undivided complexity converges with Grosz’s (2011, p. 1) interest in movement and what things are or become, because “movement pre-exists the thing and is the process of differentiation that distinguished one object from another.” Grosz’s re-reading of Darwin, for what I am trying to do here, then, is precisely about the simultaneous movement of the child to the object and the object to the child. Movement does not attach to a stable object, putting it in motion, and so it is the movement that defines the ways objects are differentiated. The process of movement makes and unmakes objects, including children, adults, animals, and institutions. What Grosz is interested in are the ways that material and living things overcome themselves and become something different, in a similar way to what Benjamin saw in children throughout all his observing of the world. It is a context of difference and a counter-topography that is about the relations between things. The importance for understanding complicated ecological systems is that the forces of change that emerge from within them then meet other forces that surround, embroil, and entangle to create something that is not quite from within and not quite from without, but is mobile and fluid. Grosz argues that identity is created through these mobile and fluid processes, which are virtual and ever-present over a variety of valences, the most fundamental of which relate to what she calls geo-power (Aitken 2014). The question of identity and power for Grosz is focused on a virtuality, that is, to use Deleuzian terms, simultaneously the future-past of the present, and always geo-coded and local, but not in the sense of contextualized by the exclusivity of the local. Here I use the local in the sense that Massey (2005) does as something that can be reified into a placeidentity or territory for exclusive use of only those who delimit its boundaries. Rather, similarly for Massey and Grosz, the local must be open to the multiplicities of places, people, and events. The question of identity and power is virtual also in the sense that it is vital. Children are, precisely, what they do, which cannot be abstracted from how they act and what they feel in the sense that David Hume meant when he talked about the power of passion. Pulling from Bergson’s (1896/2004) ideas about memory and existence, it is reasonable to assert that every feeling and emotion,

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however fleeting, contains within it the whole past and present of the being experiencing it. For Grosz, this effect is the force of a geo-power that has density and is a condition of existence in precisely the way Darwin imagined. Put simply, the earth and life are framed through geo-power, which creates a condition for the plane of composition and identity through things as varied as specific species, particular works of art, or precise ethical acts. To the degree that geo-power is localized, it can begin with a movement (e.g., Occupy Wall Street, the Umbrella Revolution, the Arab Spring) that quickly spreads to other niches and contexts. In relation to Darwin’s notion of ecological order, these framings cut through territories, break up systems of enclosure and performance, traverse territories, and then reconnect with chaos, enabling something of the chaos outside to reassert and restore itself in and through bodies and their works of art. It is worth at this point making a side-bar to the students who followed Darwin, and particularly the neo-Lamarkians. It is worthwhile because the work of these students helped frame some of the early children’s geographies that came out of cognitive and development theory. Jeremy Campbell (2001, p. 27) notes that while Lamark focused on the rationality and truth of nature, “Darwin savored its eccentricities and quirks, even occasionally its silliness. He looked for the marginal, the out-of-kilter, to bolster his arguments of natural selection . . . Here we have the quintessence of Darwin. No special creation, no perfect adaptation, no given attunement of mind to world. It was precisely the disharmonies that caught Darwin’s fancy.” For early students of children’s geographies, like Bill Bunge, disharmony and rhetorical dissonance enabled a political intent that was not present in the work of those studying children’s cognitive maps looking for elegant spatial and developmental theory. Bunge noted the disharmony of black women’s children getting run over on the machine space streets of inner-city Detroit while he tried to figure out an elegant spatial evolutionary theory (see Bunge 1973, and Aitken 2001, pp. 12–14). The pressure of the environment on the young is crucial to any species surviving, Bunge averred, because it suggests that the “Darwinian logic of child protection, not sentimentality, not kindness, not value judgment, turns the search for survival, into a children’s book” (Bunge and Bordessa 1975, p. 2). Like canaries in a coalmine, for Bunge, children were a barometer to measure the wellness of society. The societal disharmony connects with Grosz’s (1989, 1994, 1995) earlier work focusing on marginalization, perversion, and sexual identity, which understood differentiation must always contain “a bit of the other” or, in Lacanian terms, the presence of les objets petits autre. Put another way and recalling Grosz’s recent work, geo-power constitutes a new realm of images and experiences with an extended, and valid, re-territorialization of the so-called real that nonetheless acknowledges Lacan’s and Žižek’s every-present big Other. For Grosz, geo-power resides in and produces local places and their aesthetics (in terms of Rancière’s reworking of aesthetics as a political event), and it is a force that is precisely and always about the production of art, where the elegance and beauty of the artistic is not usurped by outside forces such as patriarchy and the state. And so, in the same way that Bunge is able to highlight the growing plight of black children as “canaries in the coalmine” signaling the demise of society to the excesses of capitalism, Lacan’s and Žižek’s big Other signals similar connections and complicities with late capitalism.

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To the degree that the Freudian/Lacanian context of sexual desire, repression, and the state simultaneously takes geo-power in a different direction from the artistic and emotional lines-of-flight proposed by Grosz, it highlights something that is palpably missing from standard psychoanalytic theory. In larger debates in the sciences and humanities to which Grosz (2008) and other feminists contribute, it is clear that emotions and aesthetics matter, and they clearly also matter for Darwin. For children’s geographers, they affect the way children sense the past, present, and future, and they help them negotiate events. Thus, a way of understanding spatial development is through experiencing material relations as ongoing, emergent, affective, and embodied. Spaces pose in particular form the question of how stories are presented and how the biographies of young people inculcate, negotiate and counter powerful exterior forces. Geo-power is not static or place-based but constitutes, rather, the very processes of place-making and the production of space. Understanding the embeddedness of power relations in young biographies and space helps us to see how change plays out in particular locales, but considering power alone is insufficient to understand the dynamic relations between young people and places because, as a habituated aspect of life, spaces are often problematically envisaged as contexts through which events play out. This tame and passive notion of space belies the affective and transformative properties of geo-power. An active notion of youth/ space positions it as permeable and fluid: space/youth as an event. If we consider spaces as mobile and fluid events in the sense that they are assemblages of previously unrelated forces rather than things, then it changes the way we think about how the worlds of young people are mapped and counter-mapped.

5

Conclusion

“There is no such thing as a baby,” writes Winnicott (1975, p. 99) in an essay on the mind and its relationship to psychosomatic illnesses. By this he meant that our understanding of infants does not exist apart from our understanding of the care environments with which they and we relate. He goes on to say “I was alarmed to hear myself utter these words and tried to justify myself by pointing out that if you show me a baby you certainly also show me someone caring for a baby, or at least a pram with someone’s eyes and ears glued to it.” Winnicott’s point is that a child’s bodily experiences – oral, anal, tactile, olfactory, auditory – cannot be separated from and are always shaped by and given meaning through and within the child’s dependencies. The physical environment perceived by the child to exist simultaneously as part of and as independent of the self is understood in conjunction with a world of social and cultural practices, and the symbolic-imaginary, which may be entered into and manipulated to formulate unique relationships, transform reproduction, and, hopefully, opens the world of young people up to counter-topographies. It is clear also that the shaping of environments and self occurs not only in the psychological processes that help form an individual, but also in the cultural, historical, and geographical contexts of that formation, and that the formation is

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always emergent. Certainly, at an early age, sexual, racial, and class boundaries are constructed relationally and maintained by children and caregivers. Seen from a post-Enlightenment, post-developmental, post-child perspective, Winnicott’s idea that there is no such thing as a baby is perhaps more liberating than he thought because from the outset, there are always dependencies. Prior to any formulation of an Oedipal or mirror crisis or les objets petits autre is the recognition that the self is enmeshed in relations with others, that there are always material connections, and that nothing is set or framed. Unlike classic Freudian and Lacanian views, post-developmental theories of emergence and awakening presuppose an active and positive experience with objects and places rather than a world in which there are not only significant tensions between self and other but also gaps that can never be bridged. Interpretations emerge from neither child nor object, but from the movement of child to object and object to child. The idea of a transitional space, then, relates fully to Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) “body as activity” in resistance, survival, and geographical transformations. The “reality testing” function of transitional objects such as bunnies, blankets, or mothers, Winnicott writes (1971, pp. 13–14), persists in shared illusions or what he calls more generally “culture.” Given that transitional spaces are spaces of “play,” then it is out of these spaces that culture and social transformations arise from the movement of children to culture and culture to children. There is no universal child or any form of generalizable process of development in this perspective. Child identity is always plural and there is a multiplicity of ways to know childhood. Although childhoods are multiple and variable, they are also intentionally emergent, predicated upon social, political, historical, geographical, and moral contexts. The other issue here is, of course, that most young people are in contact with the world of adults on a day-to-day basis and if we try to compartmentalize children’s lives in any way then, as David Harvey (1992, p. 303) puts it, we “dwell on the separateness and non-compatibility of language games, discourses, and experiential domains, and treat those diversities as biographically and sometimes even institutionally, socially and geographically determined.” They become spatial frames that foreclose upon the possibility of politics and change. Post-structural theorists point out that if we are intent upon “liberating childhood,” we must embrace their resistances and transform our assumptions of what constitutes “natural” child development. But although this chapter is for the most part critical of natural predispositions to childhood and child development, it is possible that by throwing out nature we may also be throwing out the metaphorical baby with some very fast flowing and mercurial bathwater. And so, with Darwin and Grosz, I am not yet ready to give up nature. To turn the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter on their head, it might be appropriate to illustrate the ways society and culture work on and change biological bodies and how societal images of childhood are “embodied” in the corporeality of children, including their sexuality. This chapter focused on the ways relations between nature and childhood are established and elaborated in scientific and popular discourses over a fairly long period of time, but it also holds clues on the ways corporeality and sexuality are linked by their mutual exclusion from the literature in children’s geographies

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(Thomas 2014). What I am suggesting is that by focusing on development as a natural phenomenon and then simply mapping some social and cultural dimensions onto it sidesteps any kind of critical engagement with childhood as an embodied discourse, which, of course, it clearly is. What is needed is a consideration of how the nature of childhood is embodied, sexualized, and racialized. This chapter continues an intellectual journey that I began over two decades ago; I started with a consideration of the complex relations between children, their development, and their worlds as each approached the other; I continue here with a focus on the ways that science, nature, and developmental theory are disembodied and distanced from the corporeal and material experiences of young people. What seems clear at this point is a distancing of all these affects that paints, at best, a partial story or, at worst, a deceit. What I offer here is a potential way forward with a reconsideration of some of the bases of this thinking through and beyond Darwin.

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Miquel, P.-A. (2007). Bergson and Darwin: From an Immanentist to an Emergentist approach to evolution. SubStance, 36(3), 42–56. Montello, D. R. (1995). How significant are cultural differences in spatial cognition? In A. U. Frank, & W. Kuhn (Eds.), Spatial information theory a theoretical basis for GIS. (COSIT. Lecture notes in computer science, Vol. 988). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. Moore, R. (1986). Childhood’s domain: Place and play in child development. London: Croom Helm. Murris, Karin (2016). The Posthuman Child: Educational transformation through philosophy and picturebooks. New York and London: Routledge. Nast, H. (2000). Mapping the “unconscious”: Racism and the Oedipal family. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(2), 215–255. Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Piaget, J. (1971). Structuralism. New York: Basic Books. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1956). The Child’s conception of space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pratt, G. (2012). Families apart: Migrant mothers and the conflicts of labor and love. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Ranciére, J. (2005). From politics to aesthetics. Paragraph, 28(1), 13–25. Ranciére, J. (2009). The aesthetic dimension: Aesthetics, politics, knowledge. Critical Inquiry, 36, 1–19. Ranciére, J. (2010). The aesthetic heterotopia. Philosophy Today, 54, 15–25. Rousseau, J.-J. (1962). The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau: Selections (W. Boyd, Ed. & Trans.). New York: Bureau of Publications, Columbia University. Ruddick, S. (1995). Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities. New York/London: Routledge. Samuels, Marwyn S. (1978). Existentialism and Human Geography. In Ley and Samuels (eds.) Humanisitic Geography: Prospects and Problems, pp. 22–40. London: Croom Helm. Stephens, S. (1995). Children and the politics of culture in “late capitalism”. In S. Stephens (Ed.), Children and the politics of culture (pp. 3–48). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stoddart, D. R. (1966). Darwin’s influence on geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 56(4), 683–698. Thomas, M. (2014). When 1 and 1 does not equal 2. Childhood sexuality and Laplanche’s Inegmatic signifier. In P. Kingsbury & S. Pile (Eds.), Psychoanalytic geographies (pp. 199–212). Farnham: Ashgate Press. Urwin, C. (1984). Power relations and the emergence of language. In J. Enriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn, & V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity (pp. 264–322). London/New York: Methuen. Valentine, G., Skelton, T., & Chambers, D. (1998). Cool places: An introduction to youth and youth cultures. In T. Skelton & G. Valentine (Eds.), Cool places: Geographies of youth cultures (pp. 1–32). London/New York: Routledge. Walkerdine, V. (1984). Developmental psychology and the child-centred pedagogy: The insertion of Piaget into early education. In J. Enriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn, & V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity (pp. 153–202). London/New York: Methuen. Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. London/New York: Routledge. Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The family and individual development. New York: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock. Winnicott, D. W. (1975). Through pediatrics to psycho-analysis. New York: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. W. (1988). The child, the family and the outside world. London: Penguin. Žižek, S. (2006). The parallax view. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, S. (2008). On violence. London: Profile Books. Žižek, S. (2010). Living in the end times. London/New York: Verso.

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Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect Giorgio Hadi Curti

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Spinoza (and) the Spider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Of Children, Fools, and Madmen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Deus sive Natura. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 We Will Say that It Imagines. . . (or, The Passion [of] Bodily Thought) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 An Assemblage-Web of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Benjamin’s Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter theorizes childhood as capacities of affection and affect by working through the immanent philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza and intersecting some of its conceptual threads with Walter Benjamin’s understanding of children and revolutionary action through play. As part of this move, Spinoza is approached as both a complex weaver and intricate traverser of a web of immanence, and particular attention is paid to his characterization of the embodied imagination and its relationship to different forms of knowing and understanding. Spinoza’s ontological system of immanence in general – and his understanding of the embodied imagination in particular – provides promising metaphysical threads upon which to step away from notions of childhood or children as age-dependent representations or stages within identificational schemes of linear development to, instead, approach and understand them as immanent bodily capacities. The import of this move and the universal implications it holds for notions of political agency of children is also discussed. G. H. Curti (*) Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_2

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Keywords

Spinoza · Immanence · Affection and affect · Imagination · Walter Benjamin · Embodiment

1

Introduction

The seventeenth century Dutch Sephardic Jewish philosopher Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza is a figure – or perhaps it would be more fitting to say, conceptual persona – who has long effected intense feelings of hatred and love, despair and joy, utter disgust and utmost admiration – sometimes in the same person at the same time (e.g., Nietzsche (see Yovel 1986) and Leibniz (see Stewart 2006)). On one historical hand, he has zealously been maligned as the most deviant of heretics, an atheistic purveyor of the greatest “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” (Kasher and Biderman 2001, p. 86; see Stewart 2006); on another, he has been identified as a “Godintoxicated man” (Novalis, cited in Stewart 2006, p. 160) and lovingly revered as the “Christ of philosophers,” a redeemer of life whose thought embodies a “vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 48). Commenting on the vanguard nature of Spinoza’s philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 48) hint at the cause of such antipodal reactions to the metaphysical challenges Spinoza’s thought presents when they note that he was “the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. . .He discovered freedom exists only within immanence. . .”; and they ask “. . .Will we ever be mature enough for Spinozist inspiration?” But, what exactly is it to become mature enough for Spinozist inspiration? It is to understand and accept – and therefore necessarily act on the knowledge – that all that is is, and that any substantive, Cartesian-like separations of mind (thought) and body (extension) or the sacred (God) and profane (Nature) are nothing more than confused absurdities. This is because, as Spinoza tells us, “God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things” (Ethics, I, P. 18). Critical to grasp from this proposition specifically, and within Spinoza’s ontology of immanence more generally, is that it is absurd to hold disbelief in God, because It can just as well be called Nature; and it is ludicrous to not attribute mo(ve)ments of love or joy to Nature, because It may just as well be called God (Ethics, IV, P. 4 and D). As Spinoza cautioned long ago, it is imperative not to confuse images, words, and ideas (Ethics, II, P. 49, S.II). In turn, becoming worthy of Spinozist inspiration and living an immanent life require an understanding that there is no hierarchical, vertical rule of power that is not ultimately dependent on the very horizontal forces that permit, construct, and continually uphold its very existence. Relatedly, it is imperative to recognize that identity and meaning – whether of species, classes, forms, or genus – are never more than momentary, constructed fictions secondary to emergent speeds, motions, intensities, and capacities – that is, what things do and are able to do – before and beyond any supposedly set notions of groupings or individuality.

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Becoming immanent with Spinoza, then, necessitates continual contemplative commitment and clear consideration that one must always engage horizontal materialities for any understanding of life, while wholly embracing a “materialism with a difference, because God or Nature is as much an intelligible system of thought as a system of material objects” (Curley 1996: xii). Adequately knowing this is to understand that whether we choose to engage life through ontological notions of “God” or “Nature,” such conceptual engagements can never hold any weight of explanatory recourse to transcendental or teleological indulgences, whether of purpose, direction, creation, or meaning; these rejoinders are merely inadequate fictions of the imagination, itself immanently real – insofar that it is continually affected and has very real bodily effects – though confused. The immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy and the impulsion of his materialist inspiration were driven by both a search for perfection (i.e., away from confusion, toward a true understanding of all of nature) and a quest for freedom (from superstition, from tyranny, from war, in all of their forms), and this parallel journey necessitated living a particular kind of life: one which – not much different than his ambivalent and collective schizophrenic receptions – has long appeared to be “like a living oxymoron: he was an ascetic sensualist, a spiritual materialist, a sociable hermit, a secular saint” (Stewart 2006, p. 73). Perhaps it is such a peculiar and ostensibly oxymoronic life that has allowed “Spinoza [to be] claimed for many a fold: Jewish and Christian, pantheist and atheist, rationalist and mystic, realist and nominalist, analyst and continental, historicist and ahistorical metaphysician, ecologist, and, yes, Buddhist” (Goodman 2002, p. 20). Through whatever enlightened or misguided sensibilities he and his life have been characterized or his immanent thought received in the annals of the histories of religion, philosophy, and politics, Spinoza’s influence and lessons to and for multiple and heterogeneous strains of critical thought are today undeniable (see Norris 1991). Inspired by Spinoza’s immanent ontology, this chapter playfully explores threads of his critical insights and influence through the trope of the spider to theorize childhood as capacities of affection and affect. In this, Spinoza is approached as both a complex weaver and an intricate traverser of a web of immanence, and particular attention is paid to his characterization of the embodied imagination and its relationship to different forms of knowing and understanding. Spinoza’s ontological system of immanence in general – and his understanding of the embodied imagination in particular – provides promising metaphysical threads upon which to step away from notions of childhood or children as age-dependent representations or stages within identificational schemes of linear development to, instead, approach and understand them as immanent bodily capacities. The import of this move and the universal implications it holds for notions of political agency (of children or otherwise) is also discussed.

2

Spinoza (and) the Spider

In his exhaustive, in-depth study of Spinoza’s lineage and legacy, Wolfson (1969, pp. 331–332) explains Spinoza’s originality and the immanence of his thought thusly: “It was Spinoza who first dared to cross [the] boundaries [of God and the

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laws of nature], and by the skillful use of weapons accumulated in the arsenals of philosophy itself he succeeded in bringing both God and man under the universal rule of nature and thus establishing unity.” Negri recognizes in Spinoza’s immanent boundary transgression an even more critical and subversive originality: In the history of ontology and the idea of being in general, Spinoza’s position is unique. The theist and pantheist visions of being dissolve in the face of his declaration of the materiality of being. Spinoza’s thought is characterized by a continuity between physics and ethics, between phenomenology and genealogy, between ethics and politics: the indissoluble continuity of manifestations of being, this circularity of surfaces, vigorously and irreducibly opposes Spinoza’s system to every preceding and (in large part) every successive version of ontology (Negri 2004, p. 95).

Paralleling these understandings of the immanent power and importance of Spinoza’s thought, Zweig (1939, p. 44) offers perhaps the simplest, most precise, and – for our playful purposes here – most helpful description of Spinoza’s systematic philosophy and the expansive promise it offers: “In the end the system of Spinoza may be paraphrased as follows – one of the most sparkling filigree webs in which our urge for insight has ever tried to encompass the world.” Zweig’s reliance on the language of “filigree webs” to describe Spinoza’s project is as much artful poetry as (possibly unintentional) epistemological allegory and ontological clarity. Spinoza’s biographer, Colerus (Pollock and Colerus 1899, p. 395), related that at times, when absorbed by fits of intellectual exhaustion or strain, Spinoza “look’d for some Spiders, and made ‘em fight together, or he threw some Flies into the Cobweb, and was so pleased with that Battel, that he wou’d sometimes break into Laughter.” While such manipulation of and disregard for – and apparent derivation of pleasure from the violence of – animal life may disturb some, as Deleuze (1988), Deleuze and Guattari (1994), Sharp (2011), and Berman (1982) all underscore, in several ways these actions and activities all fit within Spinoza’s approach to and understanding of the universe. As Spinoza himself explains: [I]t is clear that the law against killing animals is based more on empty superstition and unmanly compassion than sound reason. . .Not that I deny that the lower animals have sensations. But I do deny that we are therefore not permitted to consider our own advantage, use them at our pleasure, and treat them as is most convenient for us. For they do not agree in nature with us, and their affects are different in nature from human affects (Spinoza, Ethics, IV, P. 37, S.1).

Understanding Spinoza’s proposition that different animals have different affects, each capacitationally different than another, is a crucial first step toward understanding the discussion of childhood and children being presented herein. A pause at this juncture, however, may be helpful. It can be anticipated that perhaps a somewhat quizzical moment may have arisen: why waste time with superfluous discussion of this “Spinoza (and) the spider” nonsense when the whole point here is to discuss and theorize childhood as capacities of affection and affect? For two inter-related reasons: First, because within the development and expression of Spinoza’s systematic (and, as Negri has argued, exceedingly unique)

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immanent philosophy, children find very little explicit mention or theorization (what mention there is will soon be discussed). Second, and relatedly, to fully flesh out and better understand the importance and implications of approaching childhood as capacities of affection and affect, a Spinozist encounter is necessary, but to reach its full potential for insight it must be one that playfully engages some of Spinoza’s interlocutors as they simultaneously confront questions of childhood while traversing and weaving filial threads in communion with Spinoza of an ontological web of immanence. To explain it another way, Spinoza’s fascination with spiders provides a doubly creative mo(ve)ment that can serve as a helpful and, indeed, enhanced safety line upon which to simultaneously traverse, approach, and better theorize childhood in the ways attempted here. By engaging Spinoza and the spider, we can begin to unpack elements of his philosophy as it relates to childhood/children as part of an immanent reproduction of “relationships of modes in the system of the Ethics as higher ethology” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 73), and by approaching Spinoza as a spider – or, to put it in a way more fitting of Spinoza’s immanent ontology, of what affections and affects a spider is capable, or by what it is a spider does – we can productively expand on his system as the production of an ontological filigree web searching for freedom and perfection that both traverses and weaves lines of Jewish thought – along with, for example, Walter Benjamin – and has joyfully ensnared a multitude of philosophers in its sticky “vertigo of immanence” – particularly such thinkers as Negri and Deleuze.

3

Of Children, Fools, and Madmen. . .

Generally reflecting the spirit of the time, what Spinoza had to say about children in both his correspondence letters and formal philosophical works, including his most famous Ethics, largely subsumes them to passivity as either malleable objects of learning and education or equates them to the passive impulsiveness and silliness of suicide victims, chatterboxes, fools, and madmen (Ethics, II, P. 49, S.III.B; III, P. 2, S.). In his clearest and most precise description of children, Spinoza (Ethics, III, P. 32, S.) states: For we find from experience that children, because their bodies are continually, as it were, in a state of equilibrium, laugh or cry simply because they see others laugh or cry. Moreover, whatever they see others do, they immediately desire to imitate it. And finally, they desire for themselves all those things by which they imagine others are pleased – because, as we have said, the images of things are the very affections of the human body, or modes by which the human body is affected by external causes, and disposed to do this or that.

By coupling this brief (and rather condescending and dismissive) characterization of children and childhood with epistemological and ontological considerations of Spinoza (and) the spider, we can begin to locate the immanent “essence,” as it were, of Spinoza’s metaphysics and, in turn, engage his fellow travelers on and weavers of

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an ontological web of immanence to help theorize childhood as capacities of affection and affect. Before we begin to intensively traverse the immanent threads of this web, however, it is important for a brief moment to highlight Spinoza’s (re)call to experience in his efforts to describe children. In the same passage where he capacitationally equates children with suicide victims, fools, and madmen, he makes clear – from both his experience and in his philosophical system (we must presume) – that he does not truly know what to make of them: “I. . .do not know how highly we should esteem one who hangs himself, or children, fools, and madmen, and so on.” While this passage may quickly be dismissed as simply a rhetorical device, it echoes similar sentiments Spinoza (Ethics, III, P. 2, S.) offers about bodies in general: “no one has yet determined what the [human] body can do. . .” and “. . .the body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature, can do many things which its mind wonders at.” In this latter statement, Spinoza is specifically speaking of somnambulists and makes reference to “the lower animals” (remember his experiments with spider battles and spider-fly fights) to explain how bodies often function in ways beyond either human control or human understanding. He also calls on experience to recount the story of a Spanish poet who recovered from a devastating illness, explaining that, despite his apparent convalescence, the poet “was left oblivious to his past life that he did not believe the tales and tragedies he had written were his own. He could surely have been taken for a grown-up infant [or, what some sources have translated as “child”] if he had also forgotten his native language” (Ethics, IV, P. 39, S.). A quite interesting proposition is raised here in this recall to experience: within Spinoza’s system of immanence, is it possible for an adult to, quite literally, become a child? And, if so, what does this tell us about the relationship of bodies and capacities for knowledge – and how they relate together to give rise to identity – in Spinoza’s ontological system? Moreover, if the child/adult dichotomy is malleable based on bodily capacities and activities, what does this imply for childhood as both an arena of political desire and agency? To begin to answer these questions, it will be necessary to give some attention to the ontology of Spinoza and the co-constitutional role bodily passions and imagination play in the formation of different forms (or levels) of knowing and understanding.

4

Deus sive Natura. . .

In direct response to Descartes’ dualistic position that there exist two fundamentally different types of substance – mental and physical – Spinoza offered a monistic alternative: there is but only one substance, God or Nature (Deus sive Natura), and they are the same thing (Ethics, IV, P. 4 and D.). Importantly, ‘or’ (sive) here does not refer to either a Cartesian dualistic other as distinct or Hegelian other as antithesis. Rather, it refers to ‘or’ as ‘and’ – the same substance simply viewed and understood from an alternative register or perspective. All things in existence (regardless of

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identity or form) are “modes” of God or Nature, or “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived” (Ethics, I, D5). Spinoza explains: [W]e have conceived an individual which is composed only of bodies which are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest, speed and slowness, that is, which is composed of the simplest bodies. But if we should now conceive another, composed of a number of individuals of a different nature, we shall find that it can be affected in a great many other ways, and still persevere its nature. For since each part of it is composed of a number of bodies, each part will therefore. . .be able, without any change of its nature, to move now more slowly, now more quickly, and consequently communicate its motion more quickly or more slowly to the others. But if we should further conceive a third kind of individual, composed [of many individuals] of this second kind, we shall find that it can be affected in many other ways, without any change of its form. And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual (Ethics, II, L7, S.).

In Spinoza’s system, humans, spiders, webs, and flies – as a few examples – can each be understood as individual modes, or bodies, with their own conatus, or the striving and endeavoring “to persevere in. . .being” (Spinoza, Ethics, III, P. 6) present within all life. As part(s) of the single substance of God or Nature (i.e., the dynamic but infinite individual), each mode necessarily affects and is affected by one another in a nonhierarchical extensional relationship of dynamic speeds, forces, and flows. Nidditch (1964, p. 191) explains: For Spinoza, each object [or body, or mode] that appears as an individual in the world – be it a man, a house, a stone, or a star – is affiliated to others and both affects and is affected by the characteristics of others. None of these objects can lead an independent existence; in their origins they have not come from a process of self-creation but have been generated by other objects, and the manner of their continuance as objects is pervasively conditioned extrinsically as well as intrinsically.

Within this metaphysics of inter-related variation and forces of different modes and the always dynamic yet unchanging single substance of God or Nature, there is a vital point that must be highlighted related to Spinoza’s experiments with and perspectives on animals presented above that has important implications for how children and childhood are – or, more precisely, can be – characterized in his system of immanence. Sharp (2011, pp. 52–53) notes that: On a casual reading, [Spinoza] seems to claim that human nature is simply different in kind from bestial nature and thus we do not regard ourselves to be bound to them. Our affects, natures, and vital interests differ, and thus we have no moral or prudential reasons to preserve and enhance the lives of animals. Unlike Descartes and the idealist tradition that he inaugurates, however, this lack of imperative to care for animals does not follow from an absolute division between humans and animals. For Spinoza, there is no unbridgeable chasm between the conscious animal and the unconscious thing. Descartes, Kant, and Hegel frequently appeal to the infinite difference between humans and “things,” a category that includes nonhuman animals, by virtue of an exclusive mental power to think, will, and

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represent our sensations. Yet, for Spinoza, there are only differences of degree between humans, animals, machines, and rocks.

With this consideration in mind, what, then, makes humans unique in Spinoza’s system? Indeed, this is a vital question if we are to understand what qualities, if any, distinguish an adult from a child. We can glean from the internal logic of his ontological system of immanence that, from at least one standpoint, the answer to both questions must certainly be: nothing at all. Even considering degrees of difference between humans and nonhumans, Spinoza states though “human bodies agree in many things, they still differ in very many” (Ethics, I, Appdx. III), and “[e]ach affect of each individual differs from the affect of another as much as the essence of the one from the essence of the other” (Ethics, III, P. 57). Moreover, he explains that “[d]ifferent [singularities] can be affected differently by one and the same object; and one and the same [singularity] can be affected differently at different times by one and the same object” (Ethics, III, P. 51). In the context of these propositions, any universalized dichotomy between human/nonhuman and, by logical extension, child and childhood/adult and adulthood, appears to be conceptually nonsensical, as each mode – considered from the standpoint of singularities – can have as many similarities or differences with another mode in any given place and at any given time regardless of any representational grouping or identificational scheme based on genus, species, age, or otherwise. Sharp (2011, p. 62), however, highlights a vital point that is necessary to consider here: Spinoza’s philosophical naturalism seeks to portray singular beings, especially “men,” as he says many times, as they are, and not as we would like them to be. But we cannot avoid erecting exemplars, or models, that give shape to our projected futures and the life we hope to build. Spinoza’s suspicion toward universal categories like species notwithstanding, he maintains the need for provisional boundaries to our idea of “humanity.”

Thus, as Sharp suggests, it is necessary for Spinoza to provide conceptual space for provisional boundaries and categorizations built through abstractions and even fictions, if for no other reason than to be able to productively work toward a capacitationally enriching future and (human) collective perseverance in being. Such abstractions and fictions of unification – or entia rationis – are vital for understanding and grasping elements of the apparent chaos of the infinite substance God or Nature, but only if we do not confuse their fictions [ficta] for truths: Entia rationis are class concepts, formed by the intellect in order to bring actual things together for comparison of their similarities and differences. Examples of entia rationis are genus, species, time, and mathematical concepts – figure, number, and measure. We need be in no fear of forming such constructions, provided we first have a true and adequate idea of the first principles of science. The intellect may then freely and knowingly construct fictional entities and abstractions as aids, tools, or instruments to push its investigations further (Savan 1986, p. 120).

Is the child/adult distinction simply this: a particular class of entia rationis, a fictional aid, tool, or instrument providing conceptual material to help analyze

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pathways and trajectories to freedom and perfection through better understanding of the infinite substance of God or Nature for Spinoza? Certainly, if measures, groupings, categories, and other identificational schemes such as genus and species are fictional constructions, so, too, must be any arbitrary classificatory or identificational scheme along age lines. While this may, indeed, be shown to be the case, it is not so in such a simple, straightforward manner. There is another, universal boundary through which humans can be characterized in Spinoza’s system that he did not deem provisional and which is not based on fictions or abstractions: the ability to adequately perceive (only) two of an infinite array of attributes, or affections, of God or Nature. It is how these two attributes function in “parallel” and how they co-exist and inform Spinoza’s system of knowledge that provide him with the internal logic necessary for conceptually and metaphysically making (implicit) distinctions between human and nonhuman and adult and child, distinctions that offer a playful opportunity to engage some of his interlocutors and fellow travelers on a web of immanence to help us move away from notions of children or childhood as age-dependent representations.

5

We Will Say that It Imagines. . . (or, The Passion [of] Bodily Thought)

Using the logic of Descartes’ dualism against itself, Spinoza reasoned that thought (mind) and extension (body) are not two substances but two distinct attributes of the one infinite substance of God or Nature. Because they are distinct attributes, thought and extension cannot be the cause or effect of one another; “a body is not limited by thought nor a thought by a body” (Ethics, I, D2; see also III, P. 2 and Dem.). Instead, both exist simultaneously, in parallel, as two perspectives of the same phenomenon or event; “the order of actions and passions of our body is, by nature, at one with the order of actions and passions of the mind” (Ethics, III, P 2, S.). Deleuze (1988, p. 18) explains in more detail: [O]ne of the most famous theoretical theses of Spinoza is known by the name of parallelism; it does not consist merely in denying any real causality between the mind and the body, it disallows any primacy of the one over the other. If Spinoza rejects any superiority of the mind over the body, this is not in order to establish a superiority of the body over the mind, which would be no more intelligible than the converse. The practical significance of parallelism is manifested in the reversal of the traditional principle on which Morality was founded as an enterprise of domination of the passions by consciousness. It was said that when the body acted, the mind was acted upon, and the mind did not act without the body being acted upon in turn . . . According to the Ethics, on the contrary, what is an action in the mind is necessarily an action in the body as well, and what is a passion in the body is necessarily a passion in the mind. There is no primacy of one series over the other.

Thus, though phenomena may register differently for humans in mind (thought) and body (extension), these different registering effects are just two expressions of the same thing: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, or a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else” (Spinoza, Ethics,

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II, P. 13). Because body and mind are the same thing simply in a different register or from a different perspective, thinking always parallels a corresponding transformation in, of, and through the body, and actions and material effects on and of the body necessarily are paralleled by thought and ideas in the mind – each interaction informed through the body as affection and affect. Like the spider, Spinoza works through the capacities of the body to measure, weave, and traverse the filigree web: “the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things, though they do not reproduce the external figures of things. And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines” (Spinoza, Ethics, II, P. 17, S.), and “[t]he human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the body is affected” (Spinoza, Ethics, II, P. 19). Here, there is an important distinction to make between affection (affectio) and affect (affectus) in Spinoza’s system. He defines “affect” as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections” (Ethics, III, D3). Affection, then, is the immediate impression of one body upon another, while an affect is that impression taken up by a particular body as a changing state in activity and thought (e.g., from joy to sadness, or from sadness to more sadness, or from joy to more joy, etc.). But Spinoza also states that it is through the ideas of affection (that is, the impression between different modes, or bodies, and their register in the mind) that we, as humans – as rational animals – (are able to) develop more advanced forms of knowledge. In other words, this understanding of affection and affect has a direct role in how we both relate to and (can) understand and know the world. Presenting an example comparing a (“rational”) human animal and a(n) (“irrational”) horse animal, Spinoza (Ethics, III, P. 57, S.) explains: [T]he affects of the animals which are called irrational (for after we know the origin of the mind, we cannot in any way doubt that the lower animals feel things) differ from men’s affects as much as their nature differs from human nature. Both the horse and the man are driven by lust to procreate, but the one is driven by an equine lust, the other by a human lust. So also the lusts and appetites of insects, fish, and birds must vary. Therefore, though each individual lives content with his own nature, by which he is constituted, and is glad of it, nevertheless that life with which each one is content, and that gladness, are nothing but the idea, or soul, of the individual. And so the gladness of the one differs in nature from the gladness of the other as much as the essence of the one differs from the essence of the other. Finally,. . .it follows that there is no small difference between the gladness by which a drunk is led and the gladness a philosopher possesses. This will be enough concerning the affects which are related to man insofar as he is acted on. . ..

To Spinoza, bodily passion such as lust is both an affection of the body and a mode of thinking (Ethics, II, A3), and thus an idea, but a confused idea; that is, it comes about through the body’s (and mind’s) passivity to the affections of the world and its cause is unclear. He tells us though “[t]he idea of any mode in which the human body is affected by external bodies must involve the nature of the human body and at the same time the nature of the external body” (Ethics, II, P. 16), it is

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often caught up in the imagination and is a source of error because it does not, or can not, (re)produce things as they are – the body is not acting but acted upon. This happens, in part, because “the ideas which we have of external bodies indicate the condition of our own body more than the nature of the external bodies” (Ethics, II, P. 16, C.2). The conditions of our bodies and their attendant ideas, then, are often confused because, as we are finite singularities constantly being affected by different bodies (or modes), we can rarely understand the complex chains of cause and effect of the single and unchanging substance of God or Nature (of which we and all other modes are only and always inter-related and dynamic parts). A confused idea comes about in thought in parallel with the passion of the body, and it registers in thought as a representation. This is the natural condition of perception, which depends on bodily affections. But representations of the state of things are always inadequate ideas, that is, confused and passive (i.e., acted upon). Adequate ideas, on the other hand, “are not representative of states of things or of what happens to us, but of what we are and of what things are” (Deleuze 1988, p. 74). In this light, adequate ideas, which are not directly dependent on passions, may appear to be superior to inadequate ones. They actively grasp things as they are, while inadequate ideas are passively entangled and confused in the imagination. The faculty of the imagination, as it is caught up in passions and confused ideas, does not give certainty to reality and truths. However, through an indelible connection between different levels of knowing and understanding, and despite the fact that it may be a source of error, the imagination, which Spinoza also calls “opinion” (or the first type of knowledge), is ultimately the basis for two other forms of more advanced knowledge – reason (second form) and intuition (third form) (Spinoza, Ethics, II, P. 40, S.2) – both of which are always adequate and “necessarily true” (Spinoza, Ethics, II, P. 41). Returning to the anecdote of Spinoza and the spider, Deleuze highlights three ways in which Spinoza’s actions resonate with this understanding of the relationships of modes, substance, knowledge, and capacities of affection and affect: Spider fights, or spider-fly fights, could have fascinated Spinoza for several reasons: 1. from the standpoint of the exteriority of the necessity of death; 2. from the standpoint of the composition of relations in nature (how the web expresses a relationship of the spider with the world, one which appropriates, as such, relations peculiar to the fly); 3. from the standpoint of the relativity of perfections (how a state that marks an imperfection of man, e.g., warfare, can on the contrary testify to a perfection if it is related to a different essence such as that of insects) (Deleuze 1988, p. 12, n.9).

Of these positional standing-points, the second and third are most telling here: the second highlights how God or Nature, as innumerable compositions of relational and capacitational affections and affects, ontologically expresses Itself in the forms of different modes (or bodies) of different capacities (i.e., the spider, the fly, the web) within and part of a given milieu (i.e., the web and its surrounding environment), all in relationship to one another (the web, the spider, the fly) as a particular composite of bodily relations expressive of God or Nature producing a particular intensive

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place/space over a certain duration. The third standpoint underscores that the “perfection” of a mode, a term which Spinoza uses as a synonym for reality (Ethics, II, DVI), is dependent upon what affections and affects a particular, singular mode is capable: “For the more things a thinking being can think, the more reality, or perfection, we can conceive it to contain” (Spinoza, Ethics, II, P. 1, S.). As modes partaking in (or a product of) two attributes of God or Nature and capable of intricate thought – and more intricate thought than other thinking animals – consequences of affections of other modes on our bodies (and therefore on our minds) highlight how human affects are different in nature from the affects of, say, spiders, cobwebs, horses, or flies (see Spinoza, Ethics, IV, P. 37, S.1). A reactive life of the spider is its own perfection, its fundamental reality; the spider knows (so to speak) what it is (of what affects it is capable) and how to (re)act to affections brought about through interactions with other bodies (the milieu of the web, the vibrations of the fly’s body). This is what permits it to best persevere in its own being. A similar reactive life of a human – for example, to the affections of a foreign human body within a given milieu or territory – more often than not subverts perseverance in being and is trapped in a passionate realm of misunderstanding and inadequate ideas that can, and often do, lead to superstition, violence, and even war. The story of Spinoza and the spider, thus, affords insight into three vital conceptual threads that help compose his web of immanence and which are useful here for theorizing childhood as capacities of affection and affect: (1) modal bodies (e.g., of a spider, fly, web, horse, human child, human adult, etc.) are defined by what they capacitationally do and can do, not by representations or fixed identities of what they supposedly are according to abstract fictions; (2) that modal bodies in communion (the spider, web, and fly, for example) can both increase or decrease each other’s capacities to persevere in being; and (3) that these capacities can be understood from a human perspective – as a particular thinking animal with particular complex capacities to feel and think – through a system of knowledge and understanding informed through (inter-related) processes built upon and informed through the imagination – that realm of knowing to which Spinoza states children, who are “in a [continual] state of equilibrium,” are most beholden, presumably because their bodies – and therefore their minds – have not yet fully developed capacities to actively achieve more advanced and active forms of knowing and understanding (i.e., reason and intuition). Important to consider here, however, is that Spinoza is no classical rationalist. Reason is not the highest form of knowledge in his system, and the imagination is not merely a confused force to be erased, but an experimentally constitutive one. As the imagination is always tied to the body’s affections, interactions, and associations with geographical phenomena, it has an always-becoming possibly productive force by and through which to explore and better understand both ourselves (our body; our conatus) and the objects affecting us (regardless of their identity or form). Further, as the imagination is formed between bodies, it always has relational – including ethical and political – implications. This understanding of the possible force and importance of the Spinozist immanent imagination for the creation of different relational, ethical, and political ways of knowing and understanding is perhaps most insightfully articulated by Italian philosopher Antonio Negri (1991, p. 89):

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[T]his corrupt imagination effectively constructs the world! The imagination is as strong as tradition, it is as vast as Power, it is as destructive as war – and it is the servant of all of this, so that human unhappiness and ignorance, superstition and slavery, misery and death are grafted onto the imaginative faculty itself, which, on the other hand, constructs the unique horizon of a human society and a positive, historical determination of being. A new metaphysical foundation, then, that tries to traverse the entire world must not avoid the conflict with this theologico-politico figure of reality. Distinguishing the truth and recognizing the human capacity to construct both the truth and the freedom of life, apart from all the calamities that the imagination determines in the world, become the first steps in a logical reform that is trying to found an ethical reform. And a political reform, too? Yes, necessarily.

In this way, by refusing a hard distinction between mind and body, action and thought, self and world, or self and other, Spinoza’s ontological immanence and his metaphysical understanding of the constitutive role of the imagination not only grants insights into how this faculty may relationally form through affections of the body but how its formation is also always an ethical, political, and spatial matter. This joint understanding of the productive power of the imagination and its dependence on bodily capacities of affection and affect provides a conceptual opportunity to rethink children beyond identificational or representational schemes along set stages, groupings, or linear lines of development. To best explain this, it will be necessary to explore intersecting threads of Spinoza’s ontological system of immanence and Walter Benjamin’s characterization of the revolutionary imaginings that come about through children’s play.

6

An Assemblage-Web of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Benjamin’s Child

Perhaps no other theorist devoted such an interest to the abilities of children to manifest (ethical, political, historical, spatial) change as Walter Benjamin. Gershom Scholem (1976, p. 175) once commented, “it is one of Benjamin’s most important characteristics that throughout his life he was attracted with almost magical force by the child’s world and ways.” While it would be dishonest to characterize his project overall as one of immanence, certainly his magical-like attraction to the domain of the child finds manifestations of immanent threads woven throughout his work that parallel Spinoza’s understanding of the imagination, knowledge, and (the body and mind’s capacities for) affection and affect in interesting ways. Perhaps this is because both Benjamin and Spinoza were scholars and children of Jewish tradition, and traversals of the mystical Jewish web of the Kabbalah find expression in both of their projects (see Buck-Morss 1991, pp. 229–252, and Montag 2002). It is also within this realm of Judaic (and Judeo-Christian, or, more specifically, Pauline) thought where we can excavate a distinct disagreement of what children are capable of doing between Spinoza and Benjamin. It would clearly be a mistake to attribute to early Jewish thought a purely immanent ontology; however, there is certainly an immanent “ethos” expressed

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within that God can always be found with children: “God’s universal presence is with children, even when things seem the darkest (Lamentation R. 1.6.33)” (Goodman 2002, p. 66). This notion of the indwelling of God with the child continues with the Jewish teachings of Jesus of Nazareth: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14), and “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein” (Mark 10:15). It is here, in this context of an immanent relational ethos of Godly presence with(in) the child, where we find a distinct break with the teachings of Paul of Tarsus: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11). In this sense, Spinoza is distinctly Pauline, and he explicitly recognizes parallels between his system of immanence and Pauline Christianity: All things, I say, are in God and move in God, and this I affirm together with Paul and perhaps together with all ancient philosophers, though expressed in a different way, and I would even dare to say, together with all the ancient Hebrews, as far as may be conjectured from certain traditions, although these have suffered much corruption (Spinoza 1995 [Letter 73 to Henry Oldenburg]).

Spinoza’s Pauline tendencies make clearer his implicit equation of the imagination with childhood and the need to move beyond both to more advance forms of knowing and understanding if the perfection of God is to be conceived and true freedom achieved. Contra Spinoza (and his Pauline thought), Benjamin (1978) (re)claims from Judaic tradition an immanent ethos of the presence of God with the child in the form of a “messianic power” (Mellamphy and Mellamphy 2009, p. 167), or what can be understood as a simultaneous capacity for (re)new(ed) cognition and action within historical time (Hamacher 2005, p. 43). Hamacher (2005, pp. 41–42) explains that for Benjamin: [M]essianic power is the intentional correlate of the claim that calls upon us from the missed possibilities of the past, not to miss them a second time but to perceive them in every sense: cognizingly to seize and to actualize them. . .This power. . .is not ‘ours’, something we can have at our disposal by our own means, but it is the power which we have been ‘endowed with’ by others. . .The messianic power is, in short, the postulate of fulfilability and, in this sense, of redeemability that is immanent in each missed opportunity and distinguishes it as a possibility.

From children’s play with that which is unwanted and cast-off comes not only the capacity to imagine things differently for Benjamin but a produced arena where renewed capacities for materially experimenting with and changing cultural, social, geographical, and political relations must be empirically actualized. Thus, in the realm of childhood and imagination, Benjamin found something much more powerfully affirming, something much more capacitating and liberating in and through the affections and affects that arise through activities of the child than Spinoza.

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Benjamin saw in children and child’s-play the emancipatory potential that was once the promise of the Marxist project of social renewal and economic transformation. . ..[and he] was convinced that children not only pointed toward this revolutionary potential, but that in childhood revolutionary emancipation was both a theoretical potential and empirically actualizable (Mellamphy and Mellamphy 2009, pp. 163–164).

It is children, Benjamin reasoned, who through their play are the models of revolution and change as their cognition has “revolutionary power because it [is] tactile, and hence tied to action, and because rather than accepting the given meaning of things, children g[e]t to know objects by laying hold of them and using them creatively, releasing from them new possibilities of meaning” (Buck-Morss 1991, p. 264). In Benjamin’s own words: [C]hildren are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things, they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship. (Benjamin 1996, pp. 449–50).

It is precisely this connection to think and act simultaneously, this capacity of a different intuition granted through the parallel attributes of thought and extension that emerge through bodily affection and affect while at play, a potential which Benjamin also sensed as present in the revolutionary consciousness of adults. Without romanticizing the innocence of childhood Benjamin continually points to the critical leverage that can be gained in assuming a child-like way of seeing. It is precisely because children do not follow the rules that they are able to intuit the world on its own terms. In “One-Way Street,” Benjamin juxtaposes children with those Enlightenment philosophers that purport to study them. Not only do children undermine Enlightenment categories of rational empiricism and mind-body dualism, they provide a new mode of seeing (Modern 2006, p. 131, n.29; see also Buck-Morss 1991, p. 263).

To Benjamin, then, the adult can learn from children “to rediscover a previously possessed mode of cognition” (Buck-Morss 1991, p. 265) through a praxis of mimeses. Benjamin’s mimesis, however, should not be understood as mere imitation, as “[i] mitation respects the boundaries between molar wholes, setting up comparisons between bodies considered separately, as entities unto themselves” (Massumi 1992, p. 96). Instead, for Benjamin, mimesis is a becoming-other through the immanent force and recognition of the fluid, porous, and blurred boundaries that come through the affections of different modes (or bodies) on modes and the revolutionary imaginings that arise with their affects: “The dining table under which [the child] is crouching turns him into the wooden idol in a temple whose four pillars are carved legs. And behind a door, he himself is the door” (Benjamin 1996, p. 465). Like the child with the table or the child with the door, the adult does not only learn from and with the child at the detached distance of observer, but through the ability to become-child herself through open, tactile, and differentiating interactions

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and connections with the world. Mellamphy and Mellamphy (2009, p. 164) explain that for Benjamin: The world and language of children stood as a kind of prototype or model (or rather potential reality) for the historian’s search for the ‘matter’ of history. For one thing, hidden within the child’s fascination for discarded, forgotten objects was a radical openness to and consciousness of the objects themselves. Benjamin argued that the historical materialist, too, must take up what has been left behind, examine it – explore it – and engage it as an active thing; ‘activate’ it, ‘animate’ it, breathe ‘life’ back into it (or allow its life to breathe onto/into ours). The materialist historian, like the infant, must open herself up to the historical possibilities of the object at hand.

The new is then available to the adult as historical materialist, but only when she detaches from the world of what is through the very immanent forces and experiences of difference bodily productions of affection and affect and their relationships to the imagination. “‘The instant one arrives,’ Benjamin not accidentally wrote of his visit to Moscow, ‘the childhood stage begins,’ when, because of the icy streets, even ‘walking has to be relearned’” (Buck-Morss 1991, p. 265). It is through differentiated movements, differentiated relations, differentiated connections, differentiated speeds, differentiated play with the immanent web of the world that the adult, quite literally, becomes a child by way of relations of affections and capacities of affects necessary for new dreams, new meanings – new imaginations – that can challenge what has been to (re)create what could be through the refuse of past possibility, a position Benjamin’s very work not only explicated and explored but embodied. Benjamin’s theological turn is simultaneously the accomplishment of the logic of Marxism and its disruption. Benjamin displays the whole scene of enthralled reason, the phantasmagoria of the phantasmagoria. And, at the same time, he ruins it; he shoots it to death. The last turn needed to secure the sealed, enciphered, buried sense of emancipation goes back to the absolute arbitrariness of the interpreter, to the absolute indeterminacy of the redeeming moment. Thus the Messianic wait for the dawn, for the fresh air of the revolutionary breakthrough, might be something like the faithfulness to a first dawn, to the experience of emancipation: the experience of the street child, of the life of anybody entering into the universe of meaning. The ruination of the bourgeois Lethe means the faithfulness to the “unsharable.” Yes, the faithfulness to the forgotten unforgettable is also an appeal to the absent flower or the sleeping beauty, the plea for the street child to come and occupy the place that has been cleared for him (Ranciére 1996, p. 38).

The past may become the future again, but only so in revolutionarily different ways when engendered by and through the capacities of the (becoming-)child to finally “recognise the new once again” (Benjamin, cited in Buse et al. 2005, p. 54).

7

Conclusion

Perhaps Spinoza and Benjamin’s distinct differences in perspective on children – and what they (are able to) do – can be attributed to the different threads these two Jewish thinkers journeyed upon in seeking freedom and emancipation. Spinoza sought

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understanding of the perfection of God or Nature sub specie aeternitatis as the means to realize freedom; Benjamin sought emancipation from the exploitations of modern capitalism through reclamation of material history and historical time to challenge the oppressive limitations of what (it) is (to be) in the world. Yet, in interesting ways, Spinoza’s project parallels Benjamin’s if we take Spinoza’s search for perfection as secondary to his understanding of affections and affects of “humankind” and the pragmatic politics it necessitated to achieve the most capacitationally empowering future. This philosophical question of politics – and exactly how and why they require philosophical engagement – is, indeed, a central thread of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (A Theologico-Political Treatise) and Tractatus Politicus (A Political Treatise) as well as his Ethics. An ontological difficulty appears to arise in this equation, however, when an early criticism of Spinoza by Deleuze is considered. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994, p. 50) argues that Spinoza’s ontology of immanence mapped out in Ethics contains a potentially problematic subordination and disjunction: that of modes to substance – “Spinoza’s substance appears independent of the modes, while the modes are dependent on substance, but as though on something other than themselves.” In this reading, Spinoza’s ontology appears at risk of erasing difference, of dismissing politics, of denying processes and negotiations of becoming under a dominance and determination of the substance of Being; a relegation of potentia (power) of the modal multitude as secondary and subordinate to potestas (power) of an independent and autonomous Sovereign: immanence as immanent to something other than itself. It is this very disjunction that Negri (2004, p. 15) confronts and overcomes, not by finding lack in the metaphysics of Spinoza’s Ethics but by understanding and affirming Ethics as an ontogenetic and processual body of text open to, weaving together, and gaining power with and through the forces of another textual body: “The Ethics is completed, so to speak,” Negri explains, “by the [Tractatus Politicus].” The consumption and (re)production of these immanent threads by Negri is more than simply an insightful recovery of Spinoza’s metaphysics for contemporary post-structural and critical concerns: it is a safety line to a Spinoza-Benjamin-Deleuzian web of immanence woven through threads of understanding that the child/adult relationship is not and never can be “an artificial exchange of roles” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 79). In diagramming the destruction of dualist subordination and pointing to the necessity of conceiving being as a radical and active constitution in Spinoza, Negri presents us with an ethical mapping. But what is it exactly about this mapping that makes it an ethical one? Deleuze (1988) explains that it is best to understand Spinoza’s titling of Ethics as an expression, not of a morality, but of an ethology, the fundamental difference being that morality is “a set of constraining rules. . .that judge actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values” (Deleuze 1995, p. 100), while an ethology “is a long affair of experimentation, requiring lasting prudence, a Spinozan wisdom that implies the construction of a plane of immanence or consistency. . .[on which there is] a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected” (Deleuze 1988, p. 125) – the horizontal plane of a spider and its web.

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Through the erosional and depositional lines of Negri’s mapping we may begin to weave together Spinoza’s monist substance of unity, modes of affection and affect, and attributes of thought and extension and Benjamin’s understandings of children’s “messianic power” and the revolutionary imaginings that emerge through play in experimentally productivist ways. In this assemblage-web for Spinoza, no less than for Benjamin or Deleuze (1994, p. 50), it is vital that the Power [potestas] of substance “must itself be said of the modes and only of the modes,” and it must be understood that “percepts. . .and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 164) if these co-compositions and co-constitutions are to become productively and actively effective. To be in the threads of this assemblage-web with Spinoza, Benjamin, and Deleuze is to always be in the middle; and to be in the middle is to always be at the dynamic intersections of bodies, space, and ethics: as co-productions, collective constitutions, and relational forces of (historical) becoming. Yet, as Deleuze tells us, relations of becoming “do not just combine in any way at all; any given relation cannot be combined with just any other” (Deleuze 2005, p. 236). Thus, as Negri appreciates, it is no accident that Spinoza realizes the very capacity and force for a creative power of production of the multitude in his political work. As a work of politics, as a fundamental component of any (ethical, spatial, conceptual, historical) negotiation and process of the modal multitude, the creative (un- and re-)making of the world is an ethics of relation along lines of capacities for being affected (Deleuze 1988, p. 27), but so too along lines of the effects of modal capacities on one another in imaginatively knowing and changing the world by “grow[ing] both young and old in [becoming] at once” (Deleuze 1995, p. 170). Benjamin recognized the ultimate significance of the faculty of the imagination and its material and embodied relations to the world for historical and political transformation, and that real historical and political change can only take hold – as both Spinoza and the child know – when thought and action are not separated from one another. The molarity of the adult-remaining-adult dismisses a true politics by closing off the creative powers of difference and separating the forces of thought and action for an un-thought return to the historical same. Agency then – or the capacity to creatively enact and exert power (potentia) for increased and enhanced capacities – does not belong to the realm of adulthood, where power is but a figment caught in tracings of a history that continue to miss the opportunities and capacities offered by the past. Rather, agency is always within the realm of childhood, which shows us – as Benjamin well recognized (Modern 2006, p. 131, n.29) – that being a responsible agent sometimes means being irresponsible to the present and its deterministic and limiting claims. Imagining the world differently through the liberating power of becoming-child to challenge existing orders and to bring about enhanced and empowering historical-material and political change is a distinct necessity that – as his ambivalently and schizophrenically received life and philosophy of ontological immanence forcefully attest – Spinoza both intensively lived and adequately knew. Thus, while Spinoza may have put away “childish things” in his Pauline imaginings, he never – through his conceptual webs woven through exploratory play with spiders, determined challenges to orthodox and political thought, and reimaginings of God or Nature – ceased in his unrelenting becoming-child.

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Part II Fundamental Politics and Political Foundations

Foundations and Impacts of Youthful Political Geographies

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Contents 1 Introduction: Starting Points and Setting Boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Getting Started: Key Political Beginnings and Interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Scholarly Contributions to the Foundations and Establishment of Political Geographies of Children and Young People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Expanding the Field Through Definitions and Concepts/Deconstructing the “Taken-forGranted” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusion: Ongoing Developments in Children’s and Young People’s Political Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter contributes to the genealogical approach provided by Volume 1 of the Springer series, Geographies of Children and Young People, which is designed to capture and trace key starting points for the establishment of different aspects of children’s and young people’s geographies. In particular it contributes to one of the key theoretical, conceptual, and empirical themes of children’s and young people’s geographies, that of political geographies. In this way it compliments and connects with Volume 7 of the series Politics, Citizenship and Rights and several other chapters within this volume that explore the complexities and diversities of politics, agency, and participation. This chapter

Portions of this chapter appeared in “Children, young people, politics and space: a decade of youthful political geography scholarship 2003–2013” (Space and Polity 2013) by Tracey Skelton. T. Skelton (*) Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_26

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provides a review of selected scholarship developed by geographers that has contributed to the emergence and firm establishment of “youthful political geographies” as a major element of the disciplinary subfield of children’s and young people’s geographies. The introduction outlines the starting points and boundaries of the review. Section 2 focuses on the 1990s to explore key interventions which have acted as foundational and impactful starting points. Section 3 focuses on a wide range of scholarly contributions that have served to create the foundations of the now thriving geographical academic work on children, young people, and politics. Section 4 opens up the ways in which the field has been expanded through conceptualization and deconstruction of taken-for-granted approaches and examines innovations around concepts of scale, childhood, youthhood, politics, articulation, and geopolitics. The chapter closes with pointers of what is likely to emerge in future years. Keywords

Political geographies · Young people · Children · Rights · Participation · Agency · Citizenship · Activism · Feminism · Childhood · Youthhood · Resistance · Protest · Political violence

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Introduction: Starting Points and Setting Boundaries

All genealogies have to start at some temporal point and, especially for geographers, at a spatial juncture – genealogies begin somewhere and at some time. However, the elasticity of space and time, means it is hard to decide where and when to identify a particular starting point. Stuart C. Aitken’s ▶ Chap. 2, “Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force” (this volume 2019), provides an excellent overview of the beginnings and developments of children’s and young people’s geographies in Euro-America and Scandinavia through to the global impact the sub-discipline now creates. His chapter sets the scene for this and several other contributions in the volume. This present chapter works to provide insight into the early starting points and the ongoing firm establishment of young people’s and children’s political geographies in order to contribute to one of the key theoretical, conceptual, and empirical themes of the broader children’s and young people’s geographies, that of political geographies. Volume 7 of the Geographies of Children and Young People series, Politics, Citizenship and Rights (Kallio et al. 2016), combined with other chapters in a range of volumes for this series, provides a substantive quantity of scholarship related to youthful geographies. This chapter focuses particularly on the genealogy of youthful political geography and links with three other chapters in this volume – Lynn Staeheli’s ▶ Chap. 11, “Paradoxes of Young People’s Political Participation,” and two chapters focusing particularly on children, Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Kallio’s ▶ Chap. 12, “Theorizing Children’s Political Agency” and Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha’s piece, ▶ Chap. 13, “"The Political Geography of the “Best Interest of the Child”.” Collectively these

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four chapters provide insights into certain points of departure for the diversity of theorizations and conceptualizations of children’s and young people’s political geographies. Geographies of children and young people are an extremely rich vein of publishing that contributes to several sub-disciplines within geography, including, among others, political, development, feminist, urban, social, cultural, emotional, and age geographies. Such is the wealth of this strand of youthful geographies that boundary drawing and limitation are required. Boundaries as fixed markers are, of course, highly disputed conceptually within geography but they do exist. Boundaries can be positive as we see in Wridt’s (2004) work with young people in New York where she demonstrates that sometimes boundaries and defined territories, in this case those of “block politics,” are important for the construction of social identities. A first boundary marker is one of inclusion and involves the meaningful recognition of children and young people as political actors and agents (cf Häkli and Kallio in this volume). There have been valuable theoretical and conceptual developments in this area since the 1990s, which I explore further below. A second boundary decision was to not focus explicitly on the geographical work that debates young people’s and children’s citizenship and/or participation – such work is collected together in Volume 7 of Geographies of Children and Young People (Kallio et al. 2016) alongside other vibrant and important work on citizenship (see Benwell 2017; Gaskell 2008; Hörschelmann and El Rafaie 2014; Kallio et al. 2015; Mills 2013; Mills and Waite 2017; Mitchell 2003, 2006; Staehli and Nagel 2012; Skelton 2005; Weller 2007; Weller and Bruegel 2009; Wood 2013). Similarly, much of the work on children’s and young people’s participation (in policy, practice or as a research method) has a political context to it (see Baca 2017; Cabannes 2006; Cahill 2010; Freeman and Aitken-Rose 2005; Hung 2011; Kent and Barnett 2012; Rahman et al. 2018). Nevertheless, emerging work in this field that is directly related to politics is examined. The final boundary set was to restrict this chapter to an examination mostly of work published in geography journals and books. Obviously not all the work related to children’s and young people’s political geographies can be included in this chapter – but many scholars of youthful politics have contributed substantially and generously to other volumes in this Springer series. Volume 11 Conflict, Violence and Peace (Harker et al. 2017), for example, provides an important collection wherein the ways in which politics play an important role in children’s and young people’s lives are explored. A decision had to be made as to the foundation of a starting point. The starting point for this review is the 1990s as I draw upon selected work that asked bold new questions about children and young people and laid important footings for contemporary geographies of children and young people. These selected pieces are not overtly related to political geographies, but each of them say something about politics that has resonated through into the twenty-first century and enabled us to work with children and young people politically.

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Getting Started: Key Political Beginnings and Interventions

In 1990 Sarah James asked a simple but profound question in the journal Area: “Is there a ‘place’ for children in geography?” Her intervention was designed to demonstrate the ways in which geographical methods of researching adult behavior could be used to focus on children and to capture the ways in which children’s geographies differ from those of other social groups. The article focused on why children were not included in geography as a discipline and how they might be. Of course, we now know that adult-focused research methods do not necessarily work well with children. Children’s geographers have been extremely creative and inventive in developing new methodological approaches and methods tool kits to ensure effective, productive, inclusive research with children and latterly with young people. Many of these are captured in Volume 2 of this major reference work, Geographies of Children and Young People, edited by Ruth Evans, Louise Holt, and Tracey Skelton (2017) Methodological Approaches. Nevertheless, the fundamental question was to ask the following: is there a place for children and where are they in relation to geography? As James states: “There has been little research undertaken which critically examines the ways in which children’s lives, experiences, attitudes and opportunities are socially and spatially structured. For far too long children have been hidden from geography, as well as from other disciplines” (1990, p. 278). James’s short but profoundly important article identified economic and political dependence as a crucial element of children’s lives vis a vis adults’. She states: “All children are in a subordinate position in relation to adults and do not have much control over their lives. Children are formally excluded from the political structuring of environmental systems. They have no vote, no direct representation, and no explicit roles in the electoral and political system” (1990, p. 280, emphasis added). James steadfastly resisted the approach of ‘adding children into’ geography but rather called for conceptual and analytical research approaches and reporting that examined and challenged children’s subordinate position in society, the environment, and institutions. The political act of asking the question “Is there a place for children in geography?”, naming the exclusion and marginalization of children from geography, and illustrating the diversity and significance of geographical and political aspects of children’s lives renders this article foundational as a starting point but also as a contributor to the political geographies of children and childhood. Focusing only on adults inevitably acts as an exclusionary practice and denies us the differential understandings of other equally important lives. While James focused on children, young people also have to be part of positive and inclusive research practice. This came later, with key texts focusing on youth identities including Sue Ruddick’s Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities (1996); Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine’s edited collection, Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (1998); and Aitken’s monograph, Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity (2001). These works were not specifically focusing on political geographies or identities, but they were motivated by a politics

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of visibility, encouraging geography as a discipline, and sub-disciplines such as political geography, to take young people seriously (Skelton 2010). In 1992 Roger Hart published Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship, as part of UNICEF’s Innocenti program’s white paper series. This commissioned essay became the foundational piece for exploring children’s genuine participation and the ways in which children and young people might achieve a form of citizenship not solely based on the age of majority and voting rights. Hart’s starting point is national democracy and the involvement of citizens in maintaining democratic practices and the fact that competency to be an active citizen is acquired over time and through participation. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was declared in 1989 and over time ratified by all but one nation, the USA. This was the start of the growth of the concept and actuality of children’s rights, although even now, 30 years later, full child rights have not been established in all countries and institutions. Hart’s essay focuses on children within the public domain including schools, community groups, and organizations that are sites for children’s contributions beyond the family. It is about the ways in which children should have a voice and how their contributions should be valued rather than trivialized. This essay effectively codified the term participation for children, defined at this time as those under 18 years of age. Hart stated: “The term ‘participation’ is used in this essay to refer generally to the process of sharing decisions which affect one’s life and the life of the community in which one lives. It is the means by which a democracy is built and it is a standard against which democracies should be measured. Participation is the fundamental right of citizenship” (Hart 1992, p. 5). Rejecting the oft articulated arguments that children are naïve, lack an adequate understanding of decision-making processes, and should not be involved too soon in social responsibilities, Hart asserted that children need to learn, from an early age, how to reason, make decisions, and participate. Children learn best by doing rather than being taught “citizenship” in classrooms. Indeed, they already have the capacity to organize, negotiate, deduce, and implement a whole range of activities through their own play and observation. Hart also confidently asserted that children are most motivated to participate when they have a degree of autonomy and can expect there to be outcomes that they and their communities will benefit from (Breitbart 1998). It is through this kind of integrated involvement that children can begin to learn about the links between participation and articulation of their rights and thence be able to understand and enjoy such rights. Hart’s Ladder of Participation designed for children has eight stages or rungs. The first three, manipulation, decoration, and tokenism, are described as having no real meaning of participation as the children rarely know what they are doing and why they are there and have no say at all about the processes and activities they are expected to “participate” in. In this context children might be given a T-shirt or have fun dancing and being applauded and photographed, but they have not had the right to say something, be listened to, or demonstrate their skills. These three stages are politically invalid. The remaining five rungs of the ladder demonstrate increasing degrees of children’s active and knowing participation culminating in stage 8 “child initiated, shared decisions with adults” (1992, p. 8). The Ladder of Participation provides a tool kit for detailed

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understanding and recognizing children’s role in the politics of participation and the potential for their participation in politics. It is designed to be a starting point for children’s meaningful participation in projects, particularly community-oriented projects which can enable children’s independent initiative, innovation, and agency. It contributes considerably to an understanding of meaningful citizenship and the political possibility that this inculcates. In 1994 Stuart C. Aitken’s Putting Children in their Place was published by the Association of American Geographers and made a significant step forward in finding a place for children in geography. At this time the key focal point for children in geography related to how they engaged, learned about, and understood their environments alongside experiencing all kinds of spatial restrictions. This remains a very important strand of children’s geographies and Aitken introduces some of the foundational research from the early 1970s up to the 1990s. In his own book, Aitken aimed to explore and contest the tensions between an “oppressive side of adult cultural politics and children’s free expression of self” (1994, x), similarly to James (1990) recognizing the significance of adult-child political relations. These tensions were, at that time, illustrated through the ways in which children were placed in environments created for them, but certainly not with or by them. Children are emplaced in environments devised, designed, and developed by adults. Nevertheless, while we “put children in place,” they also show considerable agency in changing such places and working to make them more like the spaces they can enjoy, all the while building up a repertoire of learning about immediate and wider worlds (Skelton 2009). To close this section on key political beginnings, I draw upon a major intervention developed by Hugh Matthews and Melanie Limb (1999) in their Progress in Human Geography article, Defining “an” agenda for the geography of children: review and prospect. This piece engaged with the cultural turn taking place in geography as a ripe time to invite geography to recognize “children as a neglected social grouping undergoing various forms of sociospatial marginalisation” (1999, p. 61). Their review was designed to provide a working agenda in order to “examine the experiences of children and how they see the world around them” (ibid.). While the authors did not directly engage with politics (apart from two mentions of the politics of children’s rights and the cultural politics of childhood), they were committed to potentially political outcomes from research that encouraged “empowerment, participation and self-determination consistent with competence” (ibid.) and the recognition that political solutions are required to enable children to exercise their right to participate, to speak, and to be heard and listened to (1999, p. 65). Additionally, Mathews and Limb’s agenda identified the key importance of recognizing that children: see the world differently from adults; use places in very different ways from most adults; exercise different mobilities from adults; experience fear and understand danger in different ways; experience and feel places differently to adults; are not able to determine environmental decision-making, and have different democratic responsibilities and understandings from those of adults. Acknowledgment of these divergencies between children and adults that emphasize difference as something to respect, affords the possibilities of new formations of

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political geographies for children and young people that expose inequalities, various forms of marginalization, neglect, and abuse, alongside identification of competencies, capacities, and capabilities. The following section takes children’s and young peoples’ geographies into the twenty-first century and examines a veritable explosion of youthful political geographies.

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Scholarly Contributions to the Foundations and Establishment of Political Geographies of Children and Young People

A key marker for the recognition of youthful political geographies was the publication of a special issue on young people’s and children’s political geographies, edited by Chris Philo and Fiona Smith (2003). Co-incidentally this was also the first year of the publication of the international journal Children’s Geographies (Robson et al. 2013). This journal was and remains a foundational and important site for work on children’s and young people’s political geographies. In this section I first consider the ways in which scholars working with the political geographies of children and young people have had to make space within the sub-discipline of children’s and young people’s geographies as well as connect with other sub-disciplines of geography. The final substantive section considers the ways in which political geographies of young people and children are establishing, expanding, and elucidating its theoretical, conceptual, and empirical field. At the close of their 2003 guest editorial to the Space and Polity Special Issue on Political Geographies of Children and Young People, Philo and Smith stated: The Special Issue as a whole is characterised by a. . .concern about the disempowering of children and young people, and it is the Guest Editors’ hope that, taken together, the papers. . .can bend researchers towards work on political geographies which will help, in the longer term, to empower children and young people as. . .‘political actors’ in and beyond their daily worlds. (2003, p. 112)

Sixteen years on there is no doubt that this call has been heard and acted upon. Many researchers have bent and honed their work toward analyses of political geographies of children and young people in countless ways. Jeffrey and Dyson (2008) in the introduction to their edited collection, Telling Young Lives, which focuses on young people’s contestation of their marginalization in the political sphere, cite Philo and Smith’s 2003 editorial introduction as an important trigger in opening up the sub-discipline. The five research papers in the 2003 Space and Polity collection made important statements and calls (based on empirical evidence) that have had an impact on the development of subsequent political geography work with young people and children. Skelton and Valentine (2003) through their work with young D/deaf people demonstrated that the youth performed complex political identities and were political participants, particularly in relation to their deafness. They asserted that these

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young people were not only doing politics, but they were challenging adultist notions of what young people do (or don’t do) in the context of politics; the young D/deaf people were effectively doubly “disruptive.” Susie Weller (2003) explored the contemporaneous compulsory citizenship education in England and demonstrated the ways in which young teenagers were excluded from citizenship in a constitutional sense but also from the curriculum on citizenship which tended to ignore or fail to recognize what young people were doing in their everyday politicalspatial lives. She argued forcefully that young people should be recognized as citizens in the present and not just in the future. Her work was foundational for many now working on the complexities of citizenship politics, children, and young people. Strongly connected with this theme was Hugh Matthews’ and Melanie Limb’s (2003) paper on school councils in the UK. They reported on the ways in which school councils were one strategy designed to enable children’s and young people’s participatory citizenship and democratic participation. They explored the difficulties of putting the councils into action and of getting young people involved and the problems of presuming youth members were representative of their communities. They warned against the councils being seen as the only site where young people and children were doing politics as this would run the risk of ignoring other children’s contributions to wider citizenship practices. Matthews and Limb showed that youth councils reflected more the political identities and practices of adults than they did those of the young people they were designed to involve. The two other papers in the collection both focused on children’s mobilities. John Barker’s (2003), and Robin Kearns’ and Damien Collins’ (2003) papers, connected with political moments of concern and enquiry relating to transport and child safety, just as Matthews’ and Limb’s paper linked to formal and informal political concerns about the participation of younger people. Barker illustrated the ways in which children were marginalized and ignored in UK transport policy-making and subsequent planning and how this restricted their spatial mobility. More children were being transported by cars and yet little was known about the micro-familial politics around the use of the car. Barker showed that the marginalization of children by the state in relation to transport policies was paralleled by the ways in which children’s decision-making capacities were rarely part of family choices. Similarly, Kearns’ and Collins’ work on the “walking school bus” in New Zealand showed that it was an initiative that was supposed to be child centric and aimed to provide some degree of empowerment and spatial freedom for the children. However, they demonstrated that what constituted this “freedom” was defined by adults and constrained through their surveillance and discipline. Both articles demonstrated the complexities and intersections of different scales of political process, the scales of the family, school, and state, which actively marginalized children from genuine participation and decision-making. They were also impactful in relation to greater awareness of the politics of mobilities for children and young people. Indeed, there have been several interventions around children’s and young people’s mobilities and immobilities. Barker et al. edited a special issue focusing on different aspects of children’s and young people’s mobilities (2009) in the journal Mobilities. In 2013 a special issue of ten papers was published in Urban Studies, co-edited by Tracey Skelton and

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Katherine Gough focusing on young people’s urban im/mobilities. More recently, in 2016, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers published a special issue on Geographies of Mobilities, a collection of 26 papers on mobility. The editors were Mei-Po Kwan and Tim Schwanen (2016); six of the papers focused on children and youth. Returning to the 2003 Space and Polity special issue, there are several important things that mark it as a foundational starting point for political geographies: 1. The special issue authors show active processes of making young peoples’ actual and potential political agency, subjectivities, competencies, participation, and capabilities for decision-making, visible. 2. The diversity of ways in which children and young people are “being political” (Isin 2002) and the fact that unless we pay attention to their ways and means, their strategies and tactics, we miss and misunderstand important political processes. 3. The importance of a continued critical interrogation of theories, concepts, definitions, and methodologies in relation to the political geographies of younger people. 4. The centrality of social justice issues of exposing processes of marginalization and exclusion of this particular group of people in relation to political geographies in all their formations. These themes were revisited a decade later and expanded to eight papers in the Space and Polity 2013 Special Issue edited by Kirsi Kallio and Jouni Häkli under the title “Children’s and Young People’s Politics in Everyday Life.” The collection includes both well-established and early career political geographers working with children and young people: Ann Bartos; Katharyne Mitchell and Sarah Elwood; David Jones Marshall; Sofia Cele; Lynn Staeheli, Kafui Attoh, and Don Mitchell; Fazeeha Azmi, Catherine Brun, and Ragnhild Lund; and Tracey Skelton. Chris Philo and Fiona Smith’s Afterword (2013) provides a pithy reflection on the 2003 Special Issue as well as sophisticated engagement with the 2013 research papers; in particular they explore certain long-lived generic assumptions about politics. They draw upon the fundamental notion of the “body politic” as a term to represent the ways in which all of the people, which translates into adults in reality, make up a political unit such as a state but also to capture the sense of the masses being ruled by one clearly identified ruler. Philo and Smith discuss adultism as a challenge to the normative ideas of who and what count as political. They use the term and concept of “childbody-politic” and draw upon examples in the special issue papers where a political lens focusing on younger people demonstrates the significance, complexities, and importance of children’s and young people’s geographies (see also Kallio and Häkli 2015). In an established discipline such as geography, it can be hard for new knowledge and scholarship to find a place and gain recognition. This subsection explores the process and productivity generated to stake and consolidate a claim for the creation of geographical knowledge in which young people and children are central. It also excavates instances of collaboration with, and learning from, knowledge producers

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who have previously established claims within the discipline, in this case feminist geographers. From 2000 onward there has been an establishment of an actual sub-discipline of children’s and young people’s geographies (cf Aitken 2004; Holloway 2014; Holloway and Valentine 2000; Hopkins 2010; Horton and Kraftl 2005, 2006; Matthews 2003; Vanderbeck 2008) and, fissured within this, children’s and young people’s political geographies. The journal, Children’s Geographies, has acted as an important, safe, and supportive intellectual space for scholars whose work helped consolidate the work of authors such as Stuart C. Aitken, Cindi Katz, Hugh Matthews, and Sue Ruddick. These early scholars of children’s and young people’s geographies could be described as being at the “coal-face,” and some have reflected on the ways in which their focus on children and young people has carried a price (Aitken 2004; Katz 2004). Interestingly the above named have engaged with aspects of children’s and young people’s political geographies at some point or other in their work (Aitken 2001, 2018; Katz 2004; Matthews 2001; Matthews and Limb 1999; Ruddick 2003, 2007a, b). Hence it is not surprising that the Children’s Geographies journal, as part of its own political project of visibility for young people’s and children’s geographies and for its scholars, has published a significant range of papers connected with, what we might call, the “lode” of the political geographies of children and young people. Several authors have developed children’s and young people’s geographies with a political focus, which includes aspects of citizenship, participation, rights, agency, exclusion, marginalization, identities, and so forth (Bordonaro 2012; Coe et al. 2016; Dar 2018; Dodman 2004; Holt 2004a, b; Hopkins 2004, 2015; Morris-Roberts 2004; O’Toole 2003; Parnell and Patsarika 2011; PercySmith 2010; Vanderbeck and Dunkley 2004; Seymour 2012; Skelton 2008, 2010, 2013; Thomas 2009; Tisdall and Punch 2012). In Children’s Geographies, Aitken and Plows (2010) provide an editorial introduction to a special issue on Young People, Border Spaces and Revolutionary Imaginations (volume 8, issue 4), which includes papers by Dina Jael Mendoza Inzunza and Christian Fernandez Huerta (2010), Geraldine Pratt (2010), Ramona Pérez (2010), Stuart Aitken (2010), Luis Ongay (2010), Fernando Bosco (2010), Cynthia Bejarano (2010), Andrew Burridge (2010), Giorgi Hadi Curti and Christopher Moreno (2010), and Kate Swanson (2010). The papers explore the ways in which young people experience and create borders as a state of mind that can be revolutionary and also as sites of resistance against “racism, adultism and authoritarian brutality” (ibid., 2010, p. 328). There is a range of techniques explored by the authors (writing, communicating, moving) through which young people demonstrate forms of social and political expectations that are a different way of doing things to their parents. The papers all work with different notions of the political de- and re-territorialization and political imaginations; they are part of the academic political project of making young people’s and children’s complex and active political geographies visible. There have been other important collective contributions to the establishment of children’s and young peoples’ political geographies. In 2008 Craig Jeffrey’s and Jane Dyson’s co-edited Telling Young Lives: Portraits of Global Youth, scholars introduce political narratives of 13 young people from 8 nations that explore the

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complex global practices of restructuring, imagining, and the political geographies of youth. In her foreword Katharyne Mitchell (2008) argued that the innovative style of writing in the chapters serves to give voice to young people and children who have been “greatly and disproportionately affected by economic shifts in the late twentieth century” and that this writing acts to “extend a kind of citizenship and at the same time to rework the meaning of citizenship. It is a political act.” (2008, viii). Peter Hopkins and Catherine Alexander edited a special section in Area (2010, volume 42, issue 2) titled “Upscaling Young People’s Geographies” and in their introduction examined politics, mobility, and nationhood. The section included five papers that explored the nature of the in-betweenness of young people’s politics within the binary of Politics/politics and the possible innovative political action that could emerge in such interstitial spaces with examples based in the Caribbean (Skelton 2010); a participatory action research project in Salt Lake City, USA, that explored the emotional and economic geographies of globalization, politics, and racism as they touched down in young people’s lives (Cahill 2010); the problematic ways in which asylum status is accorded or not to children due to questionable dominant conceptualizations of children’s political identities and experiences within the UK asylum system (Crawley 2010); the politics of migration as they affect the everyday geographies of young immigrants in Ireland and how this status impacts upon their sociospatial practices (Bushin and White 2010); and finally, a critical interrogation of the principle of the “best interests of the child” through an examination of the different political experiences of young Romanians who migrate to Italy (Mai 2010). Staking claims often relies upon forming alliances. Several scholars of children’s and young people’s political geographies identify feminist geography as an important influence. Skelton and Gough (2013) make a similar connection between their call for urban studies to accept the presence of young people in the urban context and those made earlier by feminist geographers in relation to the recognition of women in the city. This acts as a push toward an academic politics of inclusion. Drawing upon feminism, a sub-discipline that has been able to break through into mainstream disciplines, provides important theoretical and conceptual tools for newer emerging disciplinary approaches, especially where the goals are similar. There is an intellectual logic for those embarking on projects of social justice for marginalized and excluded groups to follow the scholarship crafted by those who have championed other groups. Pain et al.’s (2010) work on the ways in which young people’s emotional geographies (in the UK and New Zealand) are affected by everyday and distant geopolitics in terms of hopes and fears draws upon feminist scholarship. They use the feminist critiques of geopolitical work that presents disembodied interpretations of fear based on the understandings of experts rather than developing understandings from those who are fearful. Kathrin Hörschelmann (2008) skillfully draws together complex and effective feminist critiques of critical geopolitics in order to demonstrate the value of their conceptual deconstructions, for example, challenging the valence of the public/private divide, the overemphasis on elite institutions such as the state and media, and the neglect of popular subjects’ understandings and generation of geopolitical discourses. As Hörschelmann states, “such a refocusing of the lenses through which we seek to understand and critique

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formations of geopolitical power is well suited to the analysis of young people’s engagement with ‘the political’” (2008, p. 590). See also papers by Hyndman (2010) and Elwood and Mitchell (2012) for sophisticated engagements with feminist critical geopolitics and political geographies, respectively. Ann Bartos’ work on the politics of care and childhood (2012, p. 157) utilizes feminist political geography (and critical geopolitics) because of its consistent assertion that understandings of politics have to shift away from formal political action and toward the everyday (see Kallio and Häkli 2013, for an insightful discussion on debates about the definitions and spatialities of what constitutes politics). In her paper, Bartos convincingly argues that care is a political concept and that children express political acts through caring. This political definition of care employs the extensive scholarship of the feminist ethics of care. Bronwyn Wood analyzes the importance of young people’s “liminal status and the liminal spaces they occupy” (2012, p. 337) in the formation of their political identities. She applies feminist scholarship and critical youth research relating to citizenship and critical interrogation of the binaries of politics (Politics/politics, formal/informal, adult’s/children’s) to explore the notion of the spaces in-between the binary and the potential for young people’s politics. This draws upon Skelton for the idea of the “/” space between the binary (2010, p. 148) of Political/political as a site of melded and blended (p. 150) Politics/politics enacted by young people.

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Expanding the Field Through Definitions and Concepts/ Deconstructing the “Taken-for-Granted”

Once children’s and young people’s political geographies have been established, then expansion and consolidation become part of the process of the politics of developing and advancing a new sub-discipline, alongside the strengthening of new disciplinary theoretical and conceptual approaches. This final section draws upon scholarship that provides valuable tools with which to work the rich seam of children’s and young people’s political geographies. In 2009 Nicola Ansell published an article that took a fundamental concept within geography, and particularly of direct relevance to political geography, and challenged its use through an examination of children’s geographies. In her provocative and valuable paper on childhood and the politics of scale, Ansell talks about a problematic feature of children’s geographies, from the 1990s onward, that is, its focus on microworlds. She asks, if this remains the focus then what can we say about the wider issues that affect children? If we produce only case studies, what do we say that helps produce and conceptualize geographical knowledge? Ansell demonstrates that there is a long history of closing children’s worlds down closer and tighter to private spaces. This process then becomes a platform for the logical axiom that children’s direct experience of the world is limited and parochial; hence the assumption, and often assertion, that what children have to contribute in the context of politics is minimal. Much of children’s geographies followed a similar approach to children’s lifeworlds and produced very valuable material but didn’t necessarily connect with bigger issues. There were exceptions and Cindi Katz’s Growing up

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Global (2004) is a fabulous example of this. Children’s lives in rural Sudan and urban New York were connected and analyzed in and through the political economic analysis of globalization and development. Benwell and Hopkins’ edited collection, Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics (2016), is a powerful collection of geographical analysis of youthful geopolitics that engages with big political questions, scales, and diversity. The editors and chapter authors firmly challenge assumptions of children’s and young people’s immaturity, narrow foci, and limited comprehension. It is imperative that we remind ourselves that far too many children are currently impacted by geopolitical outfall whether that is in Syria, Palestine/ Israel, Yemen, Brexit Britain, Rohingya State, or the Mexican-USA border; it is essential to stretch and reconfigure our understandings of the geopolitical. Ansell argues that if we no longer view scale as hierarchically arranged and bounded and see it rather as networked: we actively destabilize the binaries of local/global, concrete/abstract, and agency/structure; we engage with a concept of a flat ontology; then we can construct more complex, accurate, and broader understandings of children’s lives and the multitudinous ways in which they interact with politics. Ansell’s careful and conceptually sound critique of scale provides an important template for the deconstruction of significant, fundamental concepts within geography and political and geopolitical geographies. It is clear that more work of this kind will be important in the future as part of the expansion and consolidation of children’s and young people’s political geography. It is about doing children’s and young people’s geographies differently and raising challenges and contestations of political geographical theorizations and concepts. Such an example of taking established disciplinary concepts and deconstructing them through a focus on children and young people’s lives can be found in the double special issue in Children’s Geographies edited by Stuart C. Aitken, Ragnhild Lund, and Anne Trine Kjørholt (2007) called Global Childhoods: Why Children? Why Now?. Consisting of ten single-authored papers (by Gagen (2007), Kjørholt (2007), Buckingham (2007), Bosco (2007), Abebe (2007), Punch (2007), Aitken (2007), Lund (2007), Nieuwenhuys (2007), and Skelton (2007)), a foreword by Allison James (2007), and an editorial introduction, the collection brought together the concepts of, and debates about, economic development and child development to show how they both fail to enable our understandings of the world and the place of young people within it (Aitken et al. 2007, p. 3; Aitken et al. 2008). The task for each scholar was to rethink economic development alongside a rethinking of childhood in order to expose “the excesses of neoliberal capitalism and the disempowerment of children” (ibid., 2007, p. 5). Each paper worked to reconsider and open up the political for young people and shift away from the fixity and determinism offered (even exalted) by economic and child development approaches. Young people’s and children’s identities have to be recognized as political identities that are co-constructed by young people and the political forces and factors they face. Such constitutions are in tension, dynamic, and in process, but they are always political. Important rethinking and reworking of a fundamental concept important to children’s and young people’s geographies has been recently developed by Kirsi Kallio and Jouni Häkli in a series of papers. I will draw here upon three of them:

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2010, 2011a, and 2011b (although these arguments are clearly informed by Kallio’s earlier paper published in 2008 based on her research about Finnish child evacuees’ experiences in the Second World War and their most recent exposition on these debates form the first paper in this special issue). The concepts Kallio and Häkli scrutinize are “children” and “childhood,” and they pull them together with the concept of politics (see ▶ Chap. 12, “Theorizing Children’s Political Agency” by Kallio and Hakli in this volume for further insight into their discussion). They argue that while there has been an expansion of work on younger people’s geographies, it is important that we learn more about the concept of politics as it relates to children and also to examine the political geographies that are located in childhood. They interrogate questions of what are children, what are politics, and what are children’s politics? What do children’s politics look like? They always talk of children, rather than of young people or both. In part this is because there is more work within this sub-discipline with young people (usually older teenagers and people in their early 20s) and politics. There is a sense in which young people are expected to connect with politics in some shape or form and indeed become politically enfranchised when they reach the age of majority, which in most countries is at the age of 18. However, children are a different kind of actor because they are not autonomous members of society and they are not necessarily responsible or liable for themselves. Childhood is not seen as being a political stage of life. Nevertheless, even very young children are part of meaning making and the construction of identities within the context of their societies. Kalio and Häkli are at pains to stress it is important to be clear about what is children’s politics and what is just behavior or social agency. They utilize the notion of intention and the ways in which children act as intentional beings based on their subject position in relation to parents and other processes of socialization. It is important to ask in what ways do children intentionally work with social change in their lives, how do they create spaces for their own purposes, and what kind of struggles do they get involved in through their everyday lives? (2010, p. 358). Children are embedded in complex power relations and possibly have less autonomy than any other social group, but these power relations are part of the formations of politics (2011a). Children have a range of tactics as part of their struggles in everyday life; they may care for someone, or avoid doing expected tasks, or they might cause disturbances that trigger policy changes. Children are intentionally involved in acting in ways that have an effect in relation to other people, and this is an aspect of political being that Kalio and Häkli argue will enliven political geography as new politics and political practices are brought into focus. In their 2011b paper, the pair focuses on the ways in which childhood policies work to involve children in (formal) politics and how this is an expanding practice in many countries. However (echoing Matthews and Limb 2003), it is important that the focus on the formal politics does not blinker us from the “mundane politics” that children practice. Importantly, Kalio and Häkli stress that “children have many kinds of political orientations, and they practice a variety of politics, whether endorsed or not. Therefore their politics may not, or rather cannot, be agreeable with all policymaking or consistent as ‘children’s politics’” (2011b, p. 107; see also 2011a).

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Children are political becomings and they need to have the opportunities and spaces in which to try out their political practices and agency. Kallio extends this notion of “political becoming” through an analysis of the “role of intergenerational recognition in processes of subject formation and political development” (2017, p. 88) and continues to explore the ways in which “people take shape and are shaped as political subjects” (ibid.). Formations of subjective political identities are shown to take place in everyday contexts. Kallio argues that it is important that care is taken in the context of intergenerational recognition, rather than misrecognition, between adults and young people to ensure a balance toward the beneficial effects on youthful political subjects (see also Kallio 2018; Punch et al. 2018; Hsieh and Skelton 2018 for a collection of work on intergenerationality). Bosco (2010) urges a consideration of what children do, bring, and make through their everyday becomings in order to see their activities as political work (in this case, children of Latino immigrant families on the US/Mexico border). He recognizes the complex ways in which children are disempowered, but children act as political agents who rework those power relations to make their worlds, and those of their communities, a better place (2010, p. 382). Bosco, as well as Kalio and Häkli, urge a stronger focus on what children and young people do rather than what they are as a way to enable research into their political agency and practices which may create change and are part of social struggles and hence see the ways in which children act politically. Elwood and Mitchell (2012) explore the difficulties in recognizing political agency and practice that falls outside of political theory and draw upon a research project with children at an after-school club in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Seattle, USA. They utilize de Certeau’s concept of spatial stories and Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic relations to show how children’s representations (spatial stories) and dialogues are an important part of their political identity formation. They argue effectively that children’s politics can be recognized through their everyday acts, behaviors, and forms of knowledge when children’s agency is theorized as embodied tactics and spatial practice. The authors found that children’s dialogue about their everyday spaces and their cartographic representations developed through the project provided opportunities and sites for children to negotiate a degree of autonomy and self-determination and develop narrative agencies. Elwood and Mitchell call this a “politics of articulation” and argue that it is important for all children but especially those with limited opportunities to feel confident about articulating their critical understandings of their environments. In a linked paper (Mitchell and Elwood 2012) on “mapping children’s politics,” the authors extend their critique to expose the ways in which nonrepresentational theory as a method of empirical research is depoliticizing in its practice and through its lack of attention to geographical and historical contexts. They offer the concept of articulation as a theory, a method, and a politics through its process of creating connections. However, other work demands a careful and meticulous examination of what constitutes political agency among children (and young people) and questions the possible taken-for-grantedness of the value of political agency. Bordonaro (2012) examines the complexities of the politics of children’s agency in Cape Verde. He

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examines the ways in which street children are seen to have too much agency, which adult youth agencies want to curb and manage by retraining their problematic autonomy and agency into something more socially acceptable. He stresses that political agency is recognized as such when young people’s actions are seen to be the right ones; there is an apparent moral distinction between what is appropriate and inappropriate agency for children (2012, p. 422). Similarly, Rahman et al. (2018) examine the complexities of the varying agency of street-connected children in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in relation to their involvement with political violence around national elections. The children are affected by the violence as both victims and perpetrators with many of them being active participants in the political violence stimulated by politicians and political parties. Day-to-day survival forces them to exercise difficult and risky decisions in relation to adult patronage and expectation. So, acknowledging children’s agency is part of a political project and indeed has been part of the project of political geographies of children and young people, but we have to ask what kind of agency is deemed acceptable and what are the power relations linked to such notions of acceptability (see Holloway et al. (2018) for an in-depth critical analysis around agency and concepts of capacity, subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality). In another strand of work, children’s and young people’s geography scholars have sought to critique and stretch the definition of the political, particularly in relation to geopolitics, and demonstrate the ways in which young people engage with geopolitics in complex ways. Note Harker’s work (2011) that considers how geopolitics tends to cohere around particular imaginative geographies of place as violent and political and hence constructs stereotyped understandings and interpretations of places, in this case of Palestine. Through using the notion of the families and familial spaces, which include children, he works to use a sociocultural analytical register to work toward a more complex set of Palestinian geographies that go beyond geopolitics. Benwell and Dodds (2011) drew upon political geopolitics of territorial nationalism to show how discourses, practices, and the everyday formations of geopolitical identities do not create universal understandings of nationalist issues among young people and that they have different critical political perspectives depending on their political experiences and geographical locations. The authors explored the temporal and spatial nuances of territorial nationalism in Argentina in relation to Las Malvinas/Falklands and how young people (aged 18–27) reacted to the political debates and policies. The youth were found to be relatively disinterested and much more critically concerned about local issues of institutional cutbacks and other broader geopolitical matters affecting Argentina. Pain et al. (2010) explored the ways in which young people’s emotions are affected by geopolitical change in the UK and New Zealand. They focus on young people’s notions of fear in order to develop the theorizations of existing geopolitics of fear. They bring young people’s voices and experiences into critical geopolitics and demonstrate the ways in which young people are political. They found that young people have a healthy suspicion of grand narratives and actively worked at keeping distant or large-scale fears in perspective but were aware of risks in their own environments. In some cases young people’s fears galvanized them into taking some form of political action.

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Hsieh and Skelton (2018) provide an Asian example of geopolitics where anxieties about inappropriate and anti-democratic practices by the Taiwanese Government in relation to a Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) with China developed into widespread youthful peaceful protest. Concerned about the apparent bias of the Taiwanese ruling party, Kuomintang (KMT), toward China in 2014, students started peaceful street protests to demand due legal process for the review clause by clause of the CSSTA. The intergenerational coalition of students, young people, and older adults became known as the Sunflower Student Movement (SSM), taking the heliotropic sunflower as a symbol of hope. During a 24-day occupation of the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, the SSM demanded formal political reform, the dissolution of the National Assembly, the setting up of a national conference to discuss constitutional change, and a timetable for political and economic reform (for another youthful occupation case study, see Hopkins and Todd 2015). Once the occupation ended, the CSSTA was rejected and the KMT lost their presidency and a majority of their seats in Parliament. The Democratic People’s Party gained power and began to bring in political reform including lowering the voting age from 20 to 18 (this was formalized in 2017) and consider possible constitutional changes. Hence this direct peaceful protest achieved several goals set by young protesters; sadly, their counterparts in Hong Kong who set up the Umbrella Movement were treated very differently with hostility, violence, and prison sentences. I close this section with a discussion from one paper which brings together critical questioning of the definition and conceptualization of what is a child, what constitutes political agency, and how to strengthen critical geopolitics. Jennifer Hyndman (2010) provides a powerful examination of the ways in which critical geopolitics may be slipping into an implicit normative politics of its own (2010, p. 247). Through analysis of an in-depth consideration of what/who constitutes a child in geopolitics, Hyndman provides the conceptual tools to dissect the value of critical geopolitics and hence force this branch of political geography to question its political project. She wonders whether critical geopolitics is only about problematizing discourse rather than having an alternative political project. She uses the concept of the “child soldier” to illustrate the ways in which we have to be continually vigilant about our concepts of the political. There is a political imperative to ask which lives count as lives (2010, p. 250). “Child soldiers” are normatively seen as those in need of rescue, protection, and rehabilitation and are an important focus of child rights workers and policies. Using examples of two “child soldiers” (i.e., boys who were 15 at the time of capture), Hyndman shows us that definitions and treatment of “child soldiers” can differ in frightening ways according to the political context, discourse, power structures, and geographical imagination at play. Ismael Beah was a child soldier in Sierra Leone. “Rescued” at 15 he was rehabilitated, wrote a book, and was invited to give lecture tours throughout the USA. Canadian Omar Khadr, also 15 at the time of “arrest” in Afghanistan, was never recognized as a “child soldier” by the USA, cited as an “enemy combatant” and “terrorist” and held in Guantanamo Bay and charged with murder. At the time of Hyndman’s writing, Khadr was 23 and still in Guantanamo. He was released in late 2012 and transferred to a maximum security prison in Canada (he has since been released, formally

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pardoned, and compensated for abuses he experienced as a child soldier held by the US military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). Khadr showed the “wrong” kind of political agency through resistance to the US army’s activities in Afghanistan, the country where he was living with his Canadian family. In the case of Khadr, several elements of international law and the rights of the child were discounted and ignored in the extralegal spaces created by the USA as part of their “war on terror”; this child was not protected, afforded legal rights, nor exempt from torture. Both “child soldiers” experienced a vulnerability to violence in extremely uneven ways. There have been several interventions building upon Hyndman’s critique. Examples include Mikko Joronen’s focus on the highly precarious legal, political, and geopolitical status of children in Palestine (2016); Chih Yuan Woon’s work with children’s critical geopolitics and peace in the Philippines utilizing cartographies (2017); Roy Huijsmans’ research on the critical geopolitics of children and young migration in Laos (2016); and Suncana Laketa’s examination of high school students’ identities as geopolitical subjects in the post-conflict city of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina (2016). There are important political questions raised that children’s and young people’s political geographers must continue to ask and pay attention to: When is a child not a child? What are the political ramifications of such distinctions for the definition of what is politics? What is agency? What do political rights and protection mean in practice?

5

Conclusion: Ongoing Developments in Children’s and Young People’s Political Geographies

When political geographers and children’s and young people’s geographers connect and combine resources, skills, and knowledge, then rich veins of work appear that explore and excavate the political contexts, activities, and aspirations of children and young people. As Kallio and Häkli (2013) clearly demonstrate, considering younger people as political actors demands new ways of conceptualizing what constitutes youthful political agency, and this can link to political action and subjectivities. Such innovations and definitional transparency can actively foster more concentrated and richer scholarship within both sub-disciplines of geography – political geography and geographies of younger people. In the UK, contemporary examinations of localized nationalism and young people’s desire to engage with national and civic citizenship and devolution debates have emerged over the past 5 years or so (Mills and Duckett 2016). Jones, Merriman, and Mills (2016) have examined the role of a long-established youth organization in Wales and its role in shaping Welsh nationalist identities. Sioned Pearce (2019) examines young people’s political engagement, participation, and representation in devolved politics in Wales where the relatively young institution of the Welsh Assembly is growing up with the youth of this new national formation. Botterill et al. (2016) explored the specific experiences and perspectives of religious and ethnic minority youth during the Scottish independence campaign in 2014. The authors focused on the ways in which the concept of “ontological security” became a

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central and important element in young people’s lives throughout the campaign as they sought particular forms of security within multicultural and democratic aspirations for a future Scotland. Both sides of the campaign of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to independence included young people’s voices and youth agency; however this hopefulness of civic inclusion was besmirched by everyday racism that generated formations of ontological insecurity. Children’s and young people’s geographers are thus directly engaging with contemporary youthful politics that demonstrate the ways in which young people are actively engaged in the major future decisions and debates of their own nations. It is essential to capture and render visible the political activism and agency played out at different scales. Political geographies of children and young people are working with new concepts in order to explore formations of different kinds of youthful politics. I focus briefly on two examples of emerging configurations: more-than-human playful politics and prefigurative politics. Noora Pyyry and Sirpa Tani (2017) focus on the concept of more-than-human playful politics and the notion of “dwelling with” and the consequent possibilities of creativity and being within place. They write of opportunities afforded by the materiality of the city which can encourage young people’s openness, spatial reworkings, and meaningfulness. For additional insight into the concept of the post-human, see Stuart C. Aitken’s ▶ Chap. 2, “Coloring Outwith the Lines of the Map: Children’s Geographies as Contested Subfield and Practical Global Force” in this volume (2019) and his book, Young People, Rights and Place (2018). Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson (2016) and Dennis Rodgers and Stephen Young (2017) focus on prefigurative politics in order to explore young people’s civic-minded activities and how these function through temporality in North India and Nicaragua and India, respectively. Prefigurative politics relate to the notion of “embodying in the present one’s vision of the future” and acting in the present (Jeffrey and Dyson 2016, p. 77). Prefigurative politics are about the “now” of the Jeffrey and Dyson article title whereby young people perform and produce possibilities of (temporal) change in the present rather than protesting against the regime and institutions. The expectations are that these activities and activisms will create change in the here and now, however local, and that they might have an impact in the future. As Rodgers and Young argue, young people have the capacity and are showing the commitment to “model in the present moment the kind of society they hope to bring into being in the future” (2017, p. 194). Both of these conceptual ways of examining youthful politics are part of the ongoing inventiveness of both young people and also political geographies of children and young people. Children’s and young people’s geographers and political geographers continue to work with children and young people in many ways in order to explore, extract, and surface the complexities of their political subjectivities, agencies, and actions. There is now a wealth of concepts with which we can work as outlined above. The identity of the sub-discipline and the ever-expanding explorations and collaborations are well established. Transformative work with children and young people not only advances the debates within the academic discipline but it provides the research participants with stronger senses of their own political identities and agencies.

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We can do political geographies with younger people in many ways: through participatory research activities, through research projects specifically designed to bring a sense of politics to the fore, and through our writing and our teaching. Where possible we can provide arenas for young people to articulate their own political practices (c.f. Skelton 2012, p. 7 on making space for youth activists within academic space to articulate their political motivations, agency, and practices). Let us build on these foundations of rich production to continue and extend innovative, intelligent, committed, critical, and confident youthful political geographies.

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Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Liberalism and Young People as Political Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Liberal Political Subjects and Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Children and Young People as Political Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Pedagogy, Self-Governance, and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Enacting Pedagogy, Creating Political Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Ambiguous Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Politics, Acts, and the Ambiguities of Political Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the complexities and paradoxes of young people’s political participation and related activism, agency, and practices. The chapter explores the ways in which young people face a range of contradictory perceptions around their political participation. They are perceived as being part of hopeful, positive, and egalitarian politics at the same time as they are considered to not have the skills or capacity to be effective political actors. This chapter contains five sections and a conclusion. The introduction (Sect. 1) provides an overview and calls for caution around the terms “youth” and “young people.” In Sect. 2, the normative positioning of young people as political agents, drawing largely from liberal political thought and its critiques based in the West, is detailed. Here the political subject in liberalism is scrutinized for its validity but also for its inadequacy. Section 3 describes a pedagogy, or a set of discourses and L. A. Staeheli (*) School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_5

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practices that sustains social order, and that emphasizes the creation of selfgoverning citizens. Section 4 of this chapter outlines the ways that this pedagogy is operationalized and enacted by institutions and civil society organizations and discusses the implications for the creation of political subjects. It engages with the expectations around youthful citizenship and the “common good.” Section 5 focuses on definitions of politics and the importance of redefining politics. It examines the relationality between acts and politics. The conclusion considers the kinds of politics such political subjects enact and questions surrounding active and activist citizenship. Keywords

Young people · Political paradoxes · Participation · Agency · Pedagogy · Active citizenship · Normative rationality · Neocommunitarianism

1

Introduction

Young people have often played important – almost mythical roles – in creating political change. In 2011, much of the West was transfixed by the scenes of young people occupying public squares in North Africa, the Middle East, and later, in cities across the USA and Europe. While many people saw the youth as representing the best hopes for toppling autocratic regimes and for challenging the excesses and injustice of capitalist economies, other people worried that the young people could not be controlled, would act impulsively, and that ultimately, their actions would descend into hooliganism. Still others were convinced that fundamental change would not be brought about, as young people lacked the vision and skills to create a new order, for all their enthusiasm in occupying squares, marching in streets, and creating a spectacle. From the latter perspective, the problem was not that youth were apathetic or disengaged, but it was that they lacked the capacity to be effective. Even in countries such as South Africa, where there is a long history of youth engagement in struggles for social justice and political change, the estimated 12,000 protests in 2013 and 2014 over services and corruption seemed to have little effect. And so programs have been initiated to channel young people’s efforts in directions that will be effective in working toward better politics, communities, and nations. These competing views of young people’s participation reflect the deep-seated, widely held fears and the equally deep-seated, widely held hopes that individuals, movements, institutions, and governments have for youth as political agents (ECOSOC 2015, 2018). Those hopes and fears are intertwined, as there is an element of unpredictability to youth (as indeed, there is with most political agents). Importantly, the ways one views young people’s participation reflects both normative expectations of how youth should engage as well as political stances with respect to what one believes a socially just political order should look like. Following the Introduction, Sect. 2 considers the normative positioning of young people as political agents, drawing largely from liberal political thought and its critiques based in the West. The third section describes pedagogy, or a set of discourses and practices

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that sustains social order, that emphasizes the creation of self-governing citizens. In the fourth section of this chapter, the ways that this pedagogy is operationalized and enacted by institutions and civil society organizations is outlined and the implications for the creation of political subjectivities and subjects is discussed. The fifth section examines the ways in which politics are defined theoretically and illustrates the diversity of debates and the need to consider redefining politics in the light of the complexities of young people’s political subjectivities. It also explores the importance of political acts, action and nonaction. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the kinds of politics such political subjects enact, focusing in particular on questions surrounding active and activist citizenship. Before considering each of these issues, however, a word of caution is in order. To talk about “youth” or “young people” as an undifferentiated category or group is to homogenize and essentialize people who are (perhaps) united only by their age. The language of “youth” is limiting, because it implies there is some distinctive and agreed status called “youth” that is clearly different to the status of “child” or “adult,” and that is universally accepted or understood. It is limiting because it can mask the diversity of young people in terms of their positioning within their communities and nations, their geopolitical positioning, their outlooks, their experiences, their subjectivities, and their political goals and values. It is also limiting in that it can demean or perhaps even deny the political agency of young people, in all their diversity. Yet it is difficult to escape the use of the categories “youth” and “young people.” In using those terms in this chapter, I acknowledge the diversity of young people, even as the language employed may mask that.

2

Liberalism and Young People as Political Agents

Statements that young people’s standing as political agents is ambiguous may be trite, but they are also true. As suggested in the Sect. 1 their agency is simultaneously celebrated and feared. Furthermore, young people are described as apathetic and unengaged but also as too quick to protest and to engage in violent acts. The contradictions in these depictions have deep, complicated sources. As an entry point, I turn to liberal political theory to understand the ways – and perhaps the hegemonic way – that political agency is commonly framed in the West. This is, of course, only one possible starting point, but it is probably the most common starting point for academic discourse and theoretical perspectives on young people’s agency. Whether one agrees with whether this should be the case, liberalism is also often presented as representing universal values and expectations of political subjectivity and agency.

2.1

Liberal Political Subjects and Citizens

Citizens within liberal political theory are typically – and perhaps stereotypically – conceptualized as rational, autonomous individuals who are collectively capable and

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worthy of being sovereign; they are individuals who can assume the responsibilities of governing. In this view, rationality is critical to the ability to participate in the dialogue and deliberation that are the basis of decision-making. It is not just any decision-making that is required, however; it is the ability to contribute wisely, to weigh evidence, and to strive for the common good, rather than making decisions on a whim or on the basis of self-interest, which is different to the aggregation of interests of the citizenry (Cohen 1986; Ober 2013). Even more, rationality implies that the political subject can understand the arguments of others and can weigh information about topics of which he or she has no direct or personal knowledge. Such epistemic approaches to the political subject highlight the moral capital and normative judgements that legitimate certain agents as citizens whose participation in decision-making and governing is critical to liberal democracy (see Häkli and Kallio 2014b). As intimated above, the political subject of liberal democracy is understood to be an individual, but an individual who can exercise judgement and wisdom as he or she engages in decisions as part of the collective, or polity. This individual is described as unencumbered and is required to be autonomous. An unencumbered subject is one who is not tethered to or overburdened by obligations and relations, such that he or she cannot participate. Subjects are also to be autonomous, in the sense of not being controlled or dependent on others in ways that would limit their ability to make decisions, and as importantly, to act. Combining the characteristics of rational, unencumbered, and autonomous individuals, the idealized liberal political subject can detach him- or herself from particularity so as to be capable of deliberation on the basis of shared, communal assumptions and understandings of the common good, but equally, should be able to engage in debates over what constitutes the common good (Gaus 2000). There are at least three interrelated implications of this way of understanding the political subject in liberalism. First, the political subjects are individuals who share in and to some extent create communities, but the basis of community is not foreordained, and is certainly not ethnic, racial, or tribal. It is a community created in and through participation and engagement in the public sphere. But as feminists and others have argued, the impossibility – and even undesirability – of detaching from family, friends, and the contexts in which people live means that political subjects, the deliberations in which they engage, and the communities they create are ineluctably social and riven with power relations, albeit in varied ways and extents (Fraser 1990; Lister 1997). The second implication follows in that those social and power relationships condition the ways that individuals and social groups are evaluated and differentiated as political subjects. Those who are deemed incapable of participating rationally and autonomously – assessments that are fundamentally social and political – may be excluded from the political community; reflecting processes of differentiation and exclusion, such individuals may be subjects, but not the political subject called “citizen.” The third implication, then, is that while liberalism is often described as incorporating universal values, it does not follow that everyone is able to participate. Instead, “universal” represents an ideal to which political subjects and political communities should aspire. For example, “universal

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human rights” are not really available to everyone but instead serve as a goal or ideal to which citizens and political communities should work and that should serve as the normative underpinning for deliberation, participation, and governing (Hoover 2013).

2.2

Children and Young People as Political Subjects

Children and young people represent a challenge as liberal political subjects. In some circumstances, they seem to be treated as any other subject/citizen. In others, they are treated as quasi-citizens (see Nash 2009). In many discussions, they are simply overlooked (see Cohen 2005 and Skelton 2010). The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1942) – and subsequent conventions, legislation, and debates surrounding it – provides an example that is particularly salient for this discussion. The Declaration embeds many ideas and principles associated with liberal political theory, such as the preeminence of the individualistic subjectivity, the need to bound state power, the importance of rights, and the reciprocity of obligations between individuals and communities. It is aspirational, in the sense of calling upon “every individual and every organ of society” to “promote respect for these rights and freedoms” to “secure their universal and effective recognition and observance.” As such, it is a platform or a starting point from which developments with regard to specific elements of human rights should be furthered. While some authors have argued that it is one manifestation of the imposition of imperial ideologies that does not recognize the cultural traditions and values of non-Western societies (e.g., Cerna 1994; Mutua 2002), others argue that it is the basis for on-going contestation about how to achieve social transformation (Hoover 2013). Significantly, the Declaration mentions children only once. Article 2, considered one of the foundations of the Declaration, claims that “everyone” is entitled to rights and freedoms “without distinction of any kind,” and lists race, color, gender, and so forth, but not age. In Article 16, the rights of men and women “of full age” are declared to have the right to marry. It is only in Article 25 that childhood is mentioned, whereby “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance” and asserts that “all children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.” Article 26 provides for the right to education and “the full development of the human personality,” although this is not specific to children or youth. Indeed, in Article 29, the Declaration states that “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his [sic] personality is possible.” Thus, by implication, the Declaration creates an ambiguous position for children and young people. Are they included in “everyone?” Or is their inclusion limited to specific circumstances? Are they “full” personalities with obligations or are they in need of “special care and assistance?” To some degree, these questions have been further debated and a degree of consensus achieved in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (all countries, except for the USA, have now ratified the convention), but these have not been adopted by every country and remain the basis of further debates and negotiations. Significantly, the

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drafting of the conventions have been the responsibility of adult elites, with children and youth involved primarily as examples – and almost as “exhibits” in the unveiling of new policies and agreements – rather than as full participants (see Häkli and Kallio 2014b). They have been the subject of politics, rather than imagined as political subjects in their own right. Reading the Declaration, it seems as though children and young people are “free and equal in dignity and rights,” but only if they are seen as part of the collective “everybody.” A substantial body of political theory and discourse, however, does not recognize children or youth as being included in that collective, in part because of concerns over autonomy and rationality. Furthermore, the Declaration describes children and childhood as in need of special protections, and education (which is labelled as a right, at least through the primary level) is required for children and youth to develop their full personalities. This developmental perspective identifies children and youth as “becoming,” rather than necessarily as political subjects or agents (see Horton and Kraftl 2006; Kallio and Häkli 2011).

3

Pedagogy, Self-Governance, and Agency

Long before the Declaration was drafted, education was seen as the foundation for the development of children and youth as political subjects, as citizens. Education systems, however, reflected the expectations and power relations of the times and places in which they were developed and implemented. In the late 1700s, for instance, Thomas Jefferson and others called for public education to train young people to be citizens of the newly constituted United States, as compared to subjects of a monarch. To act as citizens, they argued a shared approach to solving problems, and the skills to effectively participate had to be developed and instilled throughout the educational system (Shklar 1998). Such education was to be universal, in the sense of being available to both girls and boys, and to be freely available. This universal education, however, did not mean that the legal rights of citizenship were to be available to everyone, as only white men would have the right to vote, own property, and so forth. In other places, educational systems differentiated students based on their status within society and the kinds of political subjects they were to become; beginning in the 1800s in South Africa, for instance, separate curricula for racialized groups both reflected and reinforced subject-hood and subjugation (Staeheli and Hammett 2010). The expectations for political subjects and citizens also change through time, thus requiring an adaptive capacity in citizens. In the early twentieth century, the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey proposed an approach to education that would instill what he referred to as the “habits” of citizenship and “amicable cooperation” in daily lives, arguing that would lead to new kinds of political subjects equipped with skills and dispositions for citizenship and that might change to meet new needs while still remaining true to democratic principles (Dewey 1916). Reflecting Dewey’s influence (Boyte 2003), if not his pedagogical model, citizenship education and civics are now included in the core curricula of many countries in an attempt to instill particular values and ways of

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being as citizens of the nation, thus enrolling children and young people in nation building and the consolidation of the state (Osler and Starkey 2005; Mills 2013). The role of education and pedagogy, however, should be conceptualized more broadly than what is taught in the institutional settings of schools. Instead, pedagogy is used to describe the means by which discourses that sustain a social order are produced and maintained (Pykett 2010). Theorizing a pedagogy of citizenship thus directs attention to the varied ways that citizenship discourses and programming embed particular values, social expectations, and so forth. It provides the normative underpinning that justifies action – by a range of agents in civil society and the state – to reinforce behaviors and ways of being associated with the political subjects who carry the label “citizen,” even in the absence of direct government interventions. Central elements of the pedagogy relate to autonomy and rationality. In combination, autonomy and rationality are said to enable citizens (youthful and otherwise) to self-govern and to be capable of acting in the ways that they normatively should. These elements have been theorized – albeit in different ways, using different terminologies, and with differing understandings of politics – in the work of a number of critical scholars, including Michel Foucault, Georgio Agamben, Nikolas Rose, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown. Central to their work is attention to the ways that particular forms of rationality become normalized – even naturalized – such that subjects can assess potential actions, govern themselves, and participate in deliberation and dialogue. Even more, they are essential if individuals are to actively engage with issues facing their communities, thereby meeting obligations with respect to other citizens (although theoretical perspectives diverge over the issue of whether such engagements offer meaningful opportunities to participate and challenge institutions and relationships). This requirement to participate is often described as a key feature of neoliberal citizenship, but in truth, there is a longer lineage, as evident in the writings of Dewey (1916) in the early twentieth century and John Stuart Mill (1861 [2006]) in the nineteenth century. Even the Declaration of Human Rights – that epitome of liberalism – includes obligations and responsibilities to the community. Article 29, for instance, established the duty of all people to contribute to the community, although the definition and boundaries of that community are not articulated. Yet the autonomy and rationality that is encouraged in young people to enable their development as self-governing political subjects can be an unpredictable, and from some perspectives, even a dangerous mix. As the theorists referenced above all argue, subjects learn, are socialized, and internalize “proper” or “appropriate” political norms and behaviors. Foucault, in particular, has drawn attention to the ways that myriad practices associated with the economy, the state, and cultural and social reproduction discipline subjects to be selfgoverning, such that they know how to behave without being explicitly directed; they internalize a particular rationality that makes certain options, decisions, and behaviors seem appropriate, but without people necessarily being able to articulate their decisions or the means by which they came to act as they have done. When this disciplining is complete, subjects should become self-governing or self-regulating, such that they respond to unanticipated circumstances using underpinning norms and rationalities in ways that are still appropriate and that do not undermine the broader system.

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While some theoretical arguments seem to imply a system or structure that is tightly sealed, with little possibility of disruption, Rasmussen (2011), Sullivan (2001), and others point to the ways that the reproduction of the system is riven by the internal contradictions of autonomy and self-governance. Rasmussen argues that the very abilities of self-regulating political subjects to adapt and respond creatively to unexpected circumstances (e.g., evaluating a problem and making a rational response) also create opportunities and foster capacities for people to take actions that are themselves unexpected and perhaps lead to changes. The point of being selfgoverning, after all, is that people are not robotic but instead can make judgements and respond accordingly based on an assessment of changing circumstances. These judgements are to some extent contingent, not simply selected from a palate of options. And when these judgements are aggregated – either across multiple judgements of one person or across multiple people – the outcomes can be unexpected, lead to change, and be disruptive. Shannon Sullivan (2001) makes a similar sort of argument but from a different philosophical and theoretical starting point. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Sullivan argues that habits are formed through the interactions – or what she discusses in terms of transactions – between individual lives and social structures or organizations; these habits guide actions at both individual and societal levels. Sometimes habits serve as routines or fixed grooves that are difficult to step outside of. Other habits are ways of approaching issues that allow creativity, adaptation, and change. One of Dewey’s goals was to think about ways of encouraging habits of democratic participation, such as engagement in community and national debates and taking action. To the extent that habits become fixed or sedimented, they may inhibit change and more radical forms of action. Yet sometimes, and often through repetitive and collective action, sedimented habits can be loosened and create circumstances in which new rationalities or judgements can operate and be embedded in social and political institutions. Embedding such rationalities and new habits in institutions and broader structures, however, is a fraught process that is resisted and often blocked by those same institutions and structures. Significantly, youth and youthfulness often stand as metaphors for challenges within society more generally that are created through the paradoxes of self-governance observed by Rasmussen (2011). Radical philosopher Jacques Rancière (2008, p. 28), for example, argues that “politics in its entirety” can be described in terms of the opposition between “an adult humanity faithful to tradition, which it institutes as such, and a childish humanity whose dream of engendering itself anew leads to self-destruction.” While the theoretical arguments presented by Rasmussen, Sullivan and Rancière differ – even clash – in some respects, they each make the point that self-governance and the ability of a “system” to foster self-regulating political subjects is never complete, and that this is an important source of politics, political change, and political contestation. It is also the reason that institutions of different sorts attempt to shape the kinds of subjectivities and rationalities that young people bring to public debate and action; it is here that the operations of pedagogies that serve to shape politics and political subjectivities can be seen. The sources of such pedagogies are diffuse and virtually

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impossible to trace, but they operate in a social field that intertwines topographical and topological relations. In this way, the field exposes pedagogies of political subjectivities and citizenship to contextual and also seemingly decontextualized influences that are reflected in efforts to shape young people’s political subjectivities and agency (see Häkli and Kallio 2014b). In this, we can see the blending of putatively universal values with histories of specific places and nations, and the way that this blending is infused with power relations. This is, perhaps, most evident in programming associated with formal and informal education and in policies and structures in diverse settings and locations.

4

Enacting Pedagogy, Creating Political Subjects

Osler and Starkey’s (2005) theorization of the relationship between citizenship and political subjectivity has been influential in programming to promote the engagement of young people as citizens. They argue that there are mutually reinforcing relationships between people’s status within society, their feelings of belonging or inclusion, and the practices with which they engage. For Osler and Starkey, status refers to the legal standing of young people as citizens, but the idea can be usefully expanded to include their positioning with respect to institutions, rules, and normative expectations that condition the ways they act and the ways they are perceived. As such, status includes the rules that that set the terms under which young people can engage (e.g., voting age, protections for speech rights, and their applicability to people under the age of majority) normative expectations of how they should behave (e.g., Are they encouraged to speak out or to abide by the decisions of their elders?). Feeling refers to the ways that young people imagine themselves within society or within a given context. Do they feel valued, welcomed, or listened to? Or are they pushed to the side, ignored, or treated with mistrust? Under what conditions are they listened to? What kind of young people are valued? Finally, practice refers to the sites in which young people can engage and participate in dialogue and action. Osler and Starkey argue that each of these elements reinforce the others, and so interventions in one can be used to encourage the development of political subjectivities as citizens. So, for example, encouraging the practice of community service can help young people feel that they are important and valued and lead them to other acts that are consistent with their status as citizens. Or recognizing the rights of young people and making it easier for them to exercise those rights can lead to changes in practices and in feelings of belonging. It is easy to imagine how this approach is both reflective of extant pedagogies of political subjectivity and citizenship and also how it can be incorporated into curricula and programing or training offered by organizations that attempt to foster engagement and participation on the part of young people. Importantly, it seems so obvious – particularly to those in the West who design programs – as to be uncontentious. If we follow Häkli and Kallio’s (2014b) notion of the field, we can understand the pedagogy as both a site and a set of relationships in which political subjectivities are forged, contested, and reformed.

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The pedagogy as a set of practices and values is promoted in formal and informal education programs in sites around the world, but as noted above, is modified to reflect local and national histories and contexts, as well as the inspiration of those enacting the pedagogy. Formal education refers to school curricula, lessons, and programing, often through civics and/or citizenship education classes. Informal education is much more diffuse and typically is offered outwith school settings. It includes programs offered by community organizations and NGOs, as well organizations such as Scouts and Guides and many organizations affiliated with religions (see Mills 2013; Mills and Waite 2017). Three interrelated elements of the pedagogy include: commitments to cosmopolitanism and human rights, self-sufficiency and entrepreneurialism, and to active citizenship (Staeheli et al. 2014). Cosmopolitanism might seem a strange element in a pedagogy of citizenship, since citizenship is so often associated with the nationstate and cosmopolitanism can carry a connotation of deterritorialized or global citizenship. Yet nation-states often fail to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, and practices that magnify and vilify difference contravene the rights of citizens and the ideals of universalism that underpin liberal democratic citizenship. Practically, and as mobilized in the pedagogy, cosmopolitanism is used to call on global values and human rights but also to share and enact these values in order to overcome difference and inequality (Auvachez 2009). Appiah (2006) talks of this as “rooted cosmopolitanism,” and it is present in the arguments made by Osler and Starkey (2005) described previously. Young people are seen as particularly amenable to rooted cosmopolitanism, because they may not yet have been “infected” by bigotry but also because of their pragmatic desires to deal with issues in their communities as they exist now, rather than drawing on histories and stories of oppression and marginalization. From this perspective, instilling new values of citizenship and cosmopolitanism takes on a particular urgency, as young people are also seen as easily discouraged, prone to becoming cynical when futures seem bleak, and susceptible to radicalization. Self-sufficiency and entrepreneurialism comprise the second element of the pedagogy. Self-sufficient political subjects have the skills and knowledge to provide for themselves, rather than relying on the government, and can make decisions appropriately (i.e., are self-governing). To the extent that problems within communities or that individuals need assistance, the self-sufficient subject can volunteer or engage in civil society in order to address those problems, again, without being directed to do so. Jessop (2002) refers to this as neocommunitarianism and sees it as a central element in the institutionalization of neoliberal governance. Through neocommunitarianism, then, the pedagogy is intended to enroll young people in the institutionalization of neoliberalism. Entrepreneurialism supports selfsufficiency by providing the resources to sustain families and communities, again without relying on the state. This element of the pedagogy reflects an assumption that prosperity is linked to the ability and willingness to act on cosmopolitan values and to be more tolerant and other-regarding; in a sense, self-sufficient and entrepreneurial subjects are assumed to be more responsible and responsive to the needs of other people in ways that enable them to also become self-sufficient and engaged in

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communities. Mitchell (2003) has argued that this inflects citizenship with a certain instrumentality that supports neoliberal ideologies and governance. While this may be the effect of efforts to promote self-sufficiency, this element of the pedagogy is grounded in long-standing views of liberal citizenship (Levinson 1999). The final element of the pedagogy involves the promotion of active citizenship in civil society. An active citizen is one who develops skills as a rational, selfgoverning, self-sufficient individual who can make judgements about social and political issues and crucially, then uses those skills to enact changes to improve the community and the individuals within it. In cases where the state is weak, is dysfunctional, or is emerging from conflicts, active citizens are also responsible for holding the state to account and to ensure it meets its commitments to citizens and human rights. In this way, active citizenship compels the liberal citizen to act for the common good, thus blending liberal citizenship with elements of civic republicanism (e.g., Etzioni 1993). This attention to the “common good” and to action within civil society without making demands on the state is sometimes argued to depoliticize citizens, to “responsiblize” them (Ilcan and Basok 2004); it is also associated with what critical scholars describe in terms of “post-politics” or “post-democracy,” as consensus about what constitutes the common good is argued to have already been achieved (Swyngedouw 2011; Allmendinger and Haughton 2012). To the extent that discussions about the common good are held, however, children and young people are often marginalized, being talked about, almost as objects, rather than being fully engaged in dialogue, debate, and deliberation (Cohen 2005).

4.1

Ambiguous Subjects

While the pedagogy is circulated and promoted in multiple sites and forms, the extent to which and ways in which it takes hold is by no means foreordained. In part, this reflects the paradoxes inherent in creating the self-governing political subject described previously. In part, however, it reflects the difficulty of motivating young people, of making them believe they can effect change, and making them believe they have a reason to do so. This is no mean feat, as young people are often described as apathetic, as uninterested, and as motivated only insofar as they can enact their politics through social media that allows them to “like” or “share” messages posted by others (pejoratively described as “slacktivism”). In on-going research on young people in three postconflict societies, for instance, researchers interviewed directors of 189 NGOs and other organizations that promote citizenship and engagement in civil society among young people (see www.youcitizen.org). Many of the respondents commented that it was often difficult to motivate youth to become involved. The issues they raised were myriad: young people were disinterested; youth saw no future; they wanted jobs, not to volunteer; they were depressed; the barriers to participation were too high; young people did not know how to get involved; young people did not see the point of engagement due to the scope of the problems in their communities; young people just wanted to drink coffee. It was in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in particular, that respondents said that the coffee shops were

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full of young people who could be doing something useful, but they instead sat around talking. Habermas’ (1989) bourgeois coffee shops that were the incubators of the public sphere seemed nowhere in sight. Yet other respondents argued that young people were interested, could offer trenchant political analyses, but engage in ways that may not be legible as politics in adult-centric conceptualizations of politics; digital and on-line forms of politics, in particular, are often not recognized as manifestations of civic engagement (Bennett et al. 2009). Many of these respondents implied that young people were interested and knowledgeable about issues (even if they appeared to be disengaged) but simply needed the spark to mobilize them. In some ways, these respondents described Bayat’s (2010) “nonmovements.” He argues that the experience of daily life – particularly among marginalized social groups, such as lower income young people – is generative of different kinds of knowledge and political thought that may not be legible or understandable to “big politics” or to mainstream civil society organizations. Yet these knowledges and the relationships between people that create and sustain knowledge can be the basis of very rapid mobilization that can create fundamental challenges. Much of Bayat’s work is concerned with street politics in the Middle East, and Egypt in particular. It was in this context that he argued that what seemed to be a single event – the death of a young man, Kahled Saeed, brutally murdered by two police officers when they arrested him – could spark a revolution. Predicting what those sparks might be, however, is difficult. From the standpoint of the state institutions, NGOs and civil society organizations working with young people, it is even more difficult to control or direct the mobilizations that follow those sparks. Critical scholars often imply that such control is desired – either a goal or an effect of policies and programs (Basok and Ilcan 2006; Skelton 2007) – but the situation is complex. As Roy (2010) has argued with respect to the microcredit industry, broad ideological commitments may characterize the institutions, but it is unhelpful to assume that all individuals working within institutional structures share the ideological or political stances of their employers; instead, she identifies “double agents” who work within organizations and attempt to shape the implementation of programs and policies in ways that may actually contravene the goals of the organization. It is possible to argue that the ways the pedagogy of citizenship is enacted – for example, by the programing offered by youth NGOs – provide some of the skills that young people will need in mobilizing. In part, this is done through specific training in research, presentation skills, and leadership skills that are the mainstays of NGO offerings. Returning to Sullivan’s (2001) conceptualization, one could argue that the NGOs attempt to instill new habits that guide actions and unsettle patterns of behavior associated with political regimes and the dominant order. She argues further that habits are not individual but rather are shaped by interactions between individuals and their broader contexts: “Individuals come to have the habits they do by being embedded in cultures and societies whose customs and institutions exist prior to the individual and the formation of her habits” (p. 35). As such, when societies undergo change or when they are stressed, habits will invariably be dislodged, and in Bayat’s (2010) terms, nonmovements might mobilize. While

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Sullivan imagines this as opening the possibility for progressive, feminist politics to take hold, there is also the possibility that the political change will be ambiguous; the Egyptian revolutions since 2011 provide a clear example of this. Häkli and Kallio (2014a,b) argue that it is necessary for young people to feel they have a stake in their environments and contexts if they are to act, to be political agents, rather than remain passive subjects. In their extended treatment of this topic, they argue that a sense of agency is developed by the ways that we relate subjectively to our environments and events. In this way, their argument parallels that of Sullivan (2001), as they argue that the ability to act, a sense of agency, and the effects of action are not fully internal but rather are shaped through interactions – or in Sullivan’s language, transactions – with the broader context in which subjects are located. All three authors argue that this is significant, because it means that politics are not fully individualized. Rather, it “shifts the relationality of ‘the political’ from within the individual into the social world that the embodied individual encounters in multiple different subject positions, averting, accepting or altering them through individual or concerted action” (Häkli and Kallio 2014a, p. 191). From “multiple different subject positions,” young people develop a sense of what is important, or as Häkli and Kallio put it, a sense of what is at stake. What actually is important is a matter of politics, of views about how change occurs, about how to create change, and about what should be. In this way, the feeling of a political stake is different to the ways that young people attempt change, the goals of action, and the struggles they engage with. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between “the political” – the subject of so much theorizing – from “politics,” “political acts,” or “acts of politics.” Each of these, of course, is also different to political parties. In the remainder of this chapter, the discussion switches from a concern over subjectivity, agency, and efforts to shape them, and instead foregrounds a conceptualization of the ways that young people might act as political subjects and citizens.

5

Politics, Acts, and the Ambiguities of Political Subjectivity

Defining “politics” is likely to invite disagreement and even to spark political debate. For the purposes of this chapter, the conceptualization offered by feminist sociologist Naomi Abrahams (1992) provides an initial, working definition. She conceptualizes politics as the actions undertaken to attempt political, social, and cultural change. In Isin’s (2006) terms, these acts break with the everyday, the assumed, the status quo; they are disruptive and for Isin, open radical opportunities. This definition can be critiqued on many grounds, including that it privileges action and intentionality. In this way, it seems to be inconsistent with theoretical work that takes a broader view of politics by drawing attention to the political effects of existing structures and power relations and that draws quotidian acts and unintentional implications of action into the realm of the political. Reflecting these arguments, Abraham’s definition of politics can be expanded to recognize the ways that actions – some of which may seem significant, some of which may not, some of

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which seem to achieve change, some of which may not – are shaped by and are interpreted in relation to other acts and structures. Even if actions are not “successful” or even if they were not undertaken as part of a political strategy, they may well spark other actions in response. This relational understanding of politics incorporates actions taken in response to putatively nonpolitical acts or in response to the effects of those acts. And in understanding the role of institutional structures in ordering, controlling, and conditioning action, it puts acts of citizenship and politics into relationship with law, norms, and the “legitimacy” of different kinds of actions (Staeheli et al. 2012). As such, it draws attention to the relationships and iterations between political goals, political acts, and the implications of acts that may or may not have been intended to create changes but that themselves become the subject of politics. For example, young people who skateboard in publicly accessible spaces may just want to have fun rather than to make a statement about the rights of young people to be in and to use the spaces of the city. These young people might not see themselves as engaging in politics or at least deny that skateboarding is part of their political subjectivities (Jones 2014). Other people, however, might incorporate the acts of these young people in their politics, perhaps to limit the access of youth to publicly accessible spaces or to proclaim the rights of youth to them. As such, young people who just want to have fun may nevertheless be drawn into political acts, even if they do not themselves see their actions as political. And as this example also suggests, disagreements about what constitutes change are fundamental to the politics in which agents engage. Some people will see skateboarders in publicly accessible spaces as part of the status quo – a fact on the ground – and so act to limit access in order to make the space more accessible to different kinds of uses and people. Other agents might contest those efforts, arguing that young people are currently marginalized and so should be given greater freedom to be in public as young people who are enjoying themselves, their bodies and the spaces provided for the public. As such, there should be no implication that politics and political acts by or on behalf of young people are necessarily liberal or conservative, right or left, and so forth. Thus, employing this working definition of politics and political acts as a starting point enables an elaborated conceptualization of the relationship between acts and politics. This approach is not necessarily unique to young political subjects and agents, but their positioning is particularly illuminating with regard to the argument that will be presented. Using the working definition of politics, then, we can conceptualize the pedagogy of citizenship as political and as an attempt to instill particular kinds of political visions, goals, and rationalities in young people in response to threats or failures in societies and nations. Yet the political implications of such efforts are uncertain, are not foreordained, and are continuously contested and disrupted. The nature of this uncertainty is highlighted through a closer examination of the tensions between active and what might be called “activist” citizenship. In the study of young people’s citizenship in divided societies briefly introduced above, many NGOs and civil society organizations seemed to accept the importance of active citizenship, as promoted within the pedagogy of citizenship. Organization

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leaders and many of the young people involved in them emphasized the importance of being active and engaged in order to hold government and politicians to account; it seemed self-evident to many that this involved participating in civil society and communities rather than from within government or political parties. Organizations further emphasized the importance of youth gaining entrepreneurial skills that would enable them to take care of themselves, their families, and other people in their communities. On the surface, such efforts hardly seem to provide the foundation for effecting political, social, or cultural change. Instead, they seem likely to reinforce existing power relationships. Holding the state to account, for instance, does not necessarily or directly lead to changes in government goals or practices. And in apparently accepting the notion that individuals and households should be selfsufficient, the range of actions that might be undertaken may be circumscribed and may lead to compliance with existing norms and relationships. In this way, there is a tendency among critical scholars to assume that active citizenship programs create compliant, depoliticized subjects who accept the particular rationality of, and need for, self-sufficiency, as compared to subjects who enact more radical change. They may be, as Bennett et al. (2009) put it, “dutiful citizens” who know civics, participate in recognized avenues for politics, such as voting, and may contribute to their communities, without necessarily challenging them. This assumption is also consistent with arguments surrounding post-democracy and post-politics mentioned previously. It is, perhaps, more pronounced, however, with respect to young people, who it is also assumed are more likely to be radical or at least to push at the boundaries of social and political acceptability and to challenge norms of behavior. Such assumptions, however, are flawed on at least three counts. First, there is ample evidence that the political goals and actions of young people are not uniformly leftist or radical. The anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim mobilizations in Germany under the banner of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident), for instance, include large numbers of young people. Second, rather than assuming that apparent compliance with neoliberalism and the internalization of ideologies of self-sufficiency represents a sort of post-political condition, it is more useful to examine the processes and struggles by which the dominant order is maintained in the face of changed and changing conditions. If we fail to understand how young people engage in apparently conservative or compliant political action, we in essence only consider one aspect of their subjectivities, goals, and politics. As Mitchell et al. (2014) have argued in a slightly different context, it is important to understand how consensus and compliance are achieved through political acts. Only by doing so can we engage with the content of their politics. Complicating the matter further is the third flaw in the assumptions underpinning post-political arguments: that individuals are either engaged in politics or disengaged. Such an assumption overlooks the politicization that is necessary, but perhaps not obvious at a given moment, to mobilize Bayat’s nonmovements, and instead interprets seeming inactivity as disengagement. Farthing (2010) offers a different conceptualization of young people’s politicization, however, by arguing that young people’s behavior is often paradoxical: it is simultaneously disengaged and engaged, is deeply political even as seeming to eschew politics. She argues further that this

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simultaneity is largely illegible or uninterpretable from most perspectives. Drawing on Beck (2001), Farthing seeks to empower young people’s seeming rejection of politics, arguing that it is necessary to “see young people as participating in a radically antipolitical way,” and arguing that it is necessary to understand the “retreat from politics on the part of many young people as the very core of their political action” (Farthing 2010, p. 190). To enact this politics and to “address their new agenda, within new spheres of power legitimately, they must disengage from what we currently understand as the ‘political’ and live their agenda elsewhere” (p. 191). In order to escape the pedagogy of citizenship and in order to enact their very different forms of politics, then, young people may engage in politicized behaviors that either seem paradoxical (in the sense of being simultaneously engaged and disengaged) or that may be radical expressions of antipolitics. Such behaviors and accompanying political subjectivities do not fit neatly within most common understandings of politics and citizenship. The paradoxical nature of young people’s political subjectivities and agency results in a complicated, changing, and sometimes-contested reading of their collective potential. Some young people engaged in active citizenship in civil society and their communities will support the dominant order, or at least will fail to question it. It might seem that they have engaged with politics as citizens. But those who engage in acts intended to challenge or even upend the status quo are best described as activists, not just active. Returning to Isin’s (2006) framing, these are people who break with the assumed and hegemonic order, disrupt the everyday or quotidian, and who engage in what he calls “acts of citizenship.” But Farthing’s analysis cautions that it is difficult, even unproductive, to read subjectivities from discrete actions or actions at a point in time. Actions may or may not ultimately lead to broader change, while actions that appear to be inactivity may also lead to broader change. It is thus important to understand the paradoxes of agency and subjectivity as part of a contest involving more fundamental, normative challenges to how societies should be organized and how people should be allowed to live or even to simply be. MoosaMitha (2005) hopes this contest might challenge normative practices and social institutions in ways that recognize and honor people as “differently equal” members of society, tied together by multiple relationships with each other. Such a reworking would pose a different vision of citizenship as compared to the conceptualization of the atomistic, unencumbered, rights-bearing citizen of liberal political theory; this “different” vision would honor difference, potentially enable a more inclusive public culture, and be more receptive to identities and differences outwith the West.

6

Conclusion

The paradoxes surrounding young people’s political participation with respect to activism, agency, and practices suggest several contradictory perspectives on their political participation. To the degree that they are perceived as being part of hopeful, positive, and egalitarian politics, it is sometimes felt that young people do not have the skills or capacity to be effective political actors. This chapter provided an

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overview of these complexities and calls for caution with definitions of identity politics. The normative positioning of young people as political agents, drawing largely from Western liberal political thought, is problematic at best. The chapter suggests, instead, a set of discourses and practices intended to sustain social order and that emphasizes the creation of young people as self-governing citizens who are imagined by institutions and civil society organizations to advance a “common good.” Yet the chapter also demonstrates the inability of institutions and organizations to fully determine the politics of young people, as they use tools promoted through the pedagogy to actively create social and political transformation. From the perspective of powerful agents and institutions and from the perspective of those who promote the pedagogy of citizenship described previously, activist young people are enervating. They display a sense of having a stake in the polity, they have learnt skills associated with research, organizing, and leadership, and they often demonstrate the critical thinking and creativity required to respond to changing circumstances. But as argued earlier in this chapter, they also enact the central paradox of rationality and autonomy in political subjects. They make judgements about how to act, but their judgements may not fall in line with the hegemonic order. In important ways, the “success” of the pedagogy may actually be heightened political contestation as activist youth put forward new goals, ideas, and strategies. These should not be assumed to be of a particular type, either supportive of or challenging to dominant orders. Instead, they represent the paradoxes of young people’s political subjectivities, goals, and agency.

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Theorizing Children’s Political Agency

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Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Intersubjective Subject of Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Political Subjectivity as Relative Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Becoming and Being Political in Polis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Struggle Over Subjectivity: Sara’s Mundane Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter develops tools for understanding political agency and political events as they unfold contextually in children’s everyday lives. It discusses alternative understandings of the subject so as to grasp the scope of the subject’s autonomy as the ground for political subjectivity. Political agency is conceived in terms of subjectivity related to subject positions offered in the flux of everyday life. To bring together political subject and action, the topological settings of political agency are conceptualized in terms of polis. To illustrate the analytic potential of this approach, a case from the authors’ recent ethnographic research with early youth is analyzed. Keywords

Political agency · Subjectivity · Children · Youth · Topology · Polis · Finland

Portions of this chapter also appeared in “Subject, action and polis: Theorizing political agency” (Progress in Human Geography, 2014) by Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. J. Häkli (*) · K. P. Kallio Space and Political Agency Research Group, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: jouni.hakli@uta.fi; kirsipauliina.kallio@uta.fi © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_1

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Introduction

Radical expansion in the notion of politics over the past two to three decades has brought the question of political agency to the fore in human geography, along with other social sciences. In present understanding, political agency is not restricted to participation in social movements or institutional political processes, but rather, it refers to a variety of individual and collective, official and mundane, rational and affective, and human and nonhuman ways of acting, affecting, and impacting politically (e.g., McDowell 1992; Gibson-Graham 1994; Katz 1996; Flint 2003; Barnett 2008; Braun and Whatmore 2010; Lestrelin 2011; Kuus 2015). Agency is considered an inseparable element of political geographical struggles and events because, as Kevin Cox and Murray Low (2003: 601) put it, “it is through agency that contradictions potentially get suspended and change occurs.” A burgeoning literature discussing “the political” in general or assessing agency in the context of particular political struggles has shown political agency to be a highly contested and multifaceted concept (e.g., Secor 2001; Featherstone 2003; Popke 2004; Staeheli and Kofman 2004; Thomas 2009; Wright 2010; Joronen 2017). Yet, despite some calls for more work on the topic, attempts to theorize political agency in its own right remain scarce (Domosh 1998; Agnew 2003; Kuus 2009). Stressing the importance of grasping agency as distinctively political, John Agnew contends that without this critical insight, analyses may end up presuming political outcomes, so that “[p]olitics is already determined before anyone engages in it” (Agnew 2003: 604). Explicitly addressing this problematic, this chapter is an outgrowth of longstanding interest in the political agency of human beings who are often seen to fall outside the realm of politics or whose political roles and actions are considered when prompted by contingencies such as war or social unrest (Kallio 2007, 2017a; Kallio and Häkli 2010, 2011a, 2013, 2015; Häkli and Kallio 2014a, 2018). Our interest was initially set in motion by what seemed a simple and innocent question: Why are children typically excluded from the concerns of political theory, to the point that the mere idea of introducing them in this context makes both children and politics appear outlandish? We came to realize that even when seen as participants in political events, children are often apprehended in ways that tend to rob them of any spontaneous agency that cannot be traced back to what is readily known to be politically relevant in adult terms (Kallio and Häkli 2011b; see also Skelton and Valentine 2003; Bosco 2010; Bartos 2012; Elwood and Mitchell 2012; Marshall 2016). In the vast tradition of political philosophy and theory devoted to making sense of what politics is, youthful agency may seem a marginal concern. Childhood and youth are, after all, passing stages in human development toward adulthood, which supposedly is the proper domain of the political (e.g., Hyman 1959; Niemi and Hepburn 1995; Highton and Wolfinger 2001; McLeod and Shah 2009). Yet we agree with Chris Philo and Fiona Smith (Philo and Smith 2003, also Philo and Smith 2015) who argue that childhood is a particularly opportune condition through which to approach the question of political agency in general – a “critical case” in Flyvbjerg’s (2001) terms (for continued discussion, see Kallio and Häkli 2013; Kallio and Mills

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2016). First, as hinted at above, it is precisely our interest in children’s political agency that has kept us from being content with standard definitions of what counts as politics. In fact, when political theories are brought to bear on children and youth, the issue turns out highly complicated and problematic (e.g., Valentine 1997; Mitchell 2006; Ruddick 2007; Bragg 2007; Thomas 2009; Skelton 2010). Second, taking children’s agency seriously demands us to ask questions that go beyond those prevailing certainties that may hamper novel ways of assessing politics as an integral part of people’s everyday lives. Gaining new insights on these problematics has been an enduring motivation for our work. Taking up these theoretical questions has led us to focus on the “phenomenologies of political action,” instead of developing “more and more elaborate ontologies of the political” (Barnett 2012: 679, also Häkli 2017; Joronen and Häkli 2017). To bridge conceptual work on political agency with the phenomenology of political events, we highlight contextuality, both socially and spatially. Sensitivity to the contextual open-endedness of everyday political agency invites curiosity toward issues, experiences, events, and actions that are or may become political in a given situation. While this expands the notion of politics, we do not propose that everything is, or should necessarily be seen, as politics. Still less do we seek to change its definition simply to make the word better fit our purposes, as Cresswell (2012) argues is the case with some NRT theorization. We understand politics in an Arendtian sense “as a form of activity concerned with addressing problems of living together in a shared world of plurality and difference” so that “‘the political’ refers to the problematic of coexistence and association, and that the space of this sharing is constituted by active agents” (Barnett 2012: 679; see also Kallio and Häkli 2011a, 2013, 2017). According to this premise no matter, action or event is inherently political, yet anything can gain political weight through politicization, which may take place in broader or narrower social spheres. Issues and structures with long-term trajectories of contestation may seem self-evidently political, whereas others may continue to appear as non-political regardless of their particular import to some people in specific contexts. The feminist critique pointing to the political nature of private issues and spaces has for decades contested these divides, thus pluralizing the idea of the political (e.g., Aitken 1994; Mitchell et al. 2004; Massaro and Williams 2013). We seek to take these efforts further by developing a methodological approach that helps in identifying political aspects from mundane situations without flattening the concept into an all-encompassing notion. As we will argue in this chapter, even the mere presence of a person in a particular situation may embody political agency if it involves an active stance by the subject. We hence understand politics as a relational phenomenon. What makes things politically significant in each case depends on the situation and the context at hand. For us politics is about matters of importance, whether these be in the context of the state policy or a child’s everyday life. In the former case, political issues are publically discussed and thus broadly acknowledged, but in the latter case, only the people involved in the child’s private life may know what the stakes are. In most cases, children’s own political agency is prompted when matters that they hold

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particularly important are challenged or called into question and when they have something at stake in these situations. To apprehend what is political in a given issue, event, or action, we must be attentive to the question: In relation to which situation or site and for which persons or what group, community, or assemblage, does this or that question gain weight? This query can also be formulated as follows: In which polis is a given agency constituted as political? We realize that outlining the relevant socio-spatial contexts of everyday political agency in terms of polis mobilizes a concept that may seem parochial and burdened by its traditional uses and thus incapable of addressing contemporary matters (cf. Marshall 2010). Deriving from the ancient Greek city-state, it carries with it, among other things, patriarchal and hierarchical tones that, as Harvey (2000:157) suggests, may “be cast as oppressive and totalitarian.” However, we share Raymond Williams’ (1983: 21) conviction that while original meanings of words are an important source of etymological insight, these meanings remain open-ended and thus subject to historical and contextual change. Some recent attempts at freeing the idea of polis from its city-statist and territorial connotations and viewing it rather as the relational realm of everyday politics testify to this dynamism (Ely 1996; Elden 2005; Dikeç 2005; Marshall 2010; also Arendt 1958). For us polis refers to the generic context of politicization. In this regard, it is shaped as a topological constellation bringing together people, issues, events, ideologies, places, and objects here and there, now, before, and in the future. It is a constitutive setting for people’s view of themselves and (significant) others, influencing their awareness and understandings and thus shaping them as political subjects. For us the phenomenology of politics springs from matters of importance in polis, however composed. In this spirit, we have found an enlivened sense of polis a useful conceptual tool for capturing the many contextual and relational dimensions that pertain to children’s political agency (see also Cavarero 2002; Todd 2011). This chapter introduces the idea of the political as a human capacity and agency developing and unfolding throughout the life course from the early years on. We do not approach children and young people as age groups or generations demanding theories of their own. Rather, we are interested in childhood and youth as pertinent phases of life when political subjectivities are formed and different forms of political agency established. Due to this emphasis, the theoretical sections of this paper mostly refrain from discussing children and youth per se; we consider all human beings as situated subjects in polis with identities constituted along age, gender, race, class, and other social signifiers. However, in the section where we discuss our empirical study, we explicitly focus on the political agencies of children and youth. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we outline our conception of the subject so as to arrive at a tentative understanding of the possibility and scope of autonomy as the ground of political subjectivity. We then seek to understand the conditions of possibility for political action. To this end, we theorize the subject’s relative autonomy as conditioned by but not reducible to its intersubjective constitution. Third, we bring together political subject and action by theorizing the social and spatial settings

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of political agency in terms of polis. To show how political agency can be understood as the coming together of subject, action, and polis, we introduce a case from our recent ethnographic research with people aged 11–16. By analyzing the case of “Sara,” we work out in detail and extend our earlier assessment of children’s political agency unfolding in relation to various subject positions offered in the flux of everyday life. We conclude by discussing the limitations and benefits of our conceptual tools in efforts to capture politics as experienced and practiced in children’s everyday lives.

2

The Intersubjective Subject of Action

All human sciences have had to contend with the ontological status of the subject, and thus it is the source of many divisions between incommensurable philosophical and theoretical positions (e.g., Lacan 1960/1977; Sartre 1966; Levi-Strauss 1969; Rawls 1971; Badiou 2009). For us it is neither practical nor feasible to deal with the question in all its aspects, yet some interrelated issues concerning the status of the subject are highly consequential for the purposes of this chapter and must be discussed at some length. These include the question of what is the subject, can it be conceived of as autonomous, and how does it relate with subjectivity and identity. The terrain of the subject can be sketched between two extremes. At one end stands the subject as a self-sufficient, enduring, and sovereign individual, from which all consciousness and action spring. At the other end, the subject dissolves into a non-sovereign product of social and discursive construction, devoid of any stability, autonomy, or unity of self. Both extremes are unsatisfactory in the light of contemporary debates. In the first case, the subject continues to be a “refuge for older psychological and romantic models of the self,” an atomized individual of modern political subjectivism (Wetherell 2008: 78). The latter position, again, fails in responding to the simple question posed by Paul Ricoeur: “who is “I,” when the subject says he or she is nothing?” (Ricoeur 1991: 78). He insists on the distinction between self (ipse) and identity (idem) in much the same way as Hannah Arendt distinguishes between the uniqueness of being whereby “nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live” (subject as “who”) and identity as a response to the question of what these unique beings are like (subject as “what”) (Arendt 1958: 8). Arendt’s work on the uniqueness of the subject is appealing because in showing how a unique being is intertwined with the social constitution of identities, she escapes both the foundational position of self-sufficient individualism and the antifoundational overemphasis on decentered fragmentary identity. We will come back to this aspect of subjectivity as it pertains to political agency in the next section. First, however, it is necessary to examine more closely the two opposite ways of relating the subject with identity. Two major strands of scholarship have explicitly theorized the relationship between subject and identity in a way that is illuminative for our purposes. Both consider identities as intersubjectively constituted, but in questioning what this

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means to the ontological status of the subject, they tend to move to opposite directions. The first scholarship can best be captured in terms of poststructuralist conceptions of identity (e.g., Butler 1990; Young 1990; Benhabib 1992), whereas the second operates variably under the rubric of the theory, ethics, or politics of recognition (e.g., Taylor 1994; Honneth 1995, 2007; Fraser 2000). Judith Butler’s (1990, 1997, 2003) psychoanalytically attuned work on the role of performative repetition in constituting gendered identities has been influential across the social sciences. To account for subjectivity, she explores the forces of domination operating through the subject’s attachment to identity categories given by regulatory regimes. For Butler, to exist socially is to desire recognition offered by attachment to social categories that thereby come to constitute the subject as fundamentally vulnerable to subjugation. In the face of this “psychic subjection,” individuals are always already “subjected or undergoing ‘subjectivation’” (Butler 1997: 11). Thus, in her reading of Hegel, Butler leans clearly toward an intrapsychic account of self-enslavement as a logic of subjection: “What Hegel implies [is that] . . . the subject will attach to pain rather than not attach at all” (Butler 1997: 61). Butler’s work on subjectification is valuable in addressing the ways in which discursively structured subject positions condition political agency. However, her emphasis on the individual as the site of intersubjective relatedness to others is not without consequences for her understanding of political agency. Amy Allen (2005) argues that in probing into the possibility of recognition predicated on our vulnerability and dependency upon others, Butler ultimately fails to appreciate the dynamic and potentially non-subordinating aspects of human intersubjectivity. By being related and actively relating with others, people not only internalize constitutive and ordering roles but also gain stances from which to question, avert, and transform them. Kathy Magnus (2006: 87) goes as far as to say that Butler employs “a reactive, minimalist, and unduly negative notion of agency. We are left with a subject who is only as subjected.” Lois McNay (2008) sums up much recent criticism of the undue precedence given to the role of categories and discourse in subject formation by stating that such theories “cannot explain certain subjective dimensions of agency such as will, self-understanding and intention which are crucial to explaining some of the political implications of action” (McNay 2008: 195; see also Fraser 1995; Campbell 2001; Allen 2005; Vasterling 2010). One reason for this omission lies in what Adriana Cavarero (2002) calls poststructuralist theories’ preoccupation with the what-ness of being at the expense of the Arendtian question of who each one is – the “totally unique irreplaceable subjectivity” (Allen 2005: 217). Contemporary theories of recognition have set out to expand the notion of the subject’s autonomy, subjectivity, and agency. They are inspired by the “struggle for recognition,” an idea Hegel developed partly as a critique of the Hobbesian concept of the state of nature, and its “war of all against all.” Whereas Hobbes posited that the conflictual state of nature is overcome through the social contract, Hegel saw the struggle in itself as a productive force conducive to moral growth. For Hegel, subjects depend on mutual recognition for their existence as individuated selves,

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and therefore the struggle for recognition is at once the source of individual autonomy and the foundation of sociality (Honneth 1995). With his philosophical model, Hegel sought to describe the formative process leading to “ethical life” characterized by the absence of misrecognition. Similar aspirations have fueled theories of recognition which are expressly motivated by attempts to redress forms of injustice based on misrecognition or withheld recognition of individual or group identity. In Charles Taylor’s (1994: 25) words, “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.” Recognition, then, is not just a matter of due respect or courtesy but also a vital human need that may lead to serious grieving and result in identity political conflicts when it fails to be met. For Axel Honneth (1995, 2007), struggle for recognition is a form of ethical life serving as the model for a society that meets the demands for recognition. It refers to the “entirety of intersubjective conditions that can be shown to serve as necessary preconditions for individual self-realization” (Honneth 1995: 173). Ideally, individuals come to realize themselves in the positive terms of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem that result from “undistorted and unrestricted recognition” by an approving and encouraging other (Honneth 1995: 171). Where this fails to happen, experience of disrespect is likely to occur, opening up a potential for social conflict (Honneth 1995: 163). While positing in Hegelian terms that the subject is constituted intersubjectively, theories of recognition must nevertheless retain a degree of autonomy to subjective being. This is because of the import they place on the experience of recognition as the basis of human well-being. For Taylor’s point about a person’s need to have her or his identities rightly recognized by others, there has to be a locus for experience that cannot be ontologically collapsed into them, however intersubjectively negotiated. Similarly, Honneth’s claim that ethical life is based on possibilities for individuals and groups to experience recognition presupposes a subject distinct from the “intersubjective structure of personal identity” – otherwise it would be impossible for a person to determine whether a given act of recognition is just or not (Honneth 1995: 173; see also Anderson and Honneth 2005). Hence, for recognition theorists, the subject’s autonomy is not about individual sovereignty but rather about the possibility for being in relation to one’s identities through subjectivity. Subjective probing of one’s identities is particularly dynamic during the early years of life when people learn about their worlds in practice and through education, yet it continues throughout the life course. When moving between different life situations and geographical contexts, learning more about the power relations and ensuing inequalities embedded in them, people acquire new identities and start to see themselves and others in new ways. Hence, as people are being-becomings in all phases of life (Thomson 2007; Pozzo and Evers 2016), in theoretical terms, there is no difference between children, youth, and adults as political subjects.

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Political Subjectivity as Relative Autonomy

In developing his theory of recognition, Honneth appropriates George Herbert Mead’s (1934) thoughts on intersubjectivity as the foundation of identity formation, so as to embed Hegel’s metaphysical theoretical model into “empirical events within the social world” (Honneth 1995: 68). For this project, Mead’s account of the intersubjective constitution of “me” has much to offer. Honneth accepts Mead’s theoretical insight according to which “individuals can only become conscious of themselves in the object-position,” that is, “a subject can only acquire a consciousness of itself to the extent to which it learns to perceive its own action from the symbolically represented second-person perspective” (Honneth 1995: 74–75). This is how “me” emerges as the subject’s social self, functioning as a dynamic source of moral development. In practical engagements with others, an individual acquires the normative point of view of its interaction partners and applies their moral values to make sense of its own actions. As one’s sphere of interaction broadens from childhood’s narrow circles to cover the whole society, one’s “me” comes to reflect the social norms of “generalized other” needed for socially accepted membership in one’s community (Honneth 1995). Had Honneth contended with merely appropriating Mead’s account of how moral subjects become mature members of their societies through an intersubjective constitution of “me,” his theory of recognition would bear close reminiscence to determinist understandings of the subject. Yet, in contrast to the Butlerian concept of the subject’s psyche as always constituted in dialogue with social norms (Butler 1997: 102), Honneth uses Mead’s conception of the “I” to account for “the creative deviations with which, in our everyday action, we ordinarily react to social obligations,” where the subject’s “I” is the source of everyday practical spontaneity, and “unconscious force . . . [that is] the collection site for all the inner impulses expressed in involuntary reactions to social challenges” (Honneth 1995: 81). What makes Mead’s conception of the subject’s “I” so potent for understanding human political agency is precisely the way in which it explains why there may be experiences of incompatibility with the norms of the social environment, experiences that cause “one to put one’s own “me” into doubt” (Honneth 1995: 82). The subject’s “I,” then, is the source of its relative autonomy from its intersubjectively constituted social identity “me,” and subjectivity is the dynamic relation between them. In his work on intersubjectivity, Mead mostly views the “I” in terms of William James’ and John Dewey’s pragmatist thought as the subject of presently ongoing and as yet incomplete activity, thus the source of uncertainty and novelty. According to Mead, the self can only ever be experienced as an object and therefore as “me,” whereas the “I” is the elusive ongoing agency that the agent cannot experience directly precisely because “I” is not an object (Markell 2007). Hence, while “me” is routinely reflected upon as the object of past and future actions, the “I” exists only in the present tense, responding open-endedly to situations:

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Even in the case of a person who is “simply carrying out the process of walking,” [Mead] suggests, “the very taking of his next steps” nevertheless puts him in a situation that is “in a certain sense novel.” The “I” is, one might say, a name for this irreducibility of the response to the antecedent situation. (Markell 2007: 123)

Together with the understanding of “me” as the subject’s socially constituted self through which one relates to the exigencies and norms of the social world, the Meadian concept of “I” clearly represents an important source of the subject’s relative autonomy that we consider essential for understanding political agency. The subject as “I” explains why individuals cannot be thoroughly reduced to the effects of intersubjective and discursive constitution; yet, as the autonomy is relative to the subject’s social self, it does not lead back to the liberal notion of the autonomous self-sufficient subject. In a nutshell, “I” refers to the subject’s agency as an ongoing doing and existing in the world here and now, the one unique presence in the world that each and every living being has. This presence turns upon reflection into an object of consciousness that bears the characteristics of “me,” ranging from a coherent understanding of oneself as a person to a mere fleeting sense of being. That is, “I” refers to seeing itself, not to the objectified subject that does the looking, as expressed in the sentence “I see.” We adopt this insight as the basis of our conception of the subject. It paves the way for an understanding of political agency as at once socially conditioned and open-ended (Colapietro 2006). We agree with McNay (2008) who concludes that Honneth’s theory of recognition has contributed positively to our understanding of subjectivity by underlining its dialogical nature and ineluctably contextual, situated, and practical generation. These are all features that classical pragmatism has helped foreground. A restored Meadian conception of subjectivity is helpful in developing an understanding of political agency from the perspective of the lived reality of embodied social relations. This approach, we argue, is applicable in the study of children, youth, and adults alike. In the next section, we move to discussing political agency and its spatiality in terms of polis.

4

Becoming and Being Political in Polis

Above we have introduced the idea of political subjectivity as vested in the dialogue between the subject’s “I” and “me,” neither of which can exist without the other. Political agency we understand phenomenologically as activity related to problems of living together in and through the spaces that this sharing constitutes. Importantly, as subjectivity exists and develops from the beginning of social life, children belong to the political realm by definition: “With each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being” (Arendt 1953: 321; also Arendt 1958: 9). When it comes to the geographies of political agency, “I” and “me” map out differently. Through the subject’s “me,” all human beings relate to the social worlds in which their political agencies unfold. As an intersubjectively constituted social

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self, “me” has both a history and an orientation toward the future and thus existence beyond the here and now. It is the object of consciousness when the subject reflects upon or talks about her/himself, but importantly, the reflection is carried out by the subject’s “I.” The subject’s “me,” therefore, owes the powers of its agency to the “I” that animates it, yet the “I” has no social existence without the “me” that gives the subject all the characteristics that make it a potent political actor. This readily points to the importance of contextuality for political agency. If human beings only existed as “I” subjects, we could conceive of the contextuality of political agency simply in the situational terms of here and now. All politics would then unfold in relation to the conditions and other subjects presently at hand, and children’s processes of socialization would merely involve elements from their hereand-now environments. We consider the recent interest in immediacy and immanence a welcome attempt to capture such political geographies in a novel way (e.g., Horton and Kraftl 2006). However, as human political agency takes place through the subject’s “me,” the constitution of which reflects a broad array of different contexts and situations, the contextuality of political agency takes on much more temporal and spatial complexity (Gökarıksel and Secor 2009; Mitchell and Elwood 2012; Dawney 2013). Habashi (2017: 17) describes the dynamic processes of political socialization as involving “multiple agents, realities, and relationships between local and global discourses that assist in forming youth’s perspectives and actions.” This complexity we wish to capture by the term polis that we use to refer to the different kinds of spatial and temporal settings where our political agency may arise and unfold – contexts in which we have something at stake (see also Cavarero 2002; Dikeç 2005; Elden 2005). Because we understand politics relationally, the relevance of polis in our theorization of children’s political agency goes well beyond the idea of a scene or arena for political action. Indeed, it is only in relation to a polis that this or that matter will gain significance and become political to people. For example, the children and youth who took part in our study in Southern Finland and Northern England had encountered partly similar yet largely different politicized matters in their lived realities, which called forth and dampened distinct political agencies. Politics is fundamentally social, just as the “me” through which it unfolds is fundamentally intersubjective. This is an important aspect of political agency, underlining that politics is not about the whims and vagaries of the liberal sovereign individual but, rather, the subjectivity that empowers political agency is conditioned by the social and spatial settings where matters of importance get politicized. Whether shaped as a setting for institutional or everyday politics, however spatially constituted, polis both engenders and conditions youthful political agencies. For outlining the complex contextuality of children’s political agency, it is useful to begin by considering topography and topology as two different kinds of configurations of spatiality (e.g., Mol and Law 1994; Giaccaria and Minca 2011; Allen 2011a). Topography refers to the conventional understanding of cartographically representable space (e.g., territories, regions, locations, and metric distances). Disrupting this understanding, topology captures relational and discontinuous space where proximity is defined less by distance and more by the

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intensity and frequency of social relations that shape the space (Murdoch 1997; Law 2002). Along with Mol and Law (1994), we consider topography and topology as complementary rather than alternative understandings of spatial relations, neither of which alone provides an all-encompassing account of the spatiality of polis (see also Häkli 2008, 2013; Häkli and Kallio 2014b, 2016; Kallio 2017b; Kallio and Häkli 2017). A topographic space, such as a voting district, represents the more conventional understanding of political space. It keeps informing most institutional political practices, including policies that seek to promote children’s agency, and also many studies that assess these processes (e.g., Cohen and Torres 2015; Derr and Kovács 2017; Carroll et al. 2017). Hence, when children are given the chance to exercise their right to participation in matters concerning them, they tend to be approached as members of a particular district (e.g., school, residential, municipal, national), supporting a specific group or candidate (e.g., age group, classmate, school representative), with a certain history of previous choices in formal participation, level and success in education and other activities (e.g., hobbies), and nationality, ethnicity, race, family, neighborhood, class, gender, and age (Kallio and Häkli 2011b; Kallio 2017b, 2018; Kallio et al. 2015). However, formal participatory practices such as voting call forth only some aspects of our political selves. We can be certain kinds of political agents when participating in institutional polises but not all kinds of agents. This is because the institutions of representative democracy tend to offer us official, legally grounded, territorially organized, norm-bound subject positions that hail us in very particular ways. Thus, for example, the geographical assumptions pertaining to children’s politics tend to overemphasize locality and physical proximity, implying that things near are more important to children than things far (e.g., Murtagh and Murphy 2011; Said 2012; Jansson 2015). However, a growing literature following Cindi Katz’s (1996) and Doreen Massey’s (1998) early insights counters this idea by emphasizing the multiple spatial frames and scales of children’s political agency (e.g., Bosco 2010; Bartos 2012; Elwood and Mitchell 2012; Marshall 2016; Kallio and Mills 2016; Habashi 2017). These studies have made it abundantly clear that the geographies of children’s concerns – their polises – are much more complex and malleable than may have been thought. These politics cannot be identified from a merely topographical perspective. To complement the traditional approaches, we seek to make sense of political agency by studying the topological relations influential in people’s everyday lives. As we conceive of politics relationally, topological configurations of space seem particularly promising as an account of the differentially constituted settings where everyday political agency may unfold. We subscribe to John Allen’s view that “topology represents an opportunity for geographers to think again about how it is that events elsewhere seem to be folded or woven into the political fabric of daily life” (Allen 2011b: 318). In topological terms, the polis of political agency does not exist simply as a continuous physical space – a location, place, or region in which the agency takes place – but rather it is a space constituted, held together, and performed by relational intensities configured by what is significant or important for those involved, in a given moment or period of time (see also Featherstone 2008; Barnett 2012; Secor 2013).

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To grasp the polis as a non-Euclidean space, it is necessary to begin from the question of what constitutes membership in a polis and how it calls forth political agency in the flux of everyday life. To offer what can only be a very tentative account for these questions, we will turn to our recent ethnographic work focusing on children’s political agency as practiced in relation to particular subject positions they encounter in their everyday lives.

5

Struggle Over Subjectivity: Sara’s Mundane Politics

Let us first recall how Markell (2007: 129) underlines the role that “I” plays in the open-ended intersubjective constitution of “me” “located less in [the individuals] than in the world they share, in one mode or another, with others.” This move has two major consequences for understanding the phenomenology of political action. First, political agency, and along with it the formation of the first polis in which an individual partakes, begins at the birth of a child. Our political agency, then, begins when we enter into social relations that animate the dialogue between “I” and “me” and our (significant) others. Consequently, our agency in the polis is marked less by the battle between some authentic inner self and the demands coming from the society than by the way in which we relate subjectively to situations, events, and positions offered to us in the course of our lives. This seemingly subtle move is important because it shifts the relationality of “the political” from within the individual into the social world that the embodied individual encounters in multiple different subject positions, either averting, accepting, or altering them through individual or concerted action (see also Ortner 2005; Simonsen 2007; Allen 2008; Gökarıksel and Secor 2010). These positions may be set by the demands of a particular situated social interaction, or they may be of much more complex origin, reflecting particular discursive positionings, action histories, societal processes, and future orientations. Either way, the space for political agency is opened up by the subjectivity that dwells in the space of indeterminacy between the situated agency of our “I” and “me” as our social self. With this understanding of the subject, we now move on to illustrating our conception of children’s political agency. In what follows, we refer to the subject’s “I” and “me” as always present in the subject as “who,” founded on subjectivity that animates human political agency. We do this because the distinction is analytical, not empirical, and thus it is not feasible to pinpoint “I” as isolated from “me” in any particular sequence of action. What we can observe, instead, is the dynamic interplay between the subject as “who” – the unique subjective existence in the world unfolding largely beyond reflection – and the subject as “what,” the social selfnegotiated in relation to subject positions proposed and available in a particular polis. As we seek to make evident, in empirical analysis, it is possible to assess how these two facets of the subject animate political agency differently: the “who” as based on the relative autonomy of the subject and the “what” constituted in and thus constrained by the social world.

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As relating to subject positions takes different forms in diverse settings, political subjectivity is contextual and multiform. Unless living in total isolation, which hardly ever is the case, political subjects are plural and thus capable of positioning themselves differently in distinct political systems (Ortner 2006; Venn 2009). This dynamism may become overtly evident through the practices of naming and nicknaming, as is the case with our recent school ethnographic study. It involved 128 young participants from the two biggest cities in Finland (Helsinki, Tampere). We worked with two age groups: the younger ones were 10–11 years old (fifth graders, second to last class in primary school) and the older ones 15–16 years old (ninth graders, last year of secondary school). They went to school in middle-class neighborhoods: one area relatively close to the city center and the other one in a more remote part of the municipality (for details on the study, see Kallio 2017a). Children are typically given nicknames by their family members, schoolmates, and other peer groups. Often these are agreeable to them, or even coined by the children themselves, which means that they readily accept and enact the distinct subject positions afforded by the names context-specifically. As one of the girls describes it, her “school self” may lie down in a puddle to fool around, whereas her “familial self” committed to her mother’s norms and moralities could never do that (for a detailed analysis, see Häkli and Kallio 2018). But, importantly, nicknames may also be unpleasant or even humiliating. In these cases, children may lean on the plurality of their polises to avoid subordination related to an unpleasant subject position they cannot ignore. This may require constant effort, as was the case with Sara, a girl in our study. The following analysis is based on two in-depth interviews and participant observation in her school. Sara is an 11-year-old girl living in Tampere, Finland. Her family consists of father, mother, and a big sister aged 20. They live close to the city center in an area of traditional wooden houses with relatively large backyards, surrounded by green parks, walkways, and ponds. In socioeconomic terms, the neighborhood could be identified as middle class, but socioculturally it is best characterized as plural. With reasonably priced housing, ample yards, and location close to the social sciences university, the area has become popular among academic staff, students, and artists, but there are also residences allocated to people with drinking problems and villas owned by wealthy people, which together form a rather mixed social environment. Sara’s family affiliates with people of alternative lifestyle philosophies, sharing, for instance, interest in non-Western cultures and a critical attitude toward commercial media. Their house is close to the school where Sara attends a music-oriented class. Nearby there is also a well-known youth circus art school she has attended for 7 years. On top of that, as a music lover, she takes double bass lessons at the music school in the city, plays the piano at home, and visits regularly the close-by music hall for classical concerts. In talking about Sara’s familial life, we came to know a young person who highly respects the philosophy of her family that opposes many mainstream cultural conventions. For example, unlike most participants in our study, she feels very affectionate toward Russia. Her stance is based on cultural aspects that are not usually well known because the media, school education, and common discourses all emphasize geopolitical relations. Also, owing to her sisters’ student exchange year in Japan, she has

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become a great fan of Japanese culture. These dispositions are contrasted with the Anglo hegemony that dominates popular culture in Finland. Sara is proud of her differing opinions about cartoons, books, films, music, TV, and other popular media and does not avoid bringing them up in school. These acts are prime examples of “critical distancing . . . integral to the processes of disidentification” (Venn 2009: 5). At stake in this juxtaposition of preferences is nothing less than “who” and “what” she is in the school community and who gets to define this. In our interviews, it became apparent that Sara moved fluently between her different social selves, which led us to explore in-depth her subjectivity as reflected in relation to negotiated identities. As proposed by theories of personhood (e.g., Harré 1997), she implicitly conceives of herself as an indivisible self, capable of entering her worlds through different identity constructions recognized by others for what they are. What was helpful to us in analytical terms was her ability to reflect on their distinct character, a capacity embedded on her subjective experience of “not being my identity.” When discussing her home and family, Sara only takes up positive things. Her response to the question concerning her favorite things at home is a case in point: “I don’t know, at home everything is always so nice that it is hard to say.” She shares most of her personal matters with her sister who is more or less her best friend outside the intense and intimate youth community of the Circus that forms basically her other home. Her attachment to family members and friends from this hobby has its flipside in problems with other peer relations. Most importantly, Sara finds herself as an outsider at school. She says that she differs from the other girls in many ways, including attitudes, opinions, interests, outlook, habits, and upbringing, and this has placed her into a weak position in the class. The situation is gendered in the sense that, whereas Sara feels that the boys treat her “like anyone” and she can fool and joke around with them, for the girls she is a constant object of gossip and backbiting. This was verified in our participant observation at the school and interviews where none of the girls mentioned Sara in a positive light. Sara conveys that her attempts to find a place among the girls have repeatedly failed. In her own view, the problem is not herself as a person but the certain kind of relationship that has developed between her and the group of girls – what we see as discomfort with her social self at school. This became perceptible, for instance, in the following discussion: Interviewer: You said that they only know half of you. Which part do they know? Sara: It’s actually less that they know, say one quarter. They know a different me – that I am not like them, that I am not at all like the others, that I do different things and I have been brought up differently [. . .] They have not bothered getting to know me well enough for me to show them my enthusiastic side.

This reflection is illuminative of Sara’s experience of the distinction between her sense of self and identities. She sees that she is not the girl whom the others disregard or not that girl only. She even realizes that the ways in which the other girls know her are influenced by interpretations based on their subjectivities, meaning that she experiences nothing in her identities as permanently fixed. Sara’s feeling of unease is based on her political subjectivity opened up by the distance between her ongoing

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unique existence (“I”) and the many social selves (“me”) through which she relates to her polis. It facilitates her critical distanciation from the subject position that the school community offers and attachment to alternative subject positions that she can lean on in other contexts. To realize how this happens, we should take a closer look at the major subject positions that Sara relates to in her everyday life. Each time our discussion touched upon school life Sara’s tone of voice changed, pointing to its heavily politicized nature in her experience. It soon became evident that school as a social milieu is the least desirable element of her relational everyday politics. Sara’s social marginalization is epitomized by an unfriendly naming practice she cannot escape in the school community (see also Nicolaisen 1999; Pace et al. 2004). The subtle nicknaming occurs through a particular way of pronouncing her surname initial, making it sound like “hag.” This hurtful naming is easy to conceal because the initial is commonly used to distinguish her from another girl in the class with the same first name. Consequently, the teachers too end up unknowingly calling her “hag” in a seemingly legitimate way and thus upholding the repressive subject position that Sara is constantly struggling with at school. That the school nickname is particularly agonizing for Sara became evident from the way she acted when her classmates told us about it. She clearly did not want us to know and at first denied the practice, but when the word was out, she could only admit the fact. At that point she added, so quietly that only we could hear, that “In Circus they sometimes call me ‘Sushi’.” This second nickname recognizes Sara’s particular affection to everything Japanese (technological inventions, cultural product, clothes, styles, the language, and food) and reveals yet another important subject position in relation to which she leads her everyday life. Our conversations about her circus hobby revealed a community very different from her school class. Instead of creating juxtapositions that build uneven power relations and subordination, the Circus accommodates differences between people, their opinions, and habits. In an Arendt (2005) spirit, it appears as a supportive part of her polis where living together in a world of plurality and difference is possible and enjoyable. In this atmosphere, the things Sara respects about herself get positively noticed. As “Sushi” she can rely on others’ support, live to the full, and trust that this will not be turned against her. Cheerfully she conveyed that in Circus she can joke around, laugh at herself, make fun of others, and take risks and fail without the fear of losing face. She also finds herself competent in the hobby activities and a person respected by others. The next excerpt is illuminative of Sara’s feelings of liberty and proficiency that feed her aspirations toward the future as well. Interviewer: “In your circus art hobby, what would be the greatest thing ever, a dream come true?” Sara: “That Circus would become school, a kinda school where they teach both circus and school things.” Interviewer: “Meaning that when you go to school, you’d actually go there?” Sara: “Yes.” Interviewer: “Ok. So, what would be a great thing that could happen to you in your present school?” Sara: “I don’t know really.”

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Interviewer: “What about when you move to secondary school then?” Sara: “That I’d be better appreciated there.”

It seems evident that the subject position of “Sushi” is of crucial importance to Sara’s critical distanciation from being “hag.” Even if the subjective negotiation of her social self in Circus may not affect “what” Sara is at school at the moment (her social self being so established that changing it seems unfeasible), it has a profound influence on “who” she is, shaping her political subjectivity both presently and for the future. Being “Sushi” works to raise her self-esteem, provides a rescue from the position offered to her at school every day, and opens up a hopeful window toward the future as she knows that she can relate to peer communities in different ways. Hence, Sara’s alternative identity provides her with the means to practice political agency and actively resist the ongoing subordination in the school. It also builds ground for negotiating her social self differently in a new school where she hopes to get a fresh start; she was thinking of choosing a school beyond the school path that most of her classmates would take. In this sense, it is crucially important that there are environments and social settings, such as the Circus, that allow Sara more agreeable subject positions, helping her to cope with situations of anxiety. Unlike it may at first appear the challenges that Sara faces at school and her responses to them are not individualistic or encapsulated in this institutional setting. Her aspiration to be a particular kind of political subject does not reflect the “selfunderstanding or reasoned action” of the liberal subject but, rather, it is based on “commitment to a certain construction of the public self: not a “subject position” but a willful “stance” whose content, form, and consequences are not entirely foreseeable by anyone” (Gambetti 2005: 435). How she acts in her polis is therefore neither a triumph of voluntary action nor a fully predetermined social process but a relational struggle on intersubjectively negotiated matters of importance. Moreover, this polis is a multi-scalar and poly-dimensional constellation of relational intensities. Seen topographically, the negotiation over her identities is surely embedded in and conditioned by the perimeter of the school class. But the social and spatial context of the politics at play can hardly be reduced to the school. In topological terms, the polis of these struggles involves all members of both Sara’s and the other girls’ families; their significant others; the symbolic and material settings of their daily lives; the prevailing moral, cultural, and geopolitical values in their lived communities; the discursively constituted truths about life in Tampere and Finland; and so on. Polis thus understood is people, places, objects, and ideas involved, here and there, now, before, and in the future, brought together by what is at stake in the given event – it is an inalienable part of the constitution of children’s politics.

6

Conclusion

In this chapter, we set out to develop tools for understanding children’s political agency and political events as they unfold in their everyday lives. To this end, we first discussed alternative understandings of the subject so as to grasp the possibility and

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scope of the subject’s autonomy as the ground for political subjectivity. Our goal has been to theorize the intersubjective constitution of the subject in a manner that goes beyond both the poststructuralist dissolution of the subject and the liberal conception of the subject as an isolated sovereign individual. To understand the ways in which political subjectivity translates into action that can be understood as political, we have theorized political agency in terms of subjectivity related to subject positions offered in the flux of everyday life. This conception entails that regardless of their phase of life, people are always considered both as active political beings in their everyday lives and transforming political subjects. Finally, to bring together political subject and action, we conceptualized the topological settings of children’s political agency in terms of polis. To illustrate the analytical potential of our approach, we presented a brief analysis from our ethnographic work on political agency in everyday circumstances. With children as a “critical case” (Flyvbjerg 2001), we argue that political agency along the conceptual lines of subject, action, and polis can be studied in any type of event, social setting, or scale of action. What follows from this is that the meanings of the political may not be known in advance and thus need to be worked out empirically. However, to avoid the trap of “political everything,” the relational reading of political agency requires that in each case, it is explicated why certain agencies are to be considered politically relevant and how the polis in question shapes this relevance – be they situated in public or private spheres of life. This principle drives us toward exploring the phenomenology of political action, instead of asking ontologically what is, or is not, politics (cf. Dean 2000; Barnett 2012). To theoretically grasp children’s political agency, we have proposed that it is analytically divided into political subject and political action and contextualized in polis. Through Honneth’s thought, we found Mead’s original idea of “I” and “me” as intertwined but distinguishable aspects of the subject a compelling theoretical grounding for the subject’s relative autonomy. For us such autonomy is the condition for any human political agency beyond determination by the intersubjectively and discursively constituted identities and subject positions seated in existing social power relations. Without this autonomy, political agency would always be seriously thwarted by the subject’s social constitution, and it would be very difficult to account for unpredictable political acts. In our understanding, the subject as “who” is constituted in a dialogue between “I” and “me” – the agent that is always now and here and the agent as an object of reflection. “Me” refers to the intersubjectively negotiated social self to which we ourselves and others relate to when seeking to define the subject as “what.” The fact that “I” cannot be reduced to “me” is the source of subjectivity in human political agency. The latter may denote a variety of things in different situations and contexts, which we refer to as polis. These can be topographically and topologically constituted assemblages where political subjects have something at stake and where political agency unfolds. Conditioned by the subject’s relative autonomy, political agency is undetermined but limited by the conditions that the polis provides. By exploring how the varying dynamics and moralities of the polis enable and condition everyday political agency, we can see more clearly the connections between different actors and matters at stake as motivations and potentials for particular kinds of

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political action. This, we suggest, will provide tools for understanding children’s political agency in many different kinds of settings and circumstances. The case of Sara that we analyzed to illustrate our conception of children’s political agency has its restrictions but also benefits. The analyzed discussion focuses on a struggle in a school community, making the power relations between the players apparent and the relevant polis easy to imagine. However, as some of our observations readily indicate, everyday political events are usually more complex and entangled and thus harder to explicate in terms of political agency (Kallio and Mitchell 2016; Kallio and Häkli 2017; Häkli et al. 2017; Häkli 2017). Therefore, especially in empirical studies that target less explicit cases, it is important to strive for relational readings of the political so as not to ignore those who do not appear as the most influential participants. As feminist and postcolonial scholars have underlined, only such analyses may capture the political agencies that in more traditional approaches tend to go unnoticed (e.g., England 1994; Rose 1997; Valentine 2003; Popke 2006; Secor 2001). The approach we have developed facilitates the study of many different kinds of youthful political agency in situations and settings ranging from intimate experiences of subjectivity to reasoned environmental activism to geopolitical events on a world scale. What brings forth the political in each case is some question that gains importance to those involved in the respective polis. When polis is seen as a key element in the politicization of issues and agencies, as we propose, it is clear that the latter may gain significance through developments and events that defy any simple relation to location or scale. Thus, topologically understood, the politicization of a given issue in a young person’s everyday life (e.g., a sense of self-worth, sustainable diet, or gay rights) may occur at an intersection of personal experiences, public debates, social norms, institutional regulations, legal orders, and beyond. With such conception of polis, we no longer need to resort to the categorical distinction between everyday politics (“politics”) and institutional high politics (“Politics”) but, instead, are more attuned to analyzing how the public and private, individual and collective, and personal and institutional become enmeshed in the ways in which children’s political agencies unfold in the world. This insight we propose as an inspiration for further theoretical and empirical work on the political agency and polises of children and adults alike.

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The Political Geography of the “Best Interest of the Child”

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Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Critical Political Feminist Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Children’s Place in Society: The Question of Space and Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Children and Everyday Life: The Question of Space and Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Space and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The focus of this chapter is on children’s citizenship and the political geographical landscape in which decisions about their best interest are made through state practices, social policies, and other forms of adult care. The best interest of the child represents one of the four principles that exists in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and spells out special protections for children’s rights in law and public policy, justified limitations on their freedom, and correlative obligations by adults to provide support and a conducive context for the full development of children (UNCRC 1990). The best interest of the child can be viewed as a trope by which dominant assumptions about children, their welfare, and societal obligations towards them are made. Very little has been written using a spatial perspective in defining the best interest of the child, yet children are defined, situated, actively interact with and have rights that are mitigated within specific geographic spaces. Over the course of this chapter, the insights of critical/political geographers including children’s geographers will be

M. Moosa-Mitha (*) School of Social Work, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_17

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used to undertake a spatial analysis of the political landscape within which dominant assumptions about children’s rights as citizens, including their best interests, are articulated in Western (neo) welfare states. Theoretical discussion throughout this chapter will be situated in an analysis of a retrospective study undertaken by the author. Three aspects of spatial analysis in relation to children’s citizenship and their best interests will be discussed. The first will be an examination of the relationship between space and place. The second is the relationship between space and scale. The third aspect to be discussed is the relationship between children’s space and their identity. Keywords

Best interest of the child · Children and everyday life · Children’s place in society · Critical political feminist geography · Space and identity · Child welfare legislation · Children’s citizenship · Critical geographers · Department of health and statistic · Dominant elite-driven globalization processes · Feminist geographers · Heteronomous institutions · International sexual trafficking · Macroeconomic development · Macroscale · Marginalized · Moral undertones · Neoliberal ideologies · Nuisance · Parens patriae · Political geographical · Power contestations · Racialized backgrounds · Sexual exploitation · Social identity · Straight world · Transnational feminists · UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) · White parents

1

Introduction

The focus of this chapter is on children’s citizenship and the political geographical landscape in which decisions about their best interest are made through state practices, social policies, and other forms of adult care. The best interest of the child represents one of the four principles that exists in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and spells out special protections for children’s rights in law and public policy, justified limitations on their freedom, and correlative obligations by adults to provide support and a conducive context for the full development of children (UNCRC 1990). Most countries in the world are signatories to this convention (the US being the one exception) and use the principle of “the best interest of the child” in state policies and practices to determine societal, state, and familial obligations toward the welfare of children. Thus the best interest of the child can be viewed as a trope by which dominant assumptions about children, their welfare, and societal obligations toward them are made. Very little has been written using a spatial perspective in defining the best interest of the child, yet children are defined and situated, actively interact with, and have rights that are mitigated within specific geographic spaces. Over the course of this article, the insights of critical/ political geographers including children’s geographers will be used to undertake a spatial analysis of the political landscape within which dominant assumptions about children’s rights as citizens, including their best interests, are articulated in western (neo) welfare states. Between 2002 and 2004, the author undertook field research,

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using a retrospective analysis to interview and critically examine the narratives of young adults (largely women) who had entered the sex trade as children (under the age of 14) and had experiential knowledge of child sexual exploitation (for details see Moosa-Mitha 2004). Theoretical discussion, throughout this article, will be situated in an analysis of this retrospective study. Three aspects of spatial analysis in relation to children’s citizenship and its implications in defining their best interests will be discussed. The first will be an examination of the relationship between space and place. Children’s citizenship is understood in narrow terms as social (as opposed to, for example, political) citizenship largely due to majority assumptions about the naturalness of children’s place in society as being in the private space of the home. Children’s best interests are therefore understood in terms of social welfare within the background space of the home. The second is the relationship between space and scale. Normative emphasis on children as living within a microscale will be critiqued using the insights of critical geographers who refute the categorization of space into a hierarchy of scales. The very notion of citizenship is scalar in nature and centers the nation-state as the reference point by which other scales are measured (such as local, regional, international) (Moosa-Mitha 2014). An examination of social issues and phenomena that touch children’s lives challenges and undercuts the micro/macro binary assumed by social policy that defines their best interest. The third aspect to be discussed is the relationship between space and identity. Identity and space are co-constitutive in the sense that each makes the other. Children’s identity is a social construction that varies, for example, in different parts of the world and in various concrete spaces (Aitken 2001; Kallio 2007). On the other hand, children’s presence in particular spaces also changes the way that space is used and imagined (Holloway and Valentine 2000). Citizenship is about belonging, and a spatial analysis reveals the social relations of exclusion and inclusion that exist in concrete space. For example, in the neoliberal capitalist space of the city where the interests of the propertied class are dominant, the presence of those that do not participate in the market economy such as pan handlers, sex workers, and groups of youth and children are identified as criminal or suspect (Harvey 2008; Sennett 2006). Dominant discourses of children’s best interests assume a universal and fixed age-related identity of childhood that overlooks the diversity of identities that children have and the difference that this makes to their experience of belonging when addressing their best interests.

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Critical Political Feminist Geography

Insights from the work of critical geographers on space have a particular resonance when undertaking a spatial analysis of children’s rights. Children’s rights and their best interest are defined through rather rigid assumptions about what constitutes children’s space treating space as a given and a blank, as discussed in more detail later on in the chapter. Critical geographers on the other hand understand space as a social construct that is the result of social interrelationships marked by power contestations (Bondi 1990; Smith 1992, 2005; Massey 2005, 2012; Harvey 2006, 2008, 2009; Spivak 2014; Zieleniec 2008). Eschewing essentialist notions of the

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“dominant” and the “marginalized,” they view space as being under a continuous process of construction through a complex interplay of a host of actors vying for dominance in non-deterministic ways that leave the future open to possibilities of change (Massey 2005). Such a view when applied to a spatial analysis of children’s best interests offers the possibility of thinking about space in non-deterministic ways that acknowledge children’s agency and their ability to use particular spaces in ways that address their best interests depending on the specific context of their lives. Critical geographers are inclusive in their analysis, taking into consideration the class, racialized, and gendered, among other identities of people and its relationship to space. In his work, David Harvey (2006, 2009), a critical geographer, undertakes substantive geographic analysis by examining the spatial nature of class struggle and capital accumulation in particular cities or by examining the relationship between the urbanization of space and macroeconomic development over the last three decades. Spivak (2014), a feminist critical thinker, analyzes migration patterns and their relationship to global capitalist practices that work in a contradictory fashion by keeping “borders - not-frontiers - alive because it must itself be borderless” (p. 4). She analyzes the racialized and gendered nature of global capitalist practices and relationships that allow for the unfettered movement of capital with ever stricter regulations and barriers being put up on the movement of labor, asylum seekers, and refugees. Doreen Massey (2005, 2013) examines the multitudinous identities present in space that collapses several time epochs into single simultaneity. Challenging the notion of space as a given, she reveals the fluid nature of space using a Marxist analysis to examine social processes by which specific material spaces change in character continuously. Like other critical feminist geographers, her analysis reveals the intersecting ways by which space is gendered, racialized, classed, and otherwise inflected by social identity(ies). Although the focus of their scholarship is not on children’s’ geographies explicitly, there are important contributions that these theorists make to an analysis of how children’s social identities as children interact with and are co-constitutive of the spaces that they occupy, a point that will be taken up later on in this chapter.

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Children’s Place in Society: The Question of Space and Place

In commonsense understandings of geography, place is largely understood as the “local,” “specific,” or the “here” of the every day. It is considered the arena of subjective meaning-making, where one feels a sense of belonging, attachment, fear, etc. Space on the other hand is understood as being appositional (if co-dependent) to place as the “global,” “abstract,” and the “out there” (Seamon and Sowers 2008; Tuan 1977). Critical geographers challenge these definitions of place and space by arguing that space is place and that the local is in the global and vice versa (Massey 2005). Transnational feminists have also long argued for an understanding of the global as constituting multiple networks that people engage with in ways that blur the lines between the local and the global (Grewal 2005; Mohanty 2006, 2013).

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Feminist geographers, among others, have critiqued the construction of space into a private/public binary. Feminist geographers explore the site of the home as a place/ space of social reproduction that is constructed in gendered terms as women’s space understood as interior and “private,” while that dominated by men is constructed as “public” (Warf 2010). Public space is understood as the space of the market, the state, civil associations, ruled by laws of rationality and public debate, competition, and individualism in ways that are male-centered and ableist (Pateman 2003). Private space is understood as the place of home ruled by ties of affection, fewer rights and privileges, non-state intervention (though this is increasingly debateable), and the domain of women and children, though “headed” by men (Bargetz 2009; Pateman 2003). Critical feminist geographers challenge the public/private dichotomy by examining the ways that the gendered space of the home in fact responds to and effects changes in the wider society and is in turn affected by wider social events. The home therefore is not just a passive space that simply responds to “outside” forces. Atkinson et al. (2011) suggest feminist writings on the geography of care could question further how we imagine the place of care in society. Dominant discourse imagines the geography or places of care to exist in the home and within the proximity of intimate familial relations. Home is above all understood in affectional terms as the place/space of care. Neoliberal ideologies that favor the values of autonomy, independence, and the free pursuit of individual interests in the marketplace relegate dependency and caregiving responsibilities to the home through a construction of the familial space as private (Frost 2011). Massey (1994) critiques the dominant positioning of care as pre-political and private by analyzing how gender relations are spatially constructed and analyzes the critical role that the home, as a site of social reproduction and socialization of the next generation of citizens, plays in capitalist accumulation. Feminist geographers seek to critically dismantle dichotomies such as space/place, private/public, and inside/ outside in their analysis, arguing that such binaries are necessary to the maintenance of gendered relations in society. The givenness of the home as the natural site of care is universally reflected in child welfare policies across all western welfare states and has strong ideological and “commonsense” roots. Among other things, the privacy of the home consists in the common understanding that parents are most able to look after the best interests of their children. State intervention into the home is assumed to occur only in the exceptional cases where individual parents are found to be irresponsible resulting in a form of state paternalism where the state intrudes on the family by itself adopting the mantle of a parent (known as the principle of parens patriae). The assumption that states should not intervene in challenging the caregiving practices of parents is strong even among caregiving professionals as is revealed in the following excerpt of a participant in a retrospective study undertaken with sexually exploited children (Moosa-Mitha 2004, 2005). The participant is relating a school counselor’s response to her disclosure of sexual abuse by her brother: He (the school counsellor) more or less said “That’s it I am sorry but this is what you need to do- you need to go home and tell your parents and you need to do this today”. And I was very angry. It was probably the scariest day of my life. I remember leaving the office very pissed

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off at him. I felt like you know here I shared this secret and what are you doing. . .you can’t do this because my parents are not going to support me. . .I was more terrified of my mother and going home and having to face her and tell her. . ..it was not the issue of her not believing me, just the issue of her being mad at me. . .

Another participant recalled how difficult it was for counselors to deal with the child’s disclosure of parental physical abuse choosing instead to focus on the past: I had the counsellor talk to me about when I was five and stuff that happened to me then. I was like ‘trust me that doesn’t mean anything to me now. . .like move on. . . I’m okay with that, I really am’. But they were trying to find something that no longer existed. . .it’s obvious what’s wrong with me there’s scratch marks from my mom. They didn’t want to look at that, they didn’t and I would just keep saying. . .I would go down to the counselor and I’d say: “My mom tried to kill me last night; I’m going to hit her back”. They would say: “You can’t do that you will get kicked out”.

As the quote above suggests, in the case of many children who experience domestic violence, or live with parents who abuse drugs, do not experience the home as a place of care. Mainstream discourse and assumptions conflate the geographical space of the house with home and its connotation of belonging, care, and privacy (Mallett 2004). For many children the home is a place of marginalization and oppression even when they are not directly facing physical or sexual abuse (Wilson et al. 2012; Mallett 2004). This is not to disregard the contradictory fact that western societies find the presence of any kind of abuse in the home of the child as intolerable as it transgresses deeply held values of the space where children’s best interests are addressed to be that of the home under parental care. Child welfare legislation also understands children’s rights in terms of their rights of protection from harm, but it does so by imagining an alternative that continues to exist in the form of the bounded space of an alternative home and through adult care. The binary construction of space into private/public has its corollary in the construction of another binary risk/safety. If children “naturally” belong to the private space of the home, then the public space (streets) is produced as a “naturally” adult space (Valentine 1996, 2004; Holloway and Valentine 2000; Harden 2000). A risk/safety binary is employed to support this assumption where children, particularly teenagers, who frequent the streets are either understood as being at risk from “stranger danger” or are themselves understood as constituting a risk to public safety (Hayes and Carpenter 2012; Hart 2009). On the other hand, the private space of the home, that is, any space where children are in the care and control of adults, is the only place allowed as safe for children including teenagers. In fact children are far more likely to be exposed to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse within the intimate space of the home than on the streets (Hayes and Carpenter 2012). All the participants in this author’s study had experienced some form of violence in their homes. State intervention had resulted in placing these children in one or another form of adult care as the only viable safe alternative. On average, participants in the study had moved from one form of foster care to another 11 times due to the violence

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they had experienced in foster care, before finally running away to live on the streets. The Department of Health and Statistics in the USA, for example, reported that in 2011–2012 children are 13 times more likely to encounter adverse experiences, including violence in non-parental care (DoHS 2014). Being under adult care does not necessarily equate to safety. The following are some examples that participants in the author’s study provided of their experiences of abuse when in different types of foster care: They (adoptive parents) were really whacked. Like she was really messed up. We were the fake kids and her kids were the real kids. . .we had a separate table that we ate at. We ate different meals. I never had ice cream until I was like ten years old. I had never had orange juice...she was very abusive. I used to bite my nails and she’d put my hands on a cutting board and she started sawing on my hand cause she was going to cut my finger off. . .she’d tell me to go have a nap downstairs and she’d put a bowl of chocolates on the table but she had counted how many chocolates . . .of course I was starved and so I ate one chocolate and she counted them and she knew I did it. . .

Yet another participant recounted: . . .So I think I was in about eleven homes altogether in about four years. . ..I never got physically hit in any of these homes or sexually assaulted in the homes, there was just a lot of other abuse and control. . .And I was in a group home once where I was raped. . .. I watched one counselor throw a kid down the stairs. Like one of the clients, yeah and another counselor, she was very emotionally abusive to us kids.

Conversely the normative view that the opposite, children living in public spaces are always unsafe, is equally untrue as testified by the experiences and views held by the study participants. They often talked about how they felt that it was safer on the streets than it was inside the home (both parental and foster). Here is an example: Between foster homes and group homes I would run away on the street, where it was safer than inside and it was nicer than inside. I didn’t get hurt out there, not until I got older.

Another excerpt: I have always found it safer to be outside. To this day I don’t want to stay indoors for too long. I just can’t be someone who can live inside the house for too long; it’s too scary for me. . .no the street is where I feel the safest. . .

One of the reasons that children are assumed to be at risk in public spaces in an absolutist way is because children are viewed as non-participatory in public space. There is a passivity that is assigned to children that allows them some agency only in the everyday lives of bounded spaces. This assumed lack of agency or capacity to be social actors is important to highlight because it is fundamental in the treatment of children as not-yet-citizens. In fact research studies have shown that children exhibit a great deal of agency in strategizing to ensure safety and survival in public spaces such as city streets (Van der Burgt 2015; Christensen and Mikkelsen 2008). In the case of this author’s research, it was found that the vigilance, decisiveness, and crisis management that

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sexually exploited children were engaged in would be beyond what middle-class adults would need to exercise in order to survive everyday life. Yet children’s rights are so prescribed that their political and social rights to participate in public are entirely ignored, unlike articulations of human rights generally (Aitken 2015) There is a geography of care, and that geography dictates majority views on the correct places of care, and furthermore it dictates bounded places in the care and control of adults as being the only spaces of care for children. Carpenter and Hays (2012, p. 54) describe the spatial power dynamic; thus: The moral geography of the street positions young people who frequent them as “out of place”- the acceptable geography of a teenage existence is determined by heteronomous institutions such as school, sport, clubs, church and the family. To step outside this bounded existence is to threaten the very fabric of the hetero-normative imperative.

Participants in this study spoke volubly to the lack of care and concern that they experienced by officials whose job it was to care for them. They also spoke of the behavior of the general public toward them as being either indifferent to their presence or were actively hateful toward them. Following are some excerpts: The police never protect you. If you tell them that you have been abused, they never protect you. They think that you are a hooker and what else do you expect, that is part of the job.

The following is an excerpt from a participant describing the wrath visited on her by the public for transgressing space: . . .society people would drive by on the weekends and throw things and yell things. Guys would come by or whatever just to pick fights and it was a big joke. It was just a given if you’re out there, a given that’s just part of the work: “Yeah let’s go harass the hookers”.

Another excerpt: My girlfriend got a bucket of puke thrown on her and it was from like a homeless person and he was like: “yeah I’ve been saving that bucket of puke. I’ve been puking in that bucket for the last week”, and he dumped it on her. And you know like pennies being thrown at you and being yelled at it is one thing but having someone’s bodily fluids oh like oh god. . .

The general lack of concern for children (teenagers) from society is expressed by a participant in the following way: And it’s the way society views young people on the street too. When I was on the street nobody said at fourteen years old what are you doing here? Why are you here? Where’s your parents? Should you be in school tomorrow? Like there was nothing like that. The police would drive us out to Thetis Lake and make us walk back that’s how they took care of the streets. No one said why are you here? You don’t have to be here? Nobody gave me choices.

While the best interests of the child assume a private/public binary and imagine a place of care for children to be in the home with their parents, not all children are

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treated the same. Children coming from racialized backgrounds, particularly children from First Nations (Indigenous) background in colonial settler societies, are assumed to be under the care of parents whose care practices are considered inferior to that provided by white parents. This is reflected in a common history of forceful uprooting of Indigenous children from their homes and villages into residential schools (institutions that are both public and private at the same time) across all colonial settler societies (Carriere and Thomas 2014). The best interests of children however are articulated in universal terms that are in fact liberal in their ideological bent allowing for an overrepresentation of children from racialized backgrounds within state care in the name of their best interests (Kline 1992; Carriere and Thomas 2014). Outside of state policies, the policies and discourses that emanate from nongovernmental organizations also analyze children’s participation in public spaces, like their participation (willing and unwilling) in civil war using the rhetoric of protection and child saving. Children’s rights are invoked but very much as a supplement to the main force of the argument which is to emphasize children’s welfare as though they were in tangential relationship to their rights (Wells 2008).

4

Children and Everyday Life: The Question of Space and Scale

The term “best interest of the child” itself represents a notion of scale emanating as it does from an international convention on the rights of the child that transcends state practices into something bigger and more universal by being international. As Häkli and Kallio (2014) argue, however, the UN Convention on the rights of the child is a document that reflects social processes of a particular time and space where specific national interests initiated elite-driven globalization processes that enabled this particular articulation of the rights of the child to come into being. Isin (2007) notes that the relationship between the state and international federations are represented in exclusive (i.e., contiguous and nonoverlapping), hierarchical (i.e., nested and tiered), and ahistorical terms, which belie their actual interdependent reality. The notion of scales becomes even more entrenched by the fact that citizens, particularly children because their lives are more likely to be circumscribed by state institutional interventions, realize these rights within the national context once they get translated into state laws. As Aitken (2015) suggests, this top-down approach understanding of children’s rights creates many tensions including how universal and static definitions of rights get translated from international conventions to specific and differing social realties on the ground. Critical geographers such as Smith (1992, 2005), Cox (1998), Massey (1998), Marston (2000), and Marston et al. (2005) define scale not as an external given within a preordained hierarchy but rather as an embodiment of the arena of social relations through which structural forces of both empowerment and disempowerment operate. This relational, rather than hierarchical, notion of scale emphasizes its socially constructed nature as Neil Smith explicates (Smith 1992: 73):

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(T)here is nothing ontologically given about the traditional division between home and locality, urban and regional, national and global scales; rather the differentiation of geographical scales establishes and is established through the geographical structure of social interactions.

The construction of space into scales is a way of containing reality into domains so as to allow nation-states to be in control of what occurs within their own boundaries and the flow into and outside of them (Isin 2007). For example, global capitalism is in fact an economic reality that is both local and global at the same time. Its globalized manifestation is not abstract but rather exists within specific, localized sites. Similarly local economies potentially remain unbounded by local or national boundaries as they impact and are impacted by the demands of the market that may be spatially very far away. Constructing a hierarchical scalar representation of global capitalism however, along nationalist lines, allows for nation-states to retain greater control of the economy both nationally and internationally. It allows for state practices to create borders that control the movements of labor and human beings while allowing the movement of capital unimpeded (Spivak 2014). Scalar representations of children’s rights also allow for nation-states through state practices as well as social and institutional policies to maintain control in managing the lives of children as naturalized citizens of the state. International conventions on children’s rights are only realized once individual nation-states interpret and define those within state law. Child geographers like Kallio and Häkli (2011) and Aitken (2015) have argued for a multi-scalar approach to children’s geography where the everyday experiences of childhood (their subjectivity), institutional policies, national and international, and the wider and changing social world of childhood are jointly analyzed. By doing so, they argue, an entire network of power relations within which children’s lives are lived can be revealed. Ansell (2009) introduces a materialist approach that uses flat ontology and embodied subjectivity to understanding how children’s lives are navigated around the notion of distance such as far and near, as opposed to a hierarchy of scales. This she suggests allows for an ascertaining of the material consequences of events that impact children’s lives that maybe outside of children’s immediate experiences but also children’s own awareness and activism in negotiating with issues outside their control. Kallio (2007) suggests a two-pronged approach to undertaking this analysis: (1) examining political awareness and action on the part of children in the spaces that they live in and (2) interrogating the power structures, such as institutional child policies and the impact (disciplinary) that they have on children’s lives. I would like to go further than that. I would like to examine children’s political awareness of phenomena that they encountered in their lives which undercut and collapse artificial constructions of space into scales. Taking a cue from Kallio, this chapter examines the disciplinary effects of scalar social policy in determining children’s best interests. One phenomenon that sexually exploited children in my study experienced and that they were politically aware of was the gendered nature of social relations and how that operated as a reality in the home as well as spilled outside. Sexism and the sexualisation of the female body is not only found in public spaces such as in the

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media and on bill board advertisements featuring women’s bodies as commodities, it is also reflected in the space of the home. The following is an excerpt of a participant speaking about her father and the way that he viewed his daughters: My dad had a thing about women, it kind of goes with drinking. He fooled around a lot. He really saw us as bad girls. . .like. . .we had dark curly hair and he used to always call us sluts. He was always making these references to sexually treating us like we were trash because we were women, we were not worth anything. . .and just always bringing that about: “you’re sluts and no good”.

Another excerpt was even more revealing in the way that this participant viewed how one space leaked into the other: The more I think about it the more I feel that the sex trade actually starts before sex trade. Like. . .you have been exploited, maybe not necessarily abused but exploited and that starts even as young as in your teens. I think we learn as young teens that this is what men want, and this is how they can get it. . .but it was inevitable (getting into the sex trade) because when I look back on it my mom’s boyfriends always hit on me. . .like one of her boyfriends, she didn’t end up dating him, but I kept in contact with him, I’d clean his house and he’d give me money and he’d cook me dinner. Now I look back on it he started me out in this business because I learnt from an older guy, because I am young and I’m cute, I would be seen as charming. . .I just knew that I always had older men in my life that would give me some money. (Emphasis added)

Child welfare policy however is scalar in nature. It treats sexual exploitation occurring at the scale of the home differently than it does when it occurs in the public space of the street. Sexual exploitation at home is treated as abuse requiring child protection as a form of state intervention where the child is always already regarded as a victim. The majority of child welfare budgets in western states are commonly used to protect children from (private) abuse within the home with very little allocated to address the (public) phenomenon of child poverty. Sexual exploitation on a public scale however is not viewed as a matter of child welfare. Children found to be engaging in the sex trade in public spaces have their rights (or lack of) defined through the criminal code that does not distinguish children from adults. State protection is made available through adoption of social policies, in some countries like Canada, in the form of rigid state paternalism where children are forcibly removed from the streets and incarcerated into secure units (Moosa-Mitha 2004). Persistent presence on the street however results in the treatment of sexually exploited children as criminals. By refusing to acknowledge the connection between sexism and child sexual exploitation, the state individualizes and disciplines the unruly bodies of children present in the public square and invisiblizes patriarchy and sexism as a form of social oppression that are harmful to children’s welfare and in some part explains their engagement in the sex trade. The other phenomenon that participants showed an acute political awareness of, as it played out through their lives and cut across the different scales, was that of love. Viewed through a scalar lens, love is understood differently depending on the scale at which it is expressed. Within the scale of the home, it is understood as being a more embodied and intimate phenomenon, at a more macroscale, it is understood as existing at a more abstract

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level such as love for one’s country or love for knowledge, etc. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered theorists as well as feminists were the first to analyze the political nature of intimate love (Butler 2002) by pointing out how intimate love as a social performance spilled into the scale of the public even when expressed in the intimacy of the bedroom. They also analyzed how society in the form of policy, legislation, and internalization or socialization hetero-normativity was present in the bedroom. My study with sexually exploited children showed that the participants were keenly aware of the relationship of the role that love played at home and on the streets. Their political astuteness lay in their capacity to see how love (erotic or parental) could be used as a tool to gain power, and they were very clear about the power relations within which erotic desire was enacted when engaging in sex trade. Following is an excerpt to that point: That’s a really big thing that happens is that the bigger reason actually wasn’t just for the money it was that I liked somebody treating me nice. And I liked being the center of somebody’s attention and even though the promises were empty it was better than the ones I got before. . . and I’d have people tell me I was beautiful. And I was smart and those were things that I wasn’t told in other situations. . .

Their experiences had taught them not to believe in “family romance” that is so much a part of majority secular cultures, so they found love in the street “family,” transient as it was. The following quote speaks to the strength of bond that a participant felt with street relationships: It was there that I felt a sense of belonging (the streets). I still feel a sense of belonging. . . and I just want to help them because they’ve helped me so much. Between beatings and stuff some of the girls would take me and hide me. . .It (the street) was what I knew; it was when I was a kid where I learned acceptance and love and where they helped me. They didn’t really want too much from me but they taught me . . .

The participants were also clear of the power relationships present when working the sex trade and erotic desire as a tool by which they could maintain power: And you know also the hatred towards men, like I have such hatred towards men it’s just unbelievable. I don’t know where it started but I can just remember when I was in the trade that I would actually grit my teeth when I was with them cause it was almost like I was just getting over on them. Like I had the goods and you’re paying me, now pay up buddy. I was the one in control, I was the one, I had such a distaste for these men even though I loved the attention. . .I hated them and needed them and I guess that comes from the double standard. . .Yeah it would be stuff like trying to get back at someone and by using sex to do that and having the men weep you know.

They also knew the power of love to heal and without exception they cited love as the reason for leaving the streets: I quit. After the problems I had with Joe because I was very much in love with him and I wanted to build something functional and stable with him. I had tried to quit before but

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always ended up going back. I’d quit and I’d be gone for 2 weeks, a month and then I’d go back. The longest I was out I think was 2 months, 2 to 3 months. That was it and then I’d go back because I felt I had to. I didn’t really feel I had a choice. I ended up leaving because I wanted Joe to know that he meant that to me that I would leave for him.

The deeply entangled nature of relationships of love that transgress public/private boundaries that participants in the study were so aware of is entirely overlooked in social policy and legislation. In fact exclusions that the participants experienced both in their homes and outside of it undercut private/public boundaries, revealing the power relations within which children live their lives within material and specific spaces. Social policy response in defining children’s rights in relation to relationships of love is entirely scalar – it is to domesticate children’s rights so that they only apply to familial relationships where the rights of protection reign supreme. Children have no distinctive rights when it comes to the expression of their sexual desires on the assumption that children are sexually innocent and pure (Moosa-Mitha 2004). The only rights that they have in this regard are the rights of protection premised on the view of assumed sexual passivity on the part of children. Hence prostitution laws in all welfare societies ignore children’s presence in the sex trade as being distinct from that of adults, treating them the same, though the law targets men and women who buy sex from children differently than if they were buying sex from adults (Rendel 2000).

5

Space and Identity

Identity retains a central position in the articulation of children’s rights. Children’s rights to cultural and self-expression is enshrined in the UNCRC and is increasingly used to gauge their best interests in specific contexts. It also retains a central role in social policy because as discussed in the earlier sections of this chapter, social policies both target children’s behavior through particular interpretations of their identity but also produce particular subjectivities through social policy intervention. Hence social policies work on particular assumptions of children, what Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson (2012) term the idealized subject, and in turn produce those subjectivities through its intervention. In the case of sexually exploited children, the idealized subject assumed in social policy is the sexually innocent child and in turn social policy intervenes in the lives of these children to produce a recovered sexual passivity and innocence. In this section I would like to undertake a spatial analysis of children’s subjectivities as narrated in their own voices and use this to critique normative views assumed and embedded in social policies of children’s identities as fixed, universal, and future oriented (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2012). Doreen Massey (2005) analyzes the relationship between space and identity in the following way: . . .space too is a product of interrelations. Space does not exist prior to identities/entities and their relations. More generally I would argue that identities/entities, the relations between them and spatiality which is part of them are co-constitutive... Spatiality may also be from

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the beginning integral to the constitution of these identities themselves, including political subjectivities. (p.10)

The co-constitutive nature of space and identity relies on the insight that neither is fixed, natural, authentic, nor pure and that the negotiations that mark identity formations, often political in nature, include spatiality as a dimension of these struggles and processes. Political subjectivity therefore is not an abstract concept, rather it is grounded in material space; it occurs somewhere rather than being from nowhere. Unlike earlier attempts by geographers to simply map space on to homogeneous groups (race, class, sexuality, etc.), critical geographers acknowledge the fluidity of both space and identity (Ehrkamp 2006, 2010). They do so in two ways: by recognizing the contested nature of space as a constructed entity that reveals the nature of power relationships which mark a specific society. Thus particular concrete spaces are continually being made and unmade, for example, space used for a public car park gets changed into space used for a housing estate, depending on social dynamics that are present when making that change. Secondly the identity of groups occupying a particular space is neither homogeneous nor fixed; it is multifarious and changes with time. Moreover the identity of groups inhabiting space is related to and changes with the remaking of space. For example, a particular space may be identified as “ethnic” due to the presence of a large number of minority groups residing there, which can then evolve to being identified as “interesting” by majority groups due to a large number of “exotic” restaurants that usually accompany and reflect the food tastes of non-majority communities, making that space more desirable by the majority and leading to an insertion of majority communities into that space. This has repercussions not only in terms of class and the possible rising value of that space but also in how the identity of those occupying that space shifts from being viewed as marginal to being “hip.” Subjectively, the minority groups themselves participate in this movement by accepting the change, both in terms of how they are now being identified and use of space, or they may resist the incursion of majority communities into what they consider to be “their” space. This results in a further round of dialectics impacting both how they are viewed by the majority and how they view their own identity (for instance, from an ascribed ethnic identity to an alternate self-defined one that is worth fighting for). Identity and space are always in the process of becoming through a political process that includes objective and subjective aspects of boundary and identity maintenance (Ehrkamp 2006, 2010). Child geographers are concerned with analyzing spaces that children occupy in order to better understand their political subjectivity, how they negotiate power and control through the everyday spaces that they occupy (Valentine 1996, 2004; Holloway and Valentine 2000; Aitken 2015). The participants in my study understood the move from living inside a household that was abusive to engaging in street sex trade as related to a change in their subjective identity. One participant summarized it as follows: It made me feel like a woman and like a grownup and like whereas the other one (child sexual abuse in the home) made me feel very small and very weak and very passive and very childlike.

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The relationship between space and identity also speaks to the notion of belonging. Identity becomes a mediator in a political process whereby it is used by the majority to rationalize exclusion of the “other.” The excluded “other” counters these exclusions in two ways: by internalizing the identity imposed on them and accepting marginalization or by self-identifying in ways that provide legitimacy of space (Ehrkamp 2006, 2010). The participants on my study understood their presence on the street as resulting from a change in how they subjectively saw themselves. The following are some excerpts: This is what I thought is: I want to be responsible for the bad things that happen to me. I want to know that all those bad things that happened or could happen are my fault. I want them to stop being somebody else’s fault and I want to stop being the weak one. So I thought I don’t care what happens to me I’m walking into [sex trade] I’m deciding what’s going to happen. Very empowering for me to make that decision. . .

Another participant echoed a similar sentiment: So after being thrown around from guy to guy and being used from different so-called boyfriends and things like that I finally thought what the hell I might as well get something out of it. . .

Many of the participants narrated experiences of multiple forms of violence when working the street. None of them were under any illusion that engaging in the sex trade was only self-empowering. However, what is interesting is that the space in which the exploitation was occurring made a significant difference to their sense of identity. As has been discussed previously, relevant legislation constructs the identity of sexually exploited children in terms of criminality and delinquency. These are not just social identity ascriptions of welfare states intent upon patrolling the public/ private boundary to keep children in their place, they also have moral undertones. Boundaries are by their nature unstable, where liminal spaces exist as spaces of ambiguity and anxiety. One way to address this anxiety is through the use of a moral discourse. Spatial boundaries in effect become moral ones in part as a response to uncertainty and as a way to fix those borders (Harvey 2008). In addition to constructing the social identity of the “other” in spatially exclusionary terms (children as vulnerable to stranger danger), they are also depicted as reflecting a threat to the core values of society. In so doing majority discourses essentialize both the identity of the other and the values that are considered core to society. The core values of modern secular societies include valorization of the family, the home, and the nation. The effect of social policies that normally target children’s unruly bodies in order to discipline them (Kallio 2006) is felt even more harshly as sexually exploited children transgress all three values by challenging the naturalness of familial love, home as an inside safe place, and working in the informal labor sector when they are underage. Participants in my study were in fact aware of their own moral identity and the double standards in society where middle-class men who used their services were treated with respect while they themselves experienced disparagement by the public. Following is an excerpt of a young woman reflecting a

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nuanced sense of morality and making meaning of the acts of thievery that she engaged in when working the sex trade: I would go in and take it [money or precious items]. . .So usually they’d hide the money and I didn’t want to do that. I just got to be really good at what I did. . .But in that situation I still don’t feel bad. I’ve never stolen from anybody, I would never steal, I don’t lie to people but in that situation it was, it was my survival really. If you put yourself in that situation you are using me for something then you're pretty much setting yourself up for whatever. I won't physically harm you ever and I won’t cause any harm to you but I will steal. . . .And some of them would cry and say; “my wife bought me that” but I wouldn’t feel sorry for them. I’d say; “you go home and tell your wife that you took out a prostitute and she was mean”. You know ‘cause you shouldn’t be here’, I wouldn’t do it if I was in a relationship.

Another quote: . . . If a client said something like: “You’re about the same age as my daughter and she’s built the same way as you are”. . .they show signs of being paedophiles that way and what I do is I hurt them. I’m like if you ever touch your daughter I hope she hurts you more than I do. I’d do things like I had really long finger nails naturally at the time and they were sharp, I’d keep them sharp. I would press them into their skin. . .

The street as a relational space with its own power dynamic where social identity plays a central role is clearly reflected in the legislation governing the sex trade in most liberal welfare societies that is similarly classist in nature. Social policy and legislation on prostitution reflect a power struggle between different groups vying to address their own interests to the detriment of the welfare interests of sexually exploited children. In Canada, for example, the prostitution law is often called the “nuisance” act because the rights and responsibilities defined through this act are premised on the view that while buying and selling sex is legal (between adults), it creates a nuisance in society, which is illegal (Lowman 2001; Brock 1998). This backhanded way of illegalizing the sex trade reflects the advocacy efforts on the part of businessmen and property owners who are opposed to the presence of sex workers on their streets because it lowers the market value of their homes and businesses. Such policies result in encouraging the formations of people of affected neighborhoods to organize themselves into vigilante groups to ensure that their neighborhoods remain “clean” by pushing sex trade workers out (Mensah and Bruckert 2012). In the past, police have not responded to sex trade workers’ appeal for help from vigilante activism, silently siding with the actions of the “public” (MoosaMitha 2004). The end result of this has been increasing exclusions experienced by sex trade workers, including sexually exploited children, where they are forced to work at the very margins of the city under even more dangerous conditions (Davis and Bowen 2007). The rights of propertied citizens for “clean” streets trump children’s rights to a safe environment. Perhaps the clearest reflection of the co-constitutive nature of identity and space is reflected in the following quote by a participant attesting to the difficulty of changing space while resisting the social identity ascribed to those that occupy that space:

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They (social workers) all want me to go back to living the straight life. . .I can’t do that, it was not my choice but my life was different, I can’t go back to being the innocent child that is naïve like other children in my school were. I can only go back in the straight world if I am allowed to be different, to be accepted for being different. . ..

Identities are fluid and sexually exploited children who have been able to exist in the relatively hostile and dangerous environment of city streets, and the sex trade cannot entirely become “square” as a condition of reentering the “straight” world. Yet this is what is required of them, in the present articulation of their rights, if they want to exit the public space of the street in exchange for the assumed safety of a bounded space of adult care and control.

6

Conclusion

Over the course of this chapter, the discussion has centered on the spatiality of children’s lives and its implications on defining their best interests. Central to the discussion has been an analysis of a retrospective study undertaken with sexually exploited children using the writings and insights of critical (children’s) geographers. A case has been made as to the importance of undertaking spatial analysis when defining children’s best interests. Central to an understanding of why spatiality is overlooked when defining the best interests of the child may be found in the long-standing debate in western thought between space and time. Enlightenment thinking, Harvey (1997) contends, tends to view time as central to an understanding of social phenomena. Individual human life and societies in general are understood in universal terms as participating in “natural progression” through a common trajectory. As a result nation-states globally are categorized in terms of developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries in ways that are racialized and assume western superiority as the pinnacle of progression. Critical geographers like Doreen Massey (2005) have challenged these assumptions by analyzing the desire for sameness that pervades such thinking that ignores the multiplicity of trajectories that countries may wish to pursue allowing for a breadth of ways by which societies live and thrive. The prioritizing of time over space that is characteristic of such thinking where space is understood as a blank that follows the dictates of time from regression to progression plays a particularly central role in the construction of children’s rights. Children’s identities are conceived in ways that prioritize time over space. Children are viewed through a future-oriented lens as not-yet adults with a singular emphasis on their trajectory from childhood to adulthood as the marker for having arrived at the status of a free and equal being with its attendant responsibilities and privileges. As in the case of discourses on globalization, children are understood through a development discourse as “undeveloped” or not fully developed human beings. This futuristic view of children that considers their present status as children to be significant only with reference to their anticipated status as fully fledged adults essentializes their identity with respect to age over any other source of identity. As

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with all essentialized identities, childhood is treated as a monolithic category where assumptions are made about children in relation to what they are not able to do in relation to adults’ capacities. Their differences from adults, as in the case of differences of countries that have not followed the same trajectory as the hypercapitalist western countries is only understood in terms of a lack. Children’s geographers challenge adultist thinking by shining a light on the spaces that children occupy, their actions, preoccupations, and concerns, thereby paying attention to the present in children’s lives. By so doing they propose an alternative to dominant articulations of children’s rights that is future oriented through its emphasis on children’s rights of protection and participation within bounded spaces until they are old enough to enjoy social, political, and economic rights articulated as adult rights. In order to do so, children will need to be viewed as human beings that in the present have the “right to have rights” (Arendt 1994, 292). Until then an alternative model of international rights that is present oriented attached to and mobilized by children wherever they move in space is as yet only a theoretical possibility (Dominelli 2014).

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Part III Youthful Formations: Education, Emotional and Affective Geographies

Changing the Subject: Education and the Constitution of Youth in the Neoliberal Era

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Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Transnationalism, Education, and Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Technology, Cultural Memory, and Intergenerationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Education and Philanthropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between education, youth formation, and socioeconomic change. The focus of change is the rise of neoliberal policies, practices, and forms of governance in advanced industrial societies in the early twenty-first century. Three thematic areas are pursued: citizenship formation, technological change, and philanthropy. Evidence is presented that in each of these three areas, educational ideas and practices are affected by the growing dominance of free market ways of thinking. The state promotion of multicultural education has shifted to a more instrumental and strategic promotion of competitive success in the global knowledge economy; new digital technologies marketed under consumer capitalism have engendered short-term interests among youth and an increasing difficulty to pay deep attention across generations; the incursion of philanthropy into educational policy has encouraged more school choice and attempts to recruit parents and students into competitive and entrepreneurial subjectivities. It is argued that these processes are currently accelerating and have negative repercussions for children and society.

K. Mitchell (*) University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_6

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Keywords

Subjectivity formation · Education · Neoliberalism · Citizenship · Philanthropy · Technology · Canada · United Kingdom · USA

1

Introduction

A longstanding area of scholarly interest in the development of children involves the role of education in their social, political, and economic formation. For example, what are the educational processes through which actively engaged citizens can be created? Or how can young people be encouraged to be attentive and collaborative learners? In looking at these kinds of questions around youth subjectivity formation, the role of education should be conceptualized broadly: not referring to what is learned in school settings alone, but also inclusive of the many informal processes of education such as apprenticeships (Lave 2011), afterschool programs, and the learning that takes place within the family itself (Vanderbeck 2007; Vanderbeck and Worth 2014; Halberstam 2005). This chapter addresses three research themes concerning the formative processes of education on the constitution of young people. My specific emphasis in investigating these themes is the political and economic context in which this education takes place, specifically the period of early twenty-first-century capitalism in many highly industrialized societies. This period of free market capitalism or neoliberalism is complex, and its effects play out differently in specific places, but it can be characterized broadly as one of free market expansions and entrenchments, in which subjects are increasingly oriented toward and governed through liberal market rationalities (Foucault 2010; Lemke 2001; Larner 2000; Rose 1999; Dean 1999). The orientation and recruitment into market-based logics occurs in different registers and is always uneven and incomplete; it involves a myriad number of institutional and individual practices and effects and looks different depending on the historical, cultural, and geographical spaces in which it occurs (Peck and Tickell 2002). Nevertheless, I believe the wider processes and effects of increasing marketization in society are important to investigate as they impact children, as well as the policies and practices of education, in multiple ways. The first theme I introduce in this chapter engages the question of citizenship formation. With neoliberal globalization and new kinds of transnational migration both the legal rights and the cultural understandings of what it means to be a citizen have become increasingly contested (Isin 2002). For immigrant parents and students this has meant new types of negotiations over the meanings and assumptions associated with belonging – both to a normative conceptualization of a territorially defined state, and also to a vision of global financial flows. My interest here concerns the varied and shifting ways in which young people are enrolled and recruited as members of particular nation-states and simultaneously as entrepreneurial subjects articulated to a global scale of allegiance. I engage with ideas about multiculturalism, liberalism, and democracy as they are implicated by these geographical positionings and transformations.

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The second theme involves technology and the systems of attention and care that characterize more informal forms of learning. These are those that happen within the family and between generations, where a parent or grandparent (or mentor or coach) is engaged with children and youth in processes of intergenerational teaching and learning. In the era of finance capitalism and the rise of fast-paced, attentionabsorbing technologies, philosophers such as Bernard Stiegler (2010) suggest that these types of learning processes are under threat. This threat occurs because the “hyper” technologies of consumer capitalism derail the intergenerational transfer of cultural memory necessary for the formation of reflective and responsible adults. In this section of the chapter, I engage with questions of time, memory, and youth subjectivity formation in this context. A third theme of inquiry addresses the increasingly important role of philanthropy in US education systems. Contemporary forms of philanthropy and social impact investment are altering education systems and hence the ways that young people learn (Saltman 2010; Ravitch 2010; Scott 2009). Among other initiatives, the philanthropically funded reform movement in education encourages the creation of more school choices for parents – primarily through the expansion of charter schools. These are schools that are government funded yet have their own mandates and mission statements and can focus on particular curricular areas such as the arts or specific vocational training. They are subject to fewer rules and regulations than local public schools and can be selective of the students they admit and retain. There are both nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, and their proliferation over the past decade has had some adverse effects – including the loss of students and revenue – for many nearby public schools. In this section of the chapter my questions focus on the processes through which US-based educational reforms such as these – those that have been galvanized largely through philanthropic funding – help to enroll parents and students in choice-making modes of behavior and in increasingly market-oriented directions (Mitchell and Lizotte 2014). I argue that these reforms have many negative implications in the short-term (e.g., for public schools), as well as in the long-term, with respect to perceptions of what are the optimal modes of learning and social organization in education. As a technology of liberal governance, education, and the institutional processes and practices associated with it, is always changing (Popkewitz 2008). I believe that investigating these changes in these three thematic areas can aid scholarly understanding by helping us to better analyze the intersections of education and youth subjectivity formation in a particular historical and geographical moment (in this case, early twenty-first-century capitalism in many advanced industrial societies); and by adding theoretical nuance and empirical data with respect to the ways that neoliberal systems of governance have changed over recent decades (cf. Peck 2010; Leitner et al. 2006). One example of the latter analysis comes through in a case study of the Seattle schools that I wrote about with Chris Lizotte (Mitchell and Lizotte 2016). In that study, we showed how the failure of an educational reform measure (to create smaller high schools) encouraged by the Gates Foundation led to political and spatial shifts in grant-making by the Foundation. This, in turn, initiated a broader

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restructuring of neoliberal practices involving public private partnerships (PPPs). Ironically, through the failure of this particular philanthropy-initiated reform, new neoliberal policies were produced that affected multiple PPP arrangements nationally. Thus, by focusing on a specific research study and making the connection to broader processes of change, we were able to illuminate the centrality of education in producing new socioeconomic practices. My aim in this chapter is to make some similar connections and analyses.

2

Transnationalism, Education, and Citizenship

In this section I begin with a broad question: What is the role of formal educational systems in the contemporary citizenship formation of young people? (Portions of this section are adapted from “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, 4, 2003, pp. 387–403; and “Neoliberal Governmentality in the European Union: Education, Training and Technologies of Citizenship,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 2, 2006, pp. 389–407.) Further, how is this changing in the context of neoliberal globalization? Answering this requires some historical and comparative analysis. Here I draw, in part, on prior research conducted in the early 2000s. First, it is clear that national, public systems of education in many advanced industrial nations began to come under attack in the 1980s and 1990s at least partially as a result of sweeping changes in the social organization of work; these changes occurred in the context of globalization and new forms of flexibility in production (Giroux 2004; Aronowitz and Giroux 1985; Mitchell 2018). New systems of flexible accumulation were accompanied by new relationships between the state and economic actors and corporations, as well as between the state and its citizenry. While numerous scholars focused on the effects of these changes vis-à-vis cultural processes and the impact on labor (e.g., Harvey 1989), their impact on educational systems was equally profound. The changing dynamics of global production and capital accumulation were accompanied by shifting narratives of citizenship and the best ways to educate students to be effective participants in a democratic community (Torres 1998). With capital, commodities, and people moving rapidly and in great volume across borders, one of the more critical issues for education vis-à-vis the constitution of young people as effective citizens revolved around the idea of state territorial containment. This was reflected in the discourses and practices around multicultural education, which at the time was perceived and managed as a primarily national ideology and set of policies in most industrialized countries (Mitchell 2001). In my research, I focused on the shifting discourse of multicultural education away from what might be termed a more “person-centered” nationally based or contained education for everyone – the creation of a “multicultural self” in the direction of a more skills-based, highly mobile, and individuated education, or the creation of a “strategic cosmopolitan” (Mitchell 2003). The student inculcated into multicultural ideology was taught about the advantages of diversity and plurality

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in the joint project of building and unifying the nation. The strategic cosmopolitan was, by contrast, oriented toward success in navigating diversity in the global sphere; success here was understood more in terms of strategic adoption of foreign cultural mores, linguistic sophistication, and individual flexibility in adapting to different international and business contexts, rather than in national unification and pluralist harmony. What is interesting and important about this general shift was the fact that it manifested some overarching similarities across several different advanced industrial countries, but at the same time, also reflected the differences of geographical and historical context. In Canada, the United States, and England, for example, multiculturalism was a useful tool of state integration and territorial consolidation at various historical moments. In particular, during the Fordist or Keynesian period following WWII it accorded well with state policies of expanding civil society, encouraging consumption, and facilitating effective social and economic relationships between capital and labor and between different types of laborers. It was thus a key liberal touchstone of state formation at a specific historical moment – that of the growth and development of the welfare state. Yet in all three societies this “pact” disintegrated with the advent and expansion of neoliberal ideology, governmentality, and policy. While many teachers continued with multicultural curricula in the classrooms, multiculturalism as a program of governance was no longer highlighted to the same extent in educational programs and materials, school curricula, and national policy pronouncements. Exactly how multiculturalism was conceptualized and implemented in terms of specific policy measures initially, and how it began to break apart as a central foundational touchstone of national pluralist harmony in the schools, manifested a number of individual differences that were dependent on the historical development of each state and educational system at the time. In Canada, for example, cultural pluralism gained ground in the post-World War II period, along with a strand of “ethical liberalism” that drew intellectually from the work of John Dewey (Manzer 1994). This framework achieved some degree of hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s as it became bound up with a strong political agenda in which diverse communities were narrated as integral to the Canadian nation and to the assumptions about what it meant to be Canadian. More specifically, the promotion of multiculturalism (described initially as cultural pluralism), helped position state actors as being tolerant of diverse ethnic communities such as the Québécois, indigenous groups, and immigrants, all of whom were organizing and making claims for land, cultural rights, and/or economic reparations during this time. Multiculturalism thus both deflected more radical, redistributive agendas and simultaneously served as a governing principle and national ideology reflecting Canada’s self-perceived values of tolerance and unity in diversity. This state narrative occurred, moreover, at the same time that the Canadian state was intervening more rapidly in the economy, expanding in areas of public housing, national health care, labor disputes, and various other venues. Rival theories in education, which had never fully disappeared, however, began to regain prominence alongside concerns about student and worker

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competitiveness in the global economy. Learning about the ethnic heritage and cultural mores of different individuals and groups, as well as about racism and various forms of discrimination in society were soon attacked as not just irrelevant but also as impeding the types of technological skills and learning needed for success in an increasingly competitive era. These “anti” multicultural ideas were fostered by the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, a strong proponent of more neoliberal policies and practices in Canada in the early 1990s. Alongside a harsh narrative of state schools as failing, the state promotion of multicultural policies in education began to decline at this time (Mitchell 2018). Although multicultural policies and practices in England were never established in schools to the same extent as they were in Canada, there was nevertheless a brief period in the late 1960s and 1970s when progressive educational reforms gained some traction. These reform efforts included a strong antiracist movement as well as a form of multiculturalism that sought to embrace cultural and religious differences. These ideas were manifested in the Plowden Report of 1967, which introduced the importance of examining and acknowledging the importance of economic and social factors affecting children outside the classroom. It also promulgated more progressive ideas around activity-based learning and a pedagogy centered on the individual child and his or her needs and learning style. These modest efforts to reform educational practices in England were attacked with increasing intensity over the following decades following the election of the Conservative Party candidate Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Thatcher was a strong proponent of neoliberal policies and practices, including deregulating and privatizing national industries and reducing the power and authority of locally elected administrative bodies such as the Greater London Council. Many of these local institutions, including the local education authorities, were generally more progressive than the central government. As their local financial and administrative power was diminished, individual authorities and schools lost some of their ability to continue the educational reforms that had been initiated in the previous decade (Mitchell 2018). This, along with more conservative legislation such as the Education Reform Act of 1988, and an insistent narrative of state school decline and failure, led to the decline of the antiracist and multicultural reform agenda of the earlier period. Moreover, while Tony Blair’s New Labour government (elected in 1997) was rhetorically sympathetic to questions of social inclusion, the strategic emphasis on technological skills for the “global knowledge economy” took precedence over the postwar interest in multicultural practices and other educational reforms. The United States provides a third example of the general shift in tone and policy from the more socially inclusive language of the Fordist period to a more strategic emphasis on individual success and skills mastery under neoliberalism. A number of federal education laws in the 1950s and 1960s pointed toward greater interest in including previously disenfranchised groups in society. These included the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Additionally, the landmark supreme court case of Brown v. Board of

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Education of Topeka indicated a greater national commitment to challenging segregation and racial disparities in educational access (Mitchell 2018). Multicultural education gained great ground through this period, becoming both more widespread throughout the nation as well as more inclusive vis-à-vis equity for low-income groups, LGBT students, and students with disabilities. These educational reforms were challenged in increasingly harsh ways following the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Reagan, like Thatcher, was a strong proponent of free market principles and pushed privatization and the deregulation of industry at the same time as he weakened social services provisions and the support system of various welfare programs. His government also commissioned an educational report that blasted the public education system as failing, especially with respect to preparing students for success in an increasingly competitive society. This 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” had numerous negative repercussions, including leading the way toward more conservative educational policies, with more focus on standardized testing and a reduced interest in multiculturalism, antiracism, or concern for individual learning styles and the whole child. Many of these preoccupations with competitiveness and individual success continued through successive administrations of both Republicans and Democrats. The cases broadly outlined above indicate a shifting approach to education that was clearly associated with the changing dynamics of the economy and the political formation of the state. While these shifts played out differently in different national contexts, it is the general tenor of the change that I want to highlight here. A second example of this type of broad transformation can be seen in the educational sector of the European Commission over the last two to three decades. This shift reflects a similar transition from a more liberal, person-oriented, and institutionally affirmative framing of immigrant belonging in the European Union to one stressing the formation of flexible and self-governing laborers (Mitchell 2006). As with the national public educational systems of the United States, Canada, and England, the EU’s educational emphasis became increasingly economistic and strategic in emphasis, where most of the international agreements and programs began to emphasize skillsbased training designed with the imperative of entry into the intra-EU labor market, rather than the earlier formulations that included more of a focus on personal development and cultural affirmation. The earlier social democratic impulse to inculcate a sense of European identity as well as personal development was initially targeted at the incorporation of minorities (mainly immigrants) into the larger project of European citizenship. One of the main conceptualizations of this supranational form of citizenship, moreover, was the assertion of the right to difference by minority groups, as well as the importance of “learning to live positively with difference and diversity (as) a core dimension of the practice of citizenship in Europe” (Cresson 1998). This statement, made by the education commissioner of the EU from 1995 to 1999, Edith Cresson, foregrounded the ideas of minority incorporation and the overall liberal tolerance of racial and ethnic difference as a project beneficial for the expansion of democracy and citizenship formation for all young people in the EU.

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The constitution of a well-rounded, tolerant, and personally fulfilled person was a key feature of educational pronouncements and policy during this time period. This was evident in the early concept of lifelong learning, promoted by NGOs such as UNESCO in the 1970s, and in many of the early EC (European Community) documents from that decade and the following. Meanwhile, the European dimension of supranational citizenship and identity was also promoted through various university and secondary school exchange programs such as Erasmus. Erasmus is the EU’s most expansive exchange program, one that supports education, training, and youth in Europe. It helps students to study in different EU member states and is often utilized to promote greater cross-cultural understanding. Citizenship in this early formulation emphasized a cultural awareness of difference as a positive and indeed necessary dimension of education and training for young people in the EU. This emphasis began to shift in the late 1990s. The framework of ethical liberalism that had been prominent in pronouncements and documents was replaced with language emphasizing standardization, homogenization, and the international certification of educational skills. These types of skills were promoted in order to encourage greater labor mobility across international borders. And instead of an emphasis on democratic tools and personal development, the concept of lifelong learning morphed into a concept primarily heralding the formation and reformation of work skills (Mitchell 2006, 2018; see also Popkewitz 2003). The general transformations indicated here in the educational priorities of the EU were paralleled with the broader societal devolution of responsibility for national and supranational integration to the scale of the individual immigrant. Rather than ongoing work in antiracism and multiculturalism as a responsibility of all members of the society and promoted in educational curricula, the discourse of strategic success in assimilation and in cross-border employment possibilities was increasingly projected as one of individual responsibility. Examples of this devolution are particularly evident in the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam and in the speeches and documents associated with the March 2000 Lisbon meeting of the European Council. These documents indicated the EU’s goal at the time of “shaping a new Europe,” one emphasizing the knowledge economy and the constitution of a new, more competitive European labor force. In this vision, the challenge of retraining through various forms of lifelong learning became the responsibility of individuals, who were expected to choose personally effective learning styles. Meanwhile, the state’s responsibilities for providing truly viable economic opportunities for workers, and integrating immigrants and minorities into European society, were increasingly abdicated (Mitchell 2018). This broad shift dovetailed with the prevailing discourse and practices associated with neoliberal governmentality, in which the rationalities of the market foregrounded individual freedom, responsibility, and entrepreneurialism over collaboration and equity (Lemke 2001; Dean and Hindess 1998; Rose 1999). This also accorded with a wider retreat from state-sponsored multiculturalism and antiracism efforts, as demonstrated in the research of a number of immigration scholars (Joppke and Morawska 2003; Brubaker 2003; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010; Alexander 2013). While the long-term ramifications of these shifting priorities for young

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people, especially those of immigrant descent, are difficult to quantify, recent studies of immigrant youth and racism in Europe paint a picture of ongoing dysfunction and despair that appears to be worsening over time (Arzubiaga et al. 2009; Ríos-Rojas 2014). Abu El-Haj et al. (2017), for example, argue that Muslim youth in Spain and Denmark, as well as in the United States, remain forever positioned as racialized outsiders at least partially as a result of national narratives promoted in the schools. Alexander (2013) has shown how newly restrictive citizenship tests and other examples of a growing xenophobia in many European countries are emerging in the context of a growing narrative of Islamic immigrants as threatening to European democracy and civil society. These disturbing trends are the product of many factors that should not be reduced to the discourses and practices associated with schooling, but taken together, they reflect the broad shift in both tone and concrete actions that I have identified with the rise of free market capitalism and neoliberal rationalities of governance over the past several decades.

3

Technology, Cultural Memory, and Intergenerationality

My second research theme in the chapter focuses on forms of education that include practices of care and attention. (Portions of this section are adapted from “Intergenerational Mapping and the Cultural Politics of Memory,” Space and Polity 17, 1, 2012, pp. 33–52; co-authored with Sarah Elwood and used with her permission.) This subject encompasses the relationships between generations, and the teaching and learning that occurs from birth to death. In terms of the constitution of young people, the question that concerns me here is the connection between the rise of new fast-paced and absorbing digital technologies in gaming and social media and children’s loss of the capacity for deep attention. Philosophers of subjectivity formation in young people suggest that this attentional loss makes the critical links between generations difficult to sustain – with a resulting cascading series of negative effects vis-à-vis the development of mature and responsible adults. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010), for example, Bernard Stiegler makes a strong connection between intergenerational forms of education, including the ability to access and work with collective memory archives, and the constitution of young people. He begins by examining the externalization of memory through what he calls technics – such as writing – noting how this process allows memory to cross time and space. Drawing on Husserl’s work (1989), he notes how this is possible because when one is working with writing, one can stop and start again in the exact same place despite the passage of time; written messages can also be sent over distances to somewhere or someone else. Thus “memory” is externalized and can be archived and available to others through the writing process. While writing (with the simple technologies of pen and paper or word processors) provides the most common example of the externalization process, memory can also be exteriorized with the aid of other forms of technology through, for example, video recordings, recorded music, maps, vocal CDs, data logs, and any number of

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recording and storing mechanisms. Altogether these objects of memory that have been exteriorized create a repository, and, in connection with others, these repositories create archives of collective memory. Thinking about the externalization of memory in this way is important because it is these externalized archives or “mnemotechnics” of collective memory that provide the rich source material through which individual youth subjectivities are formed. For example, in our research with 10- and 11-yearolds, mapping the Duwamish River in Washington State – including its history of indigenous use and pollution over time – Sarah Elwood and I found that “Duwamish,” a poem by Richard Hugo, helped the students to understand and relate to the river’s history. This, in turn, enabled them to imagine the river as changeable, seeing different possible future visions for the river, and giving them a greater sense of personal agency in potentially affecting these changes (Mitchell and Elwood 2013). This type of learning process occurs through the intergenerational transmission of these forms of collective memory. However, it is exactly this process that is being short-circuited under contemporary consumer capitalism and the expansion of hyper technologies. Individuation involves the way in which a person develops in a coherent manner, as a “whole” entity; it concerns how an undifferentiated being becomes separate and discrete vis-à-vis a parent or a wider collective. Drawing on Simondon’s (2007) work, Stiegler argues that in order to understand individuation fully, it is necessary to theorize the inscription of an individual and his or her development within a larger social process. Contrary to most psychoanalytic scholarship on individuation, Stiegler hypothesizes that individuals become differentiated human beings not on their own but always in concert with and in relation to a collective. In other words, they are formed as subjects through a collective process, where the “I” is formed alongside and in conjunction with a “we.” Tying this back to the discussion of time and memory, he argues that it is the archives of collective memory that are critical in this individuation process as they provide the relational connections and underpinnings or “grammatization” out of which our primary experiences and awareness as individual subjects emerge (Mitchell and Elwood 2013; Sinnerbrink 2009). How does this process work, i.e., how do the individual psychological and the collective social processes of individuation come together? Stiegler notes the critical importance of learning through intergenerational education, in which collective memory is exteriorized through technics, and by means of which attentional forms of knowledge are transmitted through the generations. Education is critical in this process, as it is through the intergenerational dissemination of these forms of knowledge that young people can become mature, capable, and responsible adult subjects. But it is the intergenerational transmission of these forms of knowledge that is now under threat because of technological acceleration. Contemporary advances in technologies are producing disorientation and crises in the formation of attention in young people, with serious consequences for intergenerational relationships and hence for human development. While many psychology studies have documented links between excessive internet use and increased behavioral problems and depression among adolescent youth (e.g., Salmela-Aro et al. 2017), Stiegler is more concerned with the long-term implications of how young people are being constituted as certain kinds of (immature) subjects as a result of a growing inability to make strong intergenerational connections.

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The key link between these somewhat abstract psychoanalytical theories of subjectivity formation, technology, intergenerational forms of education, and a larger geo-economic context occurs in the discussion of contemporary consumer capitalism. The new software and hardware of current technologies are developed in the historical milieu of late finance capitalism, in which the drive for immediate consumer goods is stimulated over that of more durable and long-lasting wishes and desires. The shortterm drives associated with consumerist society and the speedup associated with the hyper technologies thus begin to take the place of longer-term desire. But as long-term desire and the capacity for deep attention are essential for the transition from human immaturity to maturity and responsibility, this short-circuiting presents a moment of profound danger to the process of youth subjectivity formation – or learning to be human. In short, the new consumption-oriented technologies of late neoliberal capitalism frequently destroy deep attention and desire, and hence the capacity to form an interest in long-term investments of all kinds – including in human relationships. This research theme addressed the role of memory and technology in the education of young people. My emphasis here was on the importance of intergenerational relationships in education, especially the ways that these relationships are critical in the transmission and transformation of collective memory, and hence in the positive and beneficial development of young people. Locating this process in the larger geo-economic context in which children are positioned opens a window onto the types of changes and ruptures that are occurring in this relationship in the contemporary neoliberal period. A key point is the disruption of intergenerational relationships as a result of new hyper technologies, which stimulate reactive drives for immediate gratification at the expense of longer-term desires and the ability to pay deep attention to relationships. Other geographical works on intergenerational relationships in the contemporary period have also examined the value of thinking relationally about age and subjectivity formation (Hopkins and Pain 2007; Vanderbeck 2007; Punch et al. 2018). Mannion and Adey (2011) call for an end to the fetishization of children as discrete actors coming of age seemingly independent of their interactions with other generations. Mannion (2012) also most clearly identifies the importance and distinctiveness of intergenerational education vis-à-vis the production of new relations between generations that are produced in place-specific encounters. In our work (Mitchell and Elwood 2013), we focus more emphatically on time, arguing that the larger context of neoliberalism is one in which the types of concern and systems of care for self and others that compose important aspects of intergenerational education is now under threat. All, however, are concerned with context: the spaces and histories in which these types of critical encounters take place.

4

Education and Philanthropy

My third theme of inquiry that links education, youth formation, and neoliberalism involves the recent incursion of philanthropy into the world of education. (Portions of this section are adapted from “The Grassroots and the Gift,” Foucault Studies

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18, 2014, pp. 66–89; co-authored with Chris Lizotte and used with his permission.) Many of the contemporary transformations in public education in the United States, particularly the push toward education “reform” – such as increased use of standardized tests and a standardized curriculum, more teaching assessment, flexibility in hiring and firing teachers, and more school choice through the introduction of charter schools – have been encouraged and funded by the large private foundations; these include among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (Ravitch 2010; Saltman 2010; Kovacs 2011). These transformations in public schooling are set within a broader, long-term context of a general push toward the overall privatization of public education. While the big private philanthropies involved in education vary in the specific mandates and mission statements they put forward in their promotional literature and websites, they nevertheless almost uniformly promote greater school choice for families. The idea of greater school choice, while sounding attractive to parents, frequently has negative ramifications when put into practice. Offering greater choice (than, for example, the local neighborhood public school) generally necessitates the opening of more schools. In the US context, these new schools are often charter schools that are initially encouraged and sometimes even subsidized by philanthropy foundations. While charter schools are primarily government funded, they are often managed under the aegis of for-profit EMOs (Education Management Organizations). Moreover, many scholars have noted the competitive push of these types of schools toward educational privatization in the long-term (Burch 2009; Perez and Cannella 2011; Schneider 2016). Indeed, some of the greatest supporters of the growing charter school movement in the United States are conservative thinktanks that have advocated for the privatization of education for decades (for a history and cogent analysis of these connections and the privatization movement more generally, see Abrams 2016). As with much of contemporary philanthropy in general, the funding of education reform and greater choice often operates with the assumption that bringing business logics and practices to bear on grant-making and charitable giving will improve both the quality and quantity of the programs and practices. Often labeled under terms such as “philanthrocapitalism” or “venture philanthropy” the new philanthropic practices involve an emphasis on the leveraging of funds, return on investment (ROI), and evaluation and assessment based on strict tools and systems of measurement (Bishop and Green 2008; Edwards 2009). Venture philanthropy, as Saltman (2010, pp. 2–3) describes it “not only pushes privatization and deregulation, the most significant policy dictates of neoliberalism, but it is also consistent with the steady expansion of neoliberal language and rationales in public education. . . Grants are referred to as ‘investments,’ donors are called ‘investors,’ impact is renamed ‘social return,’ (and) evaluation becomes ‘performance measurement.’” Additionally, the programs that are encouraged and funded in education are often short-term, with targeted investment sites and an emphasis on the development of human capacity building as well as on broader educational reforms. Human capacity building, as used in this context, refers to a key emphasis of much private

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philanthropic funding, which is the development of subjectivities oriented to market rationalities, particularly around self-care, competition, and entrepreneurialism. As numerous scholars have indicated, these types of emphases are critical features of neoliberal governmentality, wherein subjects are encouraged to act as responsibilized and self-regulating moral and economic agents (Foucault 1991; Rose 1996; Dean 1999). Contemporary market-based philanthropy also diminishes the role of government and governmental entities as primary care providers, while at the same time recruiting parents and children into these forms of neoliberal responsibilization. This occurs through the provision of funding to a wide range of organizations that emphasize entrepreneurialism and choice-making, and which insist on strict forms of assessment and measurement in both grant-getting and program implementation. At the same time, the emphasis of these private foundations on social responsibility and moral authority in the arenas in which they intervene helps to obscure the economization of social relations that characterizes the contemporary moment of neoliberal social governance and subjectivity formation (Mitchell and Lizotte 2014). It is in the development of human capacity building that the issues of youth subjectivity formation, education, and neoliberalism intersect the most directly. In my research, I have investigated the multiple ways that philanthropy in education aims to create, either directly or tangentially, responsible, choice-making parents and children, who are nudged toward market solutions to market-based problems. This occurs through the funding of specific types of organizations and ideas, and the withholding of funding from others, as well as the recruitment of certain kinds of grassroots activism and forms of expertise. For example, choice-seeking actors are funded, whereas those not supportive of market-based solutions to the problems of public education are either ignored or marginalized. In Seattle, where we conducted our research, the entry of philanthropic funding into public education is notable in several ways. It pulls both parents and students into discussions and assumptions about risk-management and choice in education, it recruits and rewards parent and student activists who advocate for more school choice (most often via the opening of new charter schools), and it establishes and institutionalizes intermediary organizations, often called Education Reform Advocacy Organizations (ERAOs) , that both demand and naturalize metrics-based forms of assessment for students and teachers (Mitchell and Lizotte 2014). Another good example of the effects of philanthropic dollars on parents’ assumptions about risk and choice, and also on the “rewards” of choice-seeking activism can be seen in the documentary Waiting for Superman. The documentary, which appeared in 2010, focused on the failure of inner city public schools (specifically Harlem), with primarily poor minority children and their parents as the main protagonists. It emphasized the power and importance of parent activism in demanding better schools and teachers for their children. Parents are shown in the documentary as initially frustrated and helpless in the face of intransigent bureaucracies and the poor quality education their children are receiving. However, by the end of the film the parents are depicted as energized, newly formed activists for choice.

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Walden Media, one of the main financiers of the documentary, is connected with the Anschutz Family Foundation, which also donates large sums to conservative thinktanks such as the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, as well as to organizations promoting greater school choice. In the documentary many African-American parents are shown agitating for new charter schools in the neighborhood; at the end of the film they are shown waiting breathlessly and emotionally for the results of a charter lottery determining who has been accepted. What isn’t shown is a campaign that was called “Flooding the Zone,” which was funded and promoted by the Success Charter Network and the Democrats for Education Reform with the explicit purpose of creating greater parental support in Harlem for charter schools during this time. These well funded, pro school choice organizations spent $1.3 million on leaflets, mailings, ads, posters, and paid canvassing of the neighborhood between 2007 and 2009, just prior to and during the same period in which the documentary was being made (Miner 2010). Both groups are connected to conservative private funders such as the NewSchools Venture Fund, which are, in turn, connected to large foundations such as the Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation and Walton Foundation. We can thus make a direct link between so-called parental grassroots activism (for charter schools in this case) in education and the promotion and subsidization of this activism by many different kinds of private philanthropy (see also Scott 2013). In other words, the “grass” in the grassroots is carefully seeded and tended by philanthropic dollars. The type of foundation gifts identified here are targeted and intentional; they are strategic leveraged efforts to bring more competition and choice into public education, and to aid in the constitution of choice-seeking subjects. Clearly, one of the major vehicles in which increased competition in education is promoted is through charter schools, and one of the key ways in which foundations attempt to increase the prevalence of charter schools, as well as public support for charter schools, is through funding activist “parent” groups. Although there are many excellent charter schools, and some do indeed provide a superior choice to the local community school, recent research indicates that the majority of charter schools show no evidence of superiority and many are quite a bit worse than district schools (see, e.g., Ravitch 2010). Meanwhile, the overall effect of the growth of charter schools in the United States has some disturbing implications. These include decreased funding or even the closure of existing schools – with an attendant loss of a community “anchor” in underprivileged neighborhoods; the commercial sale (privatization) of school buildings and land and a frequent attendant increase in the processes of gentrification in poorer neighborhoods (Lipman 2011); numerous examples of increased segregation in charter schools around the United States (e.g., Garcia 2008); the underrepresentation of English Language Learners (ELL) and children with learning disabilities in many charter schools (Miron et al. 2010); and higher rates of suspension and expulsion, particularly of minority children – as well as a number of other areas of concern. The new direction that this philanthropy is producing is one in which parents and youth are recruited into a form of activism that spurs and justifies an ethos of everincreasing competition and entrepreneurial behavior. In the education sector, this

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activism enrolls funders and receivers, philanthropists, and parents into a kind of social contract based on reciprocity and shared understanding – one underpinned not by a vision of collective rights or economic redistribution, but rather on a new moral order of competitive self-interest as inherently beneficial for all. Understanding how this form of morality developed through different iterations of liberal thought is critical for understanding the shifting form that neoliberalism is taking in the current era, and the role of philanthropy in these transformations. In this section, I drew on the current transformations in public education to illustrate some of the complex ways that philanthropy is altering the terrain of neoliberal governmentality in the twenty-first century. I examined the rationalities of giving as a new technology of government, in which subjects are constituted as active, competitive, and obligated to maintain a moral economy of (self) care. Contemporary, large-scale philanthropy forms new kinds of consent through the reciprocal nature of gift giving, imbricating givers and receivers within social bonds of sharing and participation. Crucially, this type of sharing is profoundly uneven and serves to maintain the socioeconomic systems that produce inequality. Moreover, acceptance of “the gift” implies consent to a social world based on individual competition, which necessarily produces winners and losers, including in grant-getting itself. Giving and accepting philanthropic gifts in the current neoliberal moment simultaneously pulls subjects into a project of choice and competition and also recruits them as experts and activists within a larger social contract. But unlike other eras promoting activism and innovation, this social contract is specifically not based on redistribution or collective goals but rather on an individual ethos of competition and responsibility.

5

Conclusion

I introduced the three thematic areas of citizenship formation: technology, intergenerational relationships, and philanthropy in this chapter to give a sense of some of the broad transformational forces affecting education, and hence youth subjectivity formation, over the past three decades. My goal was to show the connections between changes in each thematic area and changes in the political and economic context of society – specifically the recent rapid expansion of market-based (neoliberal) systems and ways of thinking. Neoliberalism is characterized by policies that promote laissezfaire markets (such as privatization, deregulation, and government reductions), but also by different forms of governing and beliefs about human capital development and social value. Both the policies and the rationalities of governance affect how we think about schools and learning and about what education systems – both formal and informal – should look like. With citizenship formation, I made the case that the neoliberal restructuring of the economy under pro-free-market politicians such as Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Brian Mulroney in Canada, was connected to changes in how students were being educated to be citizens of those countries. From a broad post-World War II concern with multiculturalism

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as a philosophy that could knit together diverse citizens into a national program, it became increasingly oriented toward a more strategic emphasis on cosmopolitan success in the global economy. This shift in tone and emphasis could also be seen in EU programs, which began to orient more toward the global knowledge economy, with declining interest in immigrant incorporation and intercultural awareness. With the second theme, my aim was also to make broad connections between education and economic and technological changes under neoliberalism. In this case, I looked at these connections in the sphere of informal modes of education, such as the learning that occurs between generations (e.g., parents and children or mentors and learners). My argument centered on the rapid spread of hyper (attention-grabbing) digital technologies that are heavily marketed in consumer capitalism, and which render it increasingly difficult to pay deep attention to others. Following the work of the philosopher Stiegler, I argued that the subjectivity formation of young people is greatly affected by these economic and technological changes, as critical intergenerational relationships can be damaged and learning impaired in serious ways. In my final example, I drew on changes in education in the United States that have been spurred largely by major philanthropy foundations. These foundations have become increasingly powerful in education and also in other areas of social service provision, such as health, at least partly because of insufficient economic support from the government in these areas. With the rise of neoliberal politicians in the 1980s, public education systems and programs came under increasing attack, were frequently narrated as “failing,” and were often denied adequate resources. This has enabled philanthropic dollars, and business-oriented ways of thinking, to gain purchase in educational policy-making. While there have been many impacts of the incursion of philanthropy into education in the United States, my focus in this chapter was on the promotion of greater school choice. I argued here that the push toward choice and the subsequent growth of more choice in the form of charter schools not only affects local district schools and teachers that must compete for dollars and students, it also affects parents and students who become recruited into a way of thinking about choice itself – i.e., that this form of competitive and entrepreneurial advocacy for oneself and one’s child is a necessary and superior life strategy. In these three examples, I have made the links between education, subjectivity formation, and political and economic context – specifically the rise of neoliberal policies and practices in industrialized western countries. The changes I identified have been unfolding for over three decades and do not seem to be abating. Rather, the declining interest in multiculturalism and antiracism education in schools, the growth in the volume of “hyper” technologies on the market and their increasing allure for young people, and the spread of the logic and legitimacy of philanthropy and social impact investment worldwide appear, if anything, to be accelerating. Exactly what the ramifications of these fast-paced changes will be for young people going forward are impossible to predict. But the current political climate of nationalism, xenophobia, and self-oriented, inward-looking policies and assumptions, in the US and many European countries, seems to indicate that a rethinking and redirection of these educational processes would be a positive intervention.

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Geographies of Education: Context and Case

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Kathy Reilly, Ranu Basu, and Valerie Ledwith

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Educational Access and School Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Refugees, Diversity, and Inclusive Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Aspiration and Life Transitions: Geographies of Educational Opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Aspired Transitions and Newcomer Students: The Case of Galway, Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Race, Community, and Praxis: Decolonizing Spaces of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter explores a selection of themes across a broad range of geographies of education research. In particular we incorporate discussion on school choice, educational aspiration and transition, race, ethnicity, and migration. In doing so the chapter explores an emerging geography of educational inequality while being sensitive to the considerable ties of the sub-discipline to cultural, economic, political, and social geography. The chapter points toward key themes emerging from the geographies of education literature, before exploring the case and context of geographies of education research in Canada and Ireland (reflecting each author’s experience and positionality). Throughout, we explore how a variety of social justice issues transect educational experience. In particular we focus on migrant, newcomer, and refugee young people, with the migration K. Reilly (*) · V. Ledwith School of Geography and Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] R. Basu Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Crown 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_10

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experience both framing and impacting multiple educational tropes (e.g., school choice decision-making, inclusion, aspiration). Inherent throughout the chapter is the issue of scale, and the case studies discussed exemplify how such educational inequalities operate in nuanced, contextual, and subaltern ways, exploring the role of the state and the local in maintaining a geography of opportunity that ultimately privileges some and by extension marginalizes others. Keywords

Geographies of education · Opportunity · Inequality · Access · Diversity · Migration · Race · Aspiration

1

Introduction

Contemporary geographies of education have emerged as a flourishing and diverse sub-discipline within human geography. It is, of course, not an exclusive arena but has close ties with geographies of children, young people, and families, in addition to transecting social, economic, political, and cultural geographies. Increased interest in this research area reflects the fact that children and young people today engage educational spaces in a more sustained fashion, spending more and more time in formalized educational institutions (from early childhood through to forms of tertiary education). The depth of the geographies of education research agenda is broad with a focus on multiple scales, a range of research methodologies, and a host of thematic research strands. Taken together these elements are certainly not mutually exclusive but represent an intricately woven series of reciprocal discourses, practices, and mobilities. As a result, schools and other such educational spaces represent a complex site of encounters, located within communities, propagating hegemonic state discourses, and are perceived as key sites in understanding the everyday rhythm, routine, and lived experience of children, young people, and their families (Collins and Colman 2008). At this juncture it is important to distinguish between research on geographic education and the geographies of education agenda. The Journal of Geography and the Journal of Geography in Higher Education are two examples drawing together contemporary research focused on pedagogic practice within the discipline. Geographic education research reflects cutting-edge approaches to teaching and learning within the discipline of geography, incorporating work exploring specific pedagogies, while also drawing from and contributing to curricula studies (for further discussion, see Johnston 2009; Albert and Cassidy 2017). There is certainly common ground between geographic education research and work in the geographies of education sphere, particularly in relation to learning spaces, student experience, graduate attributes, and access to geography in schools and higher education (Kollasch et al. 2017). Both bodies of literature are inherently interdisciplinary; however, this chapter centers on themes across the geographies of education drawing on reflections from the authors’ work in Ireland and Canada. Since 2007 at least eight special journal issues have been published on themes explicitly relating to geographies of education research. Special issues have been

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published in Urban Studies (2007); Emotion, Space and Society (2011); Children’s Geographies (2011, 2018); The Canadian Geographer (2013); Cultural Geographies (2016); Geographical Research (2017); and Geographica Helvetica (2018), in addition to further research documented in this collection of 12 volumes on Geographies of Children and Young People (in particular Abebe et al. 2017). This is, of course, not an exhaustive list with countless other important (and seminal) publications in the sub-discipline. Throughout the papers included as part of each special issue (76 in total) a clear series of thematic, methodological and theoretical approaches emerge. As ever, these are diverse, yet not exclusive, and often overlap in complex ways. Central to much of this work are themes of social exclusion, pointing toward a series of persisting educational inequalities. These inequalities operate across multiple scales (individual, home, school, neighborhood, state) and are often discussed in relation to socioeconomic disadvantage (e.g., Hamnett et al. 2007), the impact of family background (e.g., Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2013), the availability of school choice (e.g., Noreisch 2007), and aspirations relating to educational transition opportunities arising from school experiences (e.g., Naafs and Skelton 2018; Holloway et al. 2011). In spite of global attempts to widen participation across educational opportunities, existing national policies favor the maintenance of a status quo that often fail to acknowledge the changing contextuality of a mobilized global knowledge economy (Mitchell 2003, 2006, 2019 this volume). Furthermore, such attempts fail to recognize the role of state educational policies in the propagation of systemic, entrenched (and often subaltern) forms of institutionalized discrimination and injustice. These, often unquestioned, educational structures and processes, moving between policy and practice, require critique, with geographies of education scholars insisting on meaningful interventions that disrupt the maintenance of a status quo that perpetuates inequality at global, national, and local scales. In focusing on social exclusion, geographies of education research is underpinned by a focus on multiple communities, exploring race, ethnicity, and gender while also considering issues of educational access, attainment, and achievement. This work draws on social class analysis, in addition to poststructuralist frameworks providing opportunities for feminist and postcolonial critique, but also incorporating theoretical perspectives from Foucault, Bourdieu, and Freire (to mention but a few). Much of this work seeks to explore the geographies of educational opportunity in the context of marginalized groups (e.g., migrants or First Nation communities, discussed later in this chapter; see also Ni Laoire et al. 2017). In addition to examining social exclusion, cultural geographers have contributed to geographies of education research on issues of belonging (e.g., Wainwright and Marandet 2011), power (e.g., Klaf 2013), and affect (e.g., Youdell and Armstrong 2011; Cairns 2013), considering the emotional impact of educational experiences on children, young people, and families (for a discussion drawing these themes together see Mills and Kraftl (2016)). Aspirations, as a core tenet of the geographies of education literature, transect many of these themes, examining geographies of opportunity relating to class (e.g., Warrington 2005), mobility (e.g., Hinton 2011), and life transitions (e.g., Chee 2018; Hörschelmann 2018). Kraftl (2015) has reflected on the importance of engaging with the geographies of alternative education, exploring the relationship

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between the social and the spatial in and across alternative educational spaces. Taken together what emerges is a broad and rich snapshot of research relating to geographies of education, pointing toward the sub-discipline’s multiple and transecting themes.

2

Educational Access and School Choice

The importance of examining the influence of educational institutions, and in particular schools, has been highlighted with many academics outlining the crucial role schools play in creating daily routines within the lives of children and young people (e.g., Aitken 2001; Collins and Colman 2008; Hill and Tisdall 1997). School children and young people learn key academic and practical skills and consequently learn “socially appropriate” knowledge and values (Collins and Colman 2008). This idea is not new; extensive writings from the 1930s onward outline education’s role in the reduction and/or perpetuation of class division and social inequality (Bondi and Matthews 1988; Willis 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Tawney 1931). Moreover, Mills (2008) highlights how schools as institutions consciously (through classroom learning) and unconsciously (through broader school experiences) develop, advocate, and maintain particular practices and values (similar to Bowles and Gintis’ concept of “hidden curriculum,” 1976). In turn, throughout the lives of children and young people, broader values and practices become consciously and unconsciously embodied inside and outside of schools (Holt 2008). In relation to educational opportunity, both Reay (1998) and Lareau (2003) highlight the immense (and often overlooked) impact of knowledge-gatekeepers, through advice provided by school staff. These authors explore the influence of pre-existing perceptions on aspired career paths of students. Throughout this literature, the perceived importance of particular skills and knowledges among students stems directly from the school experience. Subsequently, individual perceptions of choice are interpreted as relative to the limitations and enabling strategies learned and internalized by each student, as influenced by processes such as schooling, although not exclusively, with family and community contexts also representing arenas for learning and practice (BeasleyMurray 2000). Access to education, and in particular research on school choice, continues to wield traction in the geographies of education literature. On the one hand, increased school choice can be interpreted as enhancing the potential for better educational experiences and educational outcomes. At a national level, greater choice is linked with enhanced educational access, with more choice discursively associated with greater potential for achievement. By extension the potential to select from a multitude of schools can be viewed positively and as advocating equality of access for all young people. On the other hand, the politics of school choice can be interpreted as constraining for young people and their families, often masking socioeconomic privilege (Reay and Lucey 2003). This argument resonates with three key ideas. If every school is considered a potential school of choice, then young people and their families compete for access. Access is often differentiated on

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the lines of national policy and specifically implemented through local enrolment processes. Such policies often identify key attributes among the prospective student population that ultimately differentiates between those who are perceived to belong within a school and those who do not. Furthermore, there are no uniform national level policies on educational access and in particular school choice decisions. For example, in the USA and UK, school choice is spatially bounded by attendance zones and local educational authorities (respectively); school choice decisionmaking then is often contingent on place of residence in relation to the number of schools located in the zone or authority. In Ireland, national level policies indicate that every school is a school of choice, with young people free to apply to any school they wish (Buchanan and Fox 2008). In competing for access, the school choice decisions of young people living with social and economic disadvantage are often constrained to those schools in closest proximity to the family home. For young people experiencing disadvantage, school choice is often limited to local educational institutions. More affluent middle-class families have greater potential to engage broader school choice options, providing access to schools beyond local institutions (Reay and Lucey 2003). Therefore, in the school choice decision-making process, social class matters and essentially acts as a mobility barrier for some children, young people, and families but as a sociocultural and actual mobility enhancer for others. Opportunity to access schools then often becomes differentiated by social class, geography, and economic affluence, discriminating against those with lower incomes. In the UK and North America, where school choice is often dependent on where a family lives, neighborhoods in the vicinity of “good” schools experience an increased demand for family homes (resulting in increased property prices), further disadvantaging low-income families. Those who can move to the vicinity of such schools do, and those who cannot afford to move remain trapped. In the USA more recently, there have been attempts to diversify student school populations through lottery systems and quotas of places for students living beyond traditional school catchment areas. The desire to broaden choice is also reflected in the UK, though work by Wilson (2015) and Taylor (2002) demonstrates that these policies continue to be problematic, failing to address the influence of parental choice, and neighborhood and community effects, and essentially reproduce social class inequality across geographies of educational opportunity. This is reflected in Warrington’s (2005) work indicating that students from the lower classes generally enter schools of close proximity; although these young people may be aware of educational opportunities elsewhere, they are constrained by the choice which they are most likely to make (for further discussion see also Reynolds 2013; Lubienski and Lee 2017). From the perspective of schools, in a market-driven environment where young people compete for places, local school policy impacts the choice and access opportunities for minority communities. Although framed within national legislation, schools (to varying degrees) control educational access through local school enrolment policies. In this instance, educational access for prospective students can be stratified in relation to a series of identified tropes and characteristics linked to the individual and the family (e.g., address; the presence of a sibling in the school;

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religious denomination; having a parent as a past pupil). These characteristics stratify young peoples’ applications prioritizing some at the expense of others and disadvantages minority and new communities in the school choice decision-making process. For example, in the context of Ireland, where the majority of schools are under the patronage of the Catholic Church, school choice applications are often differentiated on the grounds of faith. Furthermore, newcomer and migrant communities are discriminated against as they do not have the social capital (sibling or parent as a past pupil) to provide access to broader school choice networks (Ledwith and Reilly 2012). This adds further complexity to school choice, penalizing families who have recently moved (or who have been displaced) to an area, impacting educational opportunities for some of society’s most marginalized newcomer children, young people, and families.

3

Refugees, Diversity, and Inclusive Education

The themes of inclusivity and diversity, particularly in the context of forced displacement, are crucial in the discussions of geographies of education. With the rapid escalation of global war, famine, and conflict, the flow of migrants fleeing violence and persecution has become increasingly complex and unsettling. On June 20, 2017, commemorated as World Refugee Day, UNHCR reported more than 6.5 million forcibly displaced migrants worldwide, the greatest displacement crisis since the Second World War. Another staggering aspect of this incomprehensible statistic was that more than 50% of those displaced included children (http://www.unhcr.ca/news/ world-refugee-day-statement/). In 2016, the UNHCR reported the top three countries where over 55% of migrants had originated which included Syria (5.5 m), South Sudan (1.4 m), and Afghanistan (2.5 m). During the same period, however, only slightly over 189,000 were resettled as nation state borders became increasingly impermeable. Further, the spatial unevenness of the global resettlement process disproportionately proceeds in developing regions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The top three host countries at the present time include Turkey, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Migrants’ journeys over land and sea are often long, dangerous, and treacherous. In 2017 alone, nearly 2000 migrants drowned while crossing the Mediterranean in the hope for a better life. Those able to make the journey often face other difficult challenges on arrival. This alarming trend is further made more disconcerting based on the surge of right-wing populism, xenophobia, and the hardening of borders for asylum seekers based on perceptions of “illegality” as publicized by the media. Dauvergne (2008) highlights how “extralegal migration” as a global phenomenon alongside the “moral panic” that accompanies such discourses works as a marker of the twenty-first century. The painful journey for migrants and internally displaced populations continues in different ways during the post-migration experience, as they settle into their host societies. The role of the state is reflexive of the political will and ethical vision of its communities when negotiating policies to action. Within the neoliberal welfare state environment, these discourses become contentious.

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State institutional contexts determine how resources and programs during the settlement experience can be allocated, while the legacies of austerity policies after decades of cutbacks and retrenchment dictate the outcomes (Basu 2004a, b). The broader role of the public sphere is seriously placed in question when discourses of privatization, marketization, and competition prevail. Competition of scarce resources then becomes allocated according to newly created binaries of the “deserving” and “undeserving” groups. Communities and civil society in turn respond to the process of integration in inclusive or exclusionary ways shaping the discourses and practices on the ground. The precariousness of employment opportunities for migrants and not being able to find work further exacerbates their physical and mental well-being. The multiple challenges and extreme hardships faced by forced migrants, discussed so far, at all stages of the exiled journey, need to be deeply considered during the post-migration settlement experience. Publicly funded schools provide a critical space for such interventions where the forced migrant experience can be more fully explored as it unfolds at various scales (e.g., from the global migratory route to the everyday experience in the classroom). Theoretically, such spaces provide the potential to explore questions of access, equity, belonging, and citizenship. On a more grounded level, evidence-based research can guide policy-makers and educators to provide the necessary tools to advocate toward an ethics of care and inclusivity. Children from refugee situations, in particular, have faced displacement, violence, and chaos and the lingering effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). McKenzie (2017) notes that 40% of forced migrants are more likely to face mental health problems and PTSD primarily due to pre-migration reasons of war, genocide, physical and sexual violence, starvation, homelessness, witnessing violence on others, and traumatic bereavement. In a fascinating collection of stories entitled From Bombs to Books David Starr (2011), a principal of a richly diverse school in Edmonds, Burnaby in British Columbia, retells the remarkable stories of these children. Starr charmingly describes with humor and pride, how most of his students, primarily refugees who had fled dangerous situations, are models of strength and resilience. Attempts to ease and compensate for the experiences of trauma, loss, and separation from family and friends are made by the support of teachers, staff, and their local communities. Through these new alliances, the families and students are able to slowly but surely create new beginnings. The networks of support within schools and daily interactions with other children slowly build this confidence over time. In such an instance, the entire community is able to learn new lessons from each other and collaboratively build a future together. This localized attempt is a model for broader structural change through the regional school system. Thus, in an ideal sense, schools can serve as hubs for the community to provide welcoming environments such as language classes, settlement services, after-school activities, medical and psychological services, friendships, parenting workshops, violence prevention and bullying, and other venues for emotional, physical, and intellectual support. In their work on resettlement services for refugee students in Toronto, Canada, Dippo and his colleagues (2012) were invited to visit schools

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across the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) to present workshops for teachers and principals keen to learn about students who have fled such challenging situations. The workshops, carefully designed by a group of scholars based at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, focused on different themes to provide insight into the broader process related to learning and refugeeness. These themes included the pre-arrival experiences of refugees, the legal context and refugee determination processes, settlement issues faced by refugee families, and the complexity of trauma and vicarious trauma. For teachers the following guidelines suggest procedures directed at all levels: • A clear set of procedures related to the reception and integration of refugee students and their families. • Provision of initial educational assessments in students’ first languages to ensure appropriate placement in classrooms and an understanding of their learning needs. • Provision of upgrading and literacy programs within English as a Second Language (ESL)/English Language Learning (ELL) and regular classroom programs depending on assessment results. • Procedures for careful monitoring of progress to ensure their successful integration. • Assurance that most teachers in the school have ESL qualifications and the promotion of ESL qualifications as important professional development for all teachers. • Procedures in place to prepare the student body for the reception, welcoming and protection of refugee students. • Strategies to incorporate the new families as an integral part of the school community. Dippo et al. (2012: 49–50) The discussions during the workshops aimed at creating dialogue and providing venues for revealing and rejecting false myths and misconceptions on the refugee experience. Furthermore, the workshops aimed at providing comprehensive explanations of the structural conditions and impediments faced by forced migration. Mitchell (2003, 2006) has noted how neoliberal forms of governmentality have affected the educational sector in all aspects of policy and programs including questions related to belonging, multiculturalism, and citizenship. Decades of rationalization of neoliberalism in schools has provided a challenging context to maintain equitable policies for resettlement both through material infrastructural support and programs and services. Basu (2004a, b) has documented the devastating impacts of school closures, especially in working class, racialized, and new migrant neighborhoods in Toronto that reflect the structural injustices in the city. The school closures result in the loss of support systems that are built slowly and cumulatively over the years, responding to local needs and contingencies. Such underlying physical and social infrastructures of the local school system build social, cultural, and political communities. Thus, the loss of a school means loss of these collective services,

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whether they are second language classes, settlement services, child care services, after-school clubs and activities, or nutrition programs. The informal networks sustain social capital and the “right to the city” as modes of engagement crucial for sparking new beginnings and creating new venues for being, belonging, and home. Another acute challenge, especially since the September 2011 attacks on Twin Towers in New York (9–11), is dealing with xenophobic attitudes and Islamophobia that link closely to the discourses of refugeeness, illegality, terrorism, and security. Recent Trump administration “zero-tolerance” policy has resulted in thousands of migrant children separated from their families and detained for illegal crossings – paramount to human rights abuses fueled by right-wing populism and a white supremacist electorate. In these dire circumstances do displaced migrants have a voice? How is agency constituted? What is the role of the school as political agents for change? Schools have illustrated the creative means of empowerment through placemaking and solidarity movements among different migrant communities that have faced forced displacement. For example, in Toronto, Basu (2010) has demonstrated the rich agency of sub/urban/altern cosmopolitanism through collaborative initiatives of pluralistic migrants, displaced from different parts of the world. The question of “integration” is understood and practiced differently in “multifarious” ways; and schools provide the opportune spatial conditions for these collaborations to take place. In other words, integration occurs not only with the dominant or hegemonic society but with other migrants, some who have experienced similar situations of violence, persecution, and exile. These materialize as resources within the classroom, programs (such as heritage language programs), caregiving, or even political demonstrations. Similarly, Askins (2016) notes “emotional citizenry” – as a result of such processes – often grounded in such complex places and intercultural encounters. Schools as public institutions respond to questions of inclusivity, diversity, and sustainability that are negotiated and contested through the everyday practices and policies on the ground. In the case of refugee children, particularly those coming from conflict zones, schools play an important role on a number of different levels. The unique experiences and challenges that refugee families face during the postmigration settlement experience needs to be recognized. Critical geographies of education explore the complexities between state, space, and civil society and focus on the power differentials that result through such mediations (Basu 2013). As the rights of refugees, that are international rights, are increasingly questioned, the critical geographies of education as a means of praxis provide a platform to challenge these norms.

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Aspiration and Life Transitions: Geographies of Educational Opportunity

In highlighting the difficulties faced by migrant and newcomer communities’ geographies of education, researchers have engaged with the concepts of aspiration and transitions across the life course (e.g., see Children’s Geography’s special issue 2011

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and 2018). Traditional debate in this area has focused on movement between stages of the life course (Elder 2001), some without much reflection on the situated, social, and institutional processes influencing each transition. Across the social sciences, this has resulted in a distinct shift away from customary conceptualizations of explicit transitions from one life stage to the next, to an exploration seeking to transcend simplistic and linear understandings of transition, recognizing the complex and nuanced nature of the concept (Beck 1992; Skelton 2002; Punch 2002; Langevang 2008). In doing so, this body of work has engaged with the notion of transition as situated, individually ubiquitous (Wyn and White 1997; Thomson et al. 2002), and contextually dependent upon broader social processes (Bynner 2001). Furthermore, in conceptualizing life transitions as a stage of the life course in and of itself, researchers challenge mono-dimensional and linear understandings that deliver individuals from one context to the next, without acknowledging contextual and situated processes. More specifically, in the context of geographies of education literature, young peoples’ aspirations can be examined in terms of imagined future life paths (Elder 2000), conceptualizing educational opportunity through aspired transitions. The idea of life transition is contextualized by Johnson-Hanks’ (2002) notion of vital conjuncture; this draws on Bourdieu’s conjuncture (1977: 78) and demographic theory focusing on vital events occurring throughout the life course. Johnson Hanks (2002) interprets Bourdieu’s notion of conjuncture (1977) as the manifestation of social structures and practices that introduce the individual to potential change or encourage the emergence of “new visions of the future” (Jeffrey 2010: 3). It is defined as a “socially structured zone of possibility” during which time individuals face periods of uncertainty or change in their lives (Johnson-Hanks 2002: 870; Langevang 2008: 2040). Jeffrey (2010) acknowledges the potential for vital conjunctures to explore how social structures influence perceptions of opportunity. Throughout his discussion of vital conjunctures, Jeffrey (2010) identifies three key arguments for using the concept to explore children and young peoples’ geographies of education. Primarily Jeffrey (2010: 502) asserts that the concept highlights the nuanced nature of opportunity and how life change presents itself at particular times and in particular situations. Secondly, vital conjuncture allows for an exploration of temporarily, socially structured scenarios (ibid.), where individuals engage with decisions and processes that allow them to change or build upon aspects of their daily lives (Sewell 2005). Thirdly, vital conjunctures represent a transferable concept, employable across multiple geographic boundaries, developing comparative frameworks among children and young people engaging with similar periods of change or uncertainty in their lives (Jeffrey 2010: 502). Aspired transitions then become rooted in perceptions of opportunity representing periods of change in the imagined futures of individuals (Evans 2002). By extension, aspired transitions may also be rooted in an awareness of what is perceived as possible, although not contextually determined, in addition to what is perceived as valuable to and for the life of the individual (for further discussion see Chee 2018; Day 2017; Bynner and Roberts 1991; Emirbayer and Mische 1998). When considering youth transitions, Punch (2002: 124) advocates an exploration of the social and institutional processes that shape, constrain, and support transitioning (Bynner 2001; Gillies 2000). This

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conceptualization of transition reflects the idea of vital conjuncture, highlighting how decision-making at particular junctions of life is socially structured in contextually nuanced and complex ways. In doing so, this acknowledges the subjective and individually unique nature of each aspired transition, as dependent on broader social and institutional influences (Thomson et al. 2002; Valentine 2003). Given the need for sensitivity to the socially and situated experience of transitioning, in the context of geographies of education, children, young people, and families often engage similar periods of decision-making with contextually nuanced outcomes. These outcomes are discussed in the next section in relation to migrant and newcomer students in the Irish education system.

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Aspired Transitions and Newcomer Students: The Case of Galway, Ireland

The Irish context provides an interesting case for exploring aspiration and geographies of education research. Education data in Ireland linking student demographics, socioeconomic status, and school composition is poor, providing limited scope to conduct research at a national scale. Educational trajectories in Ireland see children enter the schooling system aged four and continue at primary school level for 8 years. Upon the completion of primary schooling, young people transition to secondary school for a further 5–6 years. Compulsory schooling ends at the completion of the Junior Certificate Examination (following 3 years in secondary school); however, the majority of students continue with secondary school to complete the Leaving Certificate Examinations. Results from this final series of state examinations provide currency to gain access to higher and further education institutions. Ireland has a long history of emigration; more recently this trend has shifted (particularly during the Celtic Tiger Era) with Ireland becoming a destination for many migrant communities (for further discussion, see Gilmartin 2015). This demographic shift has had a significant impact on the Irish education system and has diversified the composition of the country’s school population(s). Given the dearth of education data, this has resulted in a research trajectory that embraces both qualitative and mixed methodological research designs; for example, two recent publications by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI, Ireland) explore student transitions (or lack thereof) in the context of early school leaver data and the Growing Up in Ireland database (McCoy and Byrne 2017; Smyth 2016). The result has been a shift in scale, with researchers in Ireland often incorporating a case-study approach exploring school experiences of communities in a variety of contexts across the island. The Galway Educational Survey exemplifies this trend and responds directly to a lack of data on newcomer communities in Galway City and its urban fringe. In particular this project sought to explore migrant educational experiences incorporating information on the student, the home, the school, and the neighborhood. A number of key findings emerged from the project (outlined below); these raise key questions and concerns regarding the aspired transition of newcomer students in the Irish education system. The Galway Education Survey (GES) collected data in Galway City and the urban fringe using both a neighborhood- and school-based survey. The developed survey tool

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incorporated a series of closed- and open-ended questions and was broken into a number of sections, the first focusing on student and family demographic details, the second on the school, the third on examination results and aspiration, and the fourth on perceptions of the neighborhood. In total 525 young people were surveyed; the majority of students were 14–16 years of age, and all had completed the first compulsory state examinations in secondary school (the Junior Certificate Examination). Thirteen schools are represented in the Galway Education Survey, and the survey was administered predominantly in schools. Participating young people lived in neighborhoods transecting Galway City and the urban fringe. At the time of data collection, the census (2006) indicated that 17% of Galway City’s population identified as non-Irish (compared to a 10% national average). Participating young people were represented by four categories: Irish born young people with Irish born parents (IBIB), Irish born young people with foreign born parents (IBFB), foreign born young people with Irish born parents (FBIB), and foreign born young people with foreign born parents (FBFB). Although this categorization is somewhat cumbersome, it was difficult to break the migrant categories down by ethnicity or nationality, as there were over 30 countries of origin represented among the migrant group. A further critique of this categorization relates to a suggested homogeneity among the IBIB (non-migrant) group, and this is certainly not the case. Parents apply to individual secondary schools (but may apply to more than one school) for a placement on behalf of their child (see Ledwith and Reilly 2012). In theory therefore, families in the vicinity of Galway City are not constrained by administrative boundaries such as school districts in the USA and the Local Educational Authorities borough system in England. The Irish context, from the outside, implies that regardless of where you live, parents are free to apply for a place in any school for their child. Buchanan and Fox (2008: 268) indicate that Ireland is served by a large number of small schools serving a wide geographic area; as a result parents usually opt for a place in the local school. Although this may be true in Ireland’s smaller urban centers and the rural hinterland, in the context of Galway City and its urban fringe, there appears to be considerable choice. Three key findings emerged from the Galway Education Survey. Firstly, school choice in Ireland is a complex system to navigate, one that ultimately prioritizes Irish born young people, with Irish born parents, who have an identified connection with a particular (and often local) school. Such connections are regularly faith-based, dependent on a sibling currently attending the school, and/or having a parent as a past pupil of the school. Ultimately this discriminates against newcomer students who do not have similar degrees of connectivity or the social capital to gain access to some schools (Ledwith and Reilly 2013). Secondly, a disproportionate number of newcomer students attend schools with a vocational focus and/or disadvantaged status, with ability grouping impacting the subject choice and achievement potential of migrants (Ledwith and Reilly 2012). Finally, the cumulative impact of the self-reported school experiences indicates an emerging gap between those Irish born students with Irish born parents and all newcomer students. The majority of participants outline a desire to access forms of higher education (and in particular university); the reality for newcomer students is less than satisfactory, with migrants seriously disadvantaged (Ledwith and Reilly 2012, 2013, 2014). Considering these findings specifically in relation to aspired educational transition, the importance of local context is imperative. Essentially, even though Irish

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policy indicates that every school is a school of choice, the newcomer status of migrant families disadvantages young migrants by constraining their educational choice opportunities. Although the majority of GES participants indicate that the school they attend is their school of choice, qualitative data points toward a more contextually nuanced decision-making process. Migrant respondents specify that they were directed to apply (usually by a teacher at primary school or a social worker) for a place in a particular school, and therefore, this was the only option available to them (for further discussion, see Ledwith and Reilly 2012, 2013). In Galway this has resulted in increasing numbers of newcomer students enrolled in vocational and/or disadvantaged status schools (reflecting findings by Smyth et al. 2009). Given that aspired educational transitions are contextually nuanced and situated, the case of newcomer students in Galway City and its urban fringe is particularly interesting when framed by vital conjunctures (Johnson-Hanks 2002). On the one hand, newcomer students articulate a clear desire to access third-level educational institutions (university in particular); however, self-reported state examination results from this group indicate that the potential to access university is seriously unlikely (due to ability streaming at school level). Therefore, more research is required to explore the role of the school’s influence on the aspired transitions of newcomer students; this seeks to unpack an emerging series of assumptions premised on ability differences between those who are newcomers and those who are not but also challenges assumptions of homogeneity across newcomer student needs. In the context of education, what emerges is a situated geography of opportunity that privileges those who have greater temporality, historicity, and connectivity to a particular place. The “zone of possibility” (Johnson-Hanks 2002: 870) in the aspired educational transitions of newcomer students therefore is socially structured in a constrained manner. Worryingly in this context, where the majority of newcomer students outline a desire to access university, the possibility of making this transition a reality is seriously constrained. The role of local schools in maintaining this inequality must be explored and further extrapolated to consider how the vital conjunctures of aspired transitions compare across Ireland more broadly. Fundamentally, this research agenda makes provision to challenge entrenched, systematic, and institutionalized forms of inequality that continue to disadvantage newcomer students and their families. This is explored further in the next section focusing on the relationship between race and educational inequality.

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Race, Community, and Praxis: Decolonizing Spaces of Education

The historical entanglement of racial discrimination, education, and resistance as a continual project of nationalism, identity, and spatial oppression requires constant critical interrogation within the studies of geographies of education. In a June, 2017 New York Times Book Review article, David Oshinsky recalls the powerful and disturbing history of racial segregation in the USA by reviewing the historical accounts of the Colour of Law by Richard Rothstein. One of the main contributions

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of the book is the participation of government involved in the policy decisionmaking process and complicity in the discrimination and violent outcomes. An area for serious consideration related to questions of equity and inclusivity are the continual legacies of race and discrimination within the educational sector. The geographies of education have explored the intersections between race, space, and society through case studies of racial segregation in schools, funding disparities, and depletion of resources in the classroom, to violence and ostracism of racialized youth within the education sector. The problems remain closely aligned to the disturbing histories of discrimination in all sectors of housing, finance, and employment sectors and to the criminalization and high levels of incarceration in the criminal justice system. These broader sociohistorical factors are tied closely to the institutional structures of the state. For example, confronting the violence and racism that Indigenous students have faced in the forced assimilation plan within the Canadian education system, Battiste (2013) reveals how the process of dispossession and exclusion works through the rejection and suppression of Indigenous heritage and knowledge. Yet, within the past few decades, the rise of international solidarity movements such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, anti-imperialist struggles, anti-war protests, LGBTQ, and environmental movements among others continues to constantly challenge the violent legacies of colonialism and continual dispossession. The discussion below is an example of such recent struggles. The impacts of these large-scale resistance movements often implicate and in turn are implicated by the neoliberal public educational systems and its contradictory mandates of universalism, redistribution, and recognition (Basu 2011). The discussion below is an example of such recent struggles. On July 1, 2017, Canada marked its celebration of 150 years of Confederation alongside Indigenous activists protesting #Unsettling Canada 150. The creation of the Canadian federation in 1867 as part of a colonial history of dispossession and violence came to the forefront of many protests and discussions during celebrations across the country. In Unsettling Canada, Manuel and Derrickson (2015) powerfully trace the stories of Indigenous grassroots resistance over time to assert the political and economic rights and claims to their land and nationhood. Raising awareness of the plethora of historical conditions of abuse and neglect that continue onto the colonial present has now entered the larger realm of public discourse, more prominently since the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Report in 2015, which revealed the untold stories of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of over 6000 witnesses from the Canadian Residential School System. The crucial importance of the Truth and Reconciliation Report (T&RR) traces and documents the role of residential schools as institutional structures supporting the project of colonialism and its debilitating effects on the children in their custody. It formed the basis of the largest class action lawsuit in Canada’s history and was painfully defined as a period of “cultural genocide.” As the opening paragraph in the preface notes: These residential schools were created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to

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indoctrinate children into a new culture—the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society, led by Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. (Truth and Reconciliation Report 2015) (www.trc.ca)

The conditions in the residential school system which had existed for over 100 years and that had caused unsurmountable pain and havoc among the indigenous children further resulted in years of intergenerational trauma. The T&RR describes these conditions: For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien. Buildings were poorly located, poorly built, and poorly maintained. The staff was limited in numbers, often poorly trained, and not adequately supervised. Many schools were poorly heated and poorly ventilated, and the diet was meagre and of poor quality. Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed. The educational goals of the schools were limited and confused, and usually reflected a low regard for the intellectual capabilities of Aboriginal people. For the students, education and technical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers. (Truth and Reconciliation Report 2015: 3)

The intention of the T&RR as the report notes was a solemn intent once again to take heed from these oppressive histories in order to, “lay the foundation for the important question of reconciliation” in the future. Yet as Coulthard (2014: 127) has incisively noted, despite the mandates of the T&RR being “important and admirable,” it was imperative to be cognizant of the power relations during the process of reconciliation, where “Indigenous subjects are the primary object of repair, not the colonial relationship.” As the T&RR aptly affirms “Reconciliation is not an Aboriginal problem; it is a Canadian one.” The condition of aboriginal youth in Canada remains in crisis, a result of intergenerational trauma, depleted resources, and systemic institutional racism. A CBC Report on Aboriginal Youth conditions in 2014 notes: “aboriginal youth are still far more likely than their non-aboriginal peers to be wards of the state, live in low-income families, drop-out of high school, be unemployed, suffer from poor health, wind up in prison, or commit suicide (http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/ what-is-most-important-issue-facing-aboriginal-youth-today-1.2602939).” The legacy of historical concerns and extraordinary barriers structurally persists to the present day: from living conditions on First Nation Reserves across the country, resource extraction, and the loss of land on traditional territories, dilapidating and overcrowded housing conditions, inadequate drinking water quality, unemployment, loss of culture, suicide crisis among youth, intergenerational trauma, high levels of incarceration, to the murders of indigenous women. The ongoing effects of colonialism on the everyday lives of indigenous people continue unabated and remain in a state of crisis. Battiste (2013: 22) has forcefully argued that the “decolonization of education is not just about changing a system for Indigenous peoples, but for everyone.” Yet as Tuck and Yang (2012) argue in their article on Decolonization is not a metaphor, the adoption of such discourse needs to be critically reviewed for it to have any structural significance.

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The decolonization of education is not restricted to the realm of the classroom but extends to a wider political sphere. Hence, when the Federal Government planned to spend over half a million dollars celebrating Canada Day on July 1, 2017, calls for action and a resurgence of movements toward decolonization sprang up all over the country. For instance, in Ottawa where approximately more than 25,000 activists gathered at Parliament Hill to be greeted by dignitaries and to watch fireworks, indigenous groups erected a teepee as a symbolic reminder of the difficult and painful histories on their unceded land. In Toronto, activists from Idle No More demonstrated in front of Spadina Museum, where Canada’s Indigenous and Northern Affairs Minister were hosting a barbeque picnic. In both these cases, the Canadian Prime Minister and Northern Affairs Minister met with the activists, the meetings were widely televised. In Halifax, an indigenous protest and spiritual ceremony by the Mi’kmaq people in relation to Edward Cornwallis, the founder of the city who had mistreated their people, were met with opposition by members of the Proud Boys, a fraternal organization with affiliations with “western chauvinists” (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/canada-day-halifax-indigenous-cere mony-proud-boys-1.4189020). Through the means of alternative social media, indigenous activists are increasingly articulating their political voice and raising broader awareness among a wider public to build and strengthen their movements. Despite many challenges, reports indicate youth embracing their indigenous cultures and identities and participating in broader struggles for political change. Canada 150 was used as a platform to unveil and confront violent histories and bring the struggles of decolonization forward, promote dialogue, unsettle, and raise awareness of the hegemonic power relations of the Canadian settler society. In the conclusion of his prolific analysis rejecting the colonial politics of recognition, in Red Skin White Masks, Coulthard (2014: 179) urges to continually engage with the settler state’s legal and political apparatus in order to build a resurgent politics of recognition that he argues “seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically non exploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best Indigenous legal and political traditions.” Decolonizing spaces of education through the resurgent politics of recognition is a critical step forward within the geographies of educational research.

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Conclusion

In this chapter, we have argued that contemporary research exploring geographies of education is broad based and operating at various scales, interdisciplinary contexts, and thematic areas with overlapping interests in the geographies of children, young people, and families. In this chapter, we have focused on the persisting challenges of inequality and the complexities of addressing the multiple intersections of classed, raced, gendered, and subaltern social divides that are often promulgated by embedded forms of institutionalism, especially those related to education. Our case studies draw primarily from geographies of education research in Ireland and Canada.

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Despite policy-driven agendas of accessibility, the case in Ireland illustrates that school choice is not a matter of equity. The geographies of territoriality, social class, and mobility create serious class-based barriers driven by a market-based environment, where competition and rigid policy regimes prevail. The second case elucidates how the global crisis in migration and refugee mobility has taken on an unprecedented turn during the past few years. Refugee children as forced migrants who have experienced innumerable hardships fleeing war, conflict, and violence face a number of difficult and unique challenges. Schools play a crucial role in the resettlement process of children and young people as local public institutions of support. The Canadian study illustrates an example where schools are not only places where learning takes place but also constitute communities where crosscultural alliances and creative means of empowerment can be potentially facilitated as is demonstrated by the study on “multiculturalism through multilingualism.” The case of Ireland, however, also cautions us to pay attention to how the geographies of educational opportunity and aspiration of migrant youth are institutionally curtailed by regulations that favor long-standing residents. These social and institutional processes shape, support, and constrain the transitioning process. Discrimination against newcomer students further entrenches the inequities in the educational system. Finally the case of decolonizing spaces of education in Canada explicates the painful journey of abuse faced over a century by Aboriginal students in residential schools recently uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Report. However, with the rise of Idle no More and most recently #Unsettling Canada 150, there is a renewed resurgence of positive and pro-equality activism, including youth, resisting and asserting political and economic rights. These histories are central to any discussions on geographies of education. Though our case studies draw on examples from Ireland and Canada, we highlight the inherent socio-spatial and systemic structures of inequity and marginalization that have become increasingly prevalent, illustrative of our current times, and the paradoxical role that schools play in this process. The future of geographies of education as a critical body of scholarship and mode of inquiry continues to provide insight into the multiple and systemic challenges facing children and young people across the globe, representing a forum for more serious engagement advocating progress and change.

References Abebe, T., Waters, J., & Skelton, T. (Eds.). (2017). Laboring and learning. Geographies of children and young people, Volume 10 of Geographies of children and young people. Singapore: Springer. Aitken, S. (2001). Geographies of young people: The morally contested spaces of identity. London: Routledge Press. Albert, D. P., & Cassidy, E. D. (2017). To whom are we listening? Measuring the pulse of geography education research, 2010. Research in Geographic Education, 19(1), 82–101. Askins, K. (2016). Emotional citizenry: Everyday geographies of befriending, belonging and intercultural encounter. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(4), 515–527.

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Web Resources https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/books/review/richard-rothstein-color-of-law-forgotten-his tory.html www.cso.ie

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Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Emotions and the Constitution of Childhood (and Adulthood) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Spaces of Childhood and Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Methodologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Concluding Remarks and Further Agendas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter explores intersections between the debates in children’s and emotional geographies, organized into three areas of discussion. First, the chapter considers how geographical approaches to emotions can help us (re-)conceptualize the categories of childhood and adulthood as well as the relations between them. It argues that childhood has been regarded at the same time as a modality of emotion different from adulthood and as a powerful affective condition. These conceptions underpin much of the policy and professional practice with children as well as the wider politics of childhood. Second, the chapter investigates the significance of emotions across specific spatialities of children’s lives. It argues that attentiveness to emotions helps us reconsider the arrangements of children’s lives in spaces more traditionally associated with childhood such as school and family but also identify and theorize the more recent and emerging spatialities of the online world. Third, the chapter scrutinizes the methodological approaches in children’s emotional geographies. It suggests that these are rooted in the sub-disciplinary traditions of children’s and emotional

M. Blazek (*) Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_9

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geographies but they at the same time push their agendas much further. The chapter identifies the challenges over the epistemological distance between adults and children and over the nature of engaging with emotional contents, and shows how these stimulate novel methodological approaches and conceptual advancements. As a way of conclusion, the chapter proposes three directions in which children’s emotional geographies could extend their scope in the future. Keywords

Childhood · Youth · Adulthood · Emotions · Methodology · Geographies

1

Introduction

Over the last two decades, the fields of children’s and emotional geographies established themselves in the mainstream geographical scholarship, with a number of pivotal publications, specialized outlets, and major international conferences (Blazek and Windram-Geddes 2013). However, it was not until more recently that a sustained dialogue developed between the two areas. This chapter aims to map this engagement and explore the intersections of childhood and emotions in geographical work. The chapter is loosely organized into three substantive sections. The review begins with section 2, which questions how emotions can be seen as central to the very conceptions of childhood and adulthood. The section traces emotional and affective relations across the adult-child difference, including their projections and significance in policy and practice. Section 3 discusses the presence and importance of emotions in particular spatial realms of children’s lives. This discussion ranges from key spaces traditionally associated with childhood such as school and family, to the more recent and emerging spatialities of virtual environments. Section 4 then reflects on the methodological accounts of research on children’s emotional geographies. It seeks to identify strengths of the existing methodological approaches as well as areas of new developments. The conclusion recapitulates the key points of the review and suggests some further areas of inquiry. It should be noted that both “childhood” and “emotions” are highly contested terms and many geographers have found themselves in disagreement over the nature and extent of their exact definition. Both are frequently associated with, or substituted by, other concepts, such as youth/young people and affects/feelings. This chapter does not aspire to envelop the review of children’s emotional geographies in these conceptual debates, nor does it seek to establish ultimate definitions of either childhood or emotions. Rather, the discussion follows and distinguishes between various conceptual frameworks as they are deployed in the presented literature. With the focus explicitly on “childhood,” although in a wider sense, the chapter does not review the work that concerns explicitly young adults, unless boundaries between the two age categories are directly problematized by such a work. Rather than looking for a preference or definite differentiation between emotions and affects, the chapter pays attention to the ways in which these concepts have been deployed by geographers working on childhood and seeks to identify links between such perspectives.

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Emotions and the Constitution of Childhood (and Adulthood)

Cameron’s (2006) study of Malting House Garden School in Cambridge explores the co-constructive role of natural sciences and psychoanalysis in a late 1920s educational experiment run by the entrepreneur Geoffrey Pyke and the psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs. At the core of the school philosophy was its directors’ recognition of powerful “negative” emotions in younger children, particularly instinctual fear and Oedipal hatred toward adults. Cameron explains how the Malting House teachers sought to encourage, rather than suppress, expressions of such intense emotions in children and channel them into the creative process of learning in the way of “finding out” about the world. Feeding aggression into curiosity and action, the Malting House stood in contrast with the dominant educational discourses of that era that sought to eradicate children’s hostility by suppressing manifestations of emotions. Influenced by the call of the New Social Studies of Childhood in the 1990s to move from reducing childhood to a development stage to acknowledging children as beings on their own, the contemporary geographical attention to children’s emotional geographies is very much focused on children’s own experiences (Kraftl 2013b). Yet, Cameron’s study illustrates how childhood as such has been conceptualized also as a particular type or modality of emotions. Both in the work of the Malting House and in its mainstream counterparts, children are principally defined through (specific) emotions, namely, fear and anger, and what separates adults from children is how these emotions are transmitted and channeled until they eventually evanesce. Understanding childhood as a certain modality of emotions is also a contemporary, not just a historical, matter. In their study of children’s use of Information and Communication (ICT) technologies in the early 2000s, Holloway and Valentine (2001) explored the adult fears over the risks associated with children’s use of ICT. Their study shows how the main area of adult concern at the time was not the direct risk of children being harmed because of associations with other people (e.g., child grooming), but rather the assumption that children are emotionally unable to handle unsupervised content on the Internet. While these two examples portray perceptions of childhood as a state of emotive deficiency or inferiority, there are alternative insights that pick up on the difference between childhood and adulthood in emotional terms, yet in a more affirmative way. Hemming’s (2007) study of Physical Education (PE) for instance associates children with “alternative values that emphasize fun, enjoyment and pleasure” (Hemming 2007, p.356). The emotional dynamics of childhood are put here in contrast with the school-policy rational discourses of PE as a promotion of health. Hemming’s conclusions can be read as a push to acknowledge the significance of emotions in the distinctiveness of childhood, but his work also emphasizes that the emotional difference between children and adults is intertwined with socio-material contexts of children’s lives rather than an essentialized feature of children as different forms of human being. Elsewhere, Bunnell et al. (2012) discuss two aspects of friendship: its affective role in human beings and its significance in children’s lives and children’s social ordering as classed, gendered, or racialized subjects. Linking these two points

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together, the emotional dynamics of child peer relations is what impacts children’s formations of identity in a way that might not be necessarily experienced by adults, whose key social relationships are often located in different settings than friendships, such as work or community (Blazek 2011). From a rather different perspective, Jones (2003) also suggests that there are differences between adult and child emotions, as children’s emotions are to a lesser extent “flattened by the memory experience” (Jones 2003, p.13). However, rather than proposing a universal notion of difference, Jones’s point emphasizes the accumulative role of experience and links with other people and non-human elements as the constitutive process of agency (Blazek 2016). In turn, the difference between childhood and adulthood has to be seen as fragmented, situated, and fluid. For a similar illustration in a different context, the investigation of the process of subjectivity formation among young carers in sub-Saharan Africa by Robson et al. (2006) identifies emotional experiences of caring – investments, trauma and bereavement, close loving relationships, coping with responsibilities, sense of pride – as central to who these young people become. Recognizing and yet destabilizing the conception of childhood by exploring the shifting natures of young carers’ agency at the fluid interface of “being a child” and “taking on the adult roles,” their research shows how children and young people’s emotions are different yet alike to adults, and how the fluidity of emotions is interrelated to young people’s social experience. Along with the work addressing childhood as a modality of emotions, there is a set of geographical literature that theorizes childhood as an affect. Kraftl (2008) argues that childhood is “a univerzalising, affective condition” (Kraftl 2008, p.82), as it is commonly associated with the prospects of the global future. What is voiced as concerns about children in fact reflects concerns about the society as such. The affective potential of childhood in discourses and politics of the future-inbecoming is well exemplified in Evans’s (2010) analysis of the pre-emptive politics in the “war on obesity” among children, where contemporary interventions in children’s food practices, embodied activities, and cultural values are promoted as the construction of a “healthy future” for the wider society. Horton and Kraftl (2006a) provide additional contexts in which childhood is being deployed as a form of affect in particular political and cultural discourses, such as the notion of the rural idyll populated by children’s outdoor movement, or the quality of children’s experience in nostalgic accounts of the past. However, Horton and Kraftl also point out that children are largely excluded from the political production of such affects to which the idea of childhood is central. A powerful affective function of childhood is in invoking sympathy and eliciting political action for a particular cause. Yea (2012) scrutinizes anti-trafficking campaigns and especially the representational construction of “the third world girl” as a “muted” powerless victim, an object of sympathy for the privileged adult audience. Particular connotations of age, gender, and geography are put on display in the process of the construction of “intimate publics” between the audience and antitrafficking stakeholders, and it is the image of these categories rather than the actual living individuals that stimulate emotional response in the audience. Elsewhere, Hörschelmann (2015) questions whether objections to war should be conditioned

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upon the age of victims. Her analysis of media representations and governmental military promotion campaigns suggests that childhood plays a crucial affective role in either the marketing, opposition, or reproduction of war by being on display in negotiations with the public. In such different modes of negotiation, the affective role of childhood can be in its symbolic associations with both innocence (in challenging the war as a harm against children) and social reproduction (in promoting it by appealing to children’s protection). Much attention has been given to affect in spaces of professional practice with children, such as schools, nurseries, or youth work centers. Watkins in particular makes an explicit call to shift the analytical focus on relationships in educational spaces from individual emotional experiences to the accumulation of affect as a way to foreground “relational and spatial aspects” of classroom interactions (Watkins 2011, p.137). She shows how teachers display strong emotions when recounting their experience in the school. Yet, these are not simply individual memories or sentiments about moments with students, but rather cumulative embodiments of teachers’ investments as they become “accumulated through the process of the pedagogic exchange enacted in schools and classrooms” (Watkins 2011, p.142). In another study, Boyer et al. (2013) seek to problematize theorizations of nurseries as spaces of commodified care by showing them as affective environments. Their focus is on how strong bonds develop and are enacted between care workers and children, and how these processes are further situated along with the “emotional entitlements of parents” toward their children (Boyer et al. 2013, p.517). Boyer et al. conclude that the affective quality of nurseries helps challenge the sharp distinctions between kin and non-kin. Mills (2015) makes a similar point in a historical analysis of postWar youth work in Manchester. She reveals the significance of youth workers’ emotional labor and how it emerges at the interface of real contact with specific young people and circulated affective imaginations of youth as such. The idea of childhood is sometimes employed as a form of affect even in spaces where no children are present. Instead, the notion of childhood in general, or specific children in particular, is crucial to affective qualities of a concrete space. Both Simard-Gagnon (2016) and Hook (2016) discuss the affective qualities of university and how it is partly defined by contradictions to the idea of childhood. Hook (2016) describes how Australian universities reproduce higher education spaces as childfree, deploying emotional content that excludes sole parents. Reflecting on her own experience as a graduate student and mother of two children, Simard-Gagnon (2016) concludes that the affective space of academia and its demands on productivity are implicitly – and in some areas explicitly – in opposition to the well-being of the family environment. In a very different context, Baldwin’s analysis portrays prison as an affective space of (absent) childhood, exploring how “maternal emotions and maternal identity are assembled and challenged through prison” (Baldwin 2017, p.51). And finally, Longhurst et al. (2012) depict how lone mothers might be subject to societal reactions that construct them as irresponsible and burdens to taxpayers, instigating the sense of guilt and shame. It is again the idea of childhood/children – in a particular imaginative constellation of the sufficient nuclear family – that has an affective function of catalyzing certain types of emotional responses.

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Considering childhood as an affect leads to a theme that has been somewhat less explicitly addressed in the discussions of children’s emotional geographies, namely, adult emotions toward children. The aforementioned example of concerns over children’s use of ICT by Holloway and Valentine (2001) represents what has been perhaps the most common point of interest, namely, the presence and impact of emotions in family (although other contexts, such as research (Benwell 2009) or professional care (Disney 2015) have been explored too). While much of this literature is focused specifically on adult concerns over children’s lives (Pain 2006), some arguments in this line of research also indicate how understanding adult emotions toward children can help us better conceptualize the very notion of adulthood in a relational sense. Ansell et al. (2015) discuss how working in a Lesotho garment factory work transforms women’s family roles from the providers of practical and emotional care to breadwinners. Given the low status and lesser pay of women’s work together with the newly discovered lack of opportunities to provide emotional presence for their children, this labor restructuring also reshapes the structures of social reproduction and social roles of female and male adults. In another example that illustrates how emotional relationships with children define adult gender subjectivities, Aitken (2000, p582) explores fathering as a “daily emotional practice” through qualitative research in South California. He suggests that the emphasis and detachment of particular emotions in family relationships with children are defining features of the parenting role, but that it happens in different ways between men and women, as fathers see themselves as supporting their partners rather than taking on the central role in parenting. He concludes that “fathers embrace the emotions of parenting without taking responsibility for the domestic labor that such emotions should entail” and emerge as “disembodied father-figures because they cannot take on the work and responsibility of parenting without imagining themselves as ‘Mr Mom’” (Aitken 2000, p. 597). Problematic entanglements of adulthood, childhood, and emotions can be also observed in the analyses of child-related policy-making. On the one hand, positive images of childhood as the future and hope are widely deployed in high-profile global policy documents (Kraftl 2008). On the other hand, if children’s emotions are at all referred to in child-related policies, they are usually depicted as problems to be addressed and mitigated. Kraftl and Blazek (2015) critique the process of childrelated policy-making for presenting itself as a rational act but struggling to reflect on how it is in fact propelled by affective politics of childhood and adult emotions toward children such as fear (of/for children) or guilt. The lack of emotional reflexivity in policy-making has been also critiqued at the level of policy implementation and related engagement with young people (Kraftl and Horton 2007). The shift toward political participation of young people has been identified as leading toward involvement that can be tokenistic in its effects but requiring considerable emotional labor from young people (Bosco and Joassart-Marcelli 2015). The contested role of emotions in child-related policy-making can be illustrated on an example of education. Nairn and Higgins (2011) investigated the emotional geographies of neoliberal school reforms in New Zealand, addressing the transitions of young men excluded from mainstream schools and redirected to an alternative

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education program. Nairn and Higgins in particular explore these young men’s alienation and how it emerges at multiple scales of relationships: with teachers and other school staff members, with specific institutions, but also the state and its policies that establish the alternative education programs. Emotions emerge within everyday educational spaces that are shaped by policies (themselves rather oblivious to such emotional dynamics), and in turn shape young people’s bonds with the wider society. In contrast, Kraftl’s (2013c) study of alternative education emphasizes how the intimacy of adult–child relations and the one-to-one material and emotional contact are written into the core policies of some such programs. The wider philosophy and guidance for action is (on the example of homeschooling) complemented with slowly nurtured “place-specific emotion and intimacies” and “management of emotive relationships” (Kraftl 2013a, p.438) between children and educators. Emotional experience with people, environments, and objects is seen as central to the process of learning and is as such reflected in the major policies of alternative education. The importance of space and emotions in the constitution of childhood (and adulthood) has been also recognized in a range of approaches that engage with the broader issue of everyday politics of space and childhood. Jones’s (2003, 2008, 2013) writings on children’s otherness and spatial autonomy have been of particular importance here. Jones argues that children present an unbridgeable otherness to adults due to ultimately different social experiences and power relations between the two. Rather than bridging to children and approaching childhood from a “childfriendly” perspective, he calls for respecting and maintaining children’s autonomy in social and spatial terms. He argues that “children have to live within adult orders, spaces and systems, and . . . they seek to, or have to, build their own spatialities within that” (Jones 2013, p. 4). He extends this argument considerably also to the sphere of emotional autonomy (Jones 2013), reckoning that refraining from seeking to fully understand children’s emotions is a stance toward not colonizing childhood and not asserting full control over children’s lives. Where Jones’s work engages with a range of media including literature and film, ideas about the importance of spatial and emotional autonomy of children can be also traced in research that builds from a direct engagement. Dickens and Lonie (2013), for instance, theorize youth workers’ use of a music studio as an autonomous space where young people are allowed not just to engage freely with their emotions, but also work through them and translate them into musical outputs in textual (lyrics) as well as non-textual (music, its color and rhythm) formats. The promise of youth work is interrogated also by Blazek and Hricová (2015) who draw on the perspective of detached youth work to shift the attention from understanding children’s emotions to understanding adults’ co-being and engagement with these emotions, without seeking to govern or manipulate them. In a more uncharted territory, Preece (2015) opens up the question of children’s emotions in social media and other virtual sources, questioning the similarities and difference between these media and physical environment and what implications they might have for the politics of children’s autonomy. The range of examples presented in this section illustrate how explorations of children’s emotional geographies observe and theorize not only children’s emotional

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experiences but they also carry a potential for broader theorization of childhood (and adulthood) as such. From acknowledging but also problematizing the notion of childhood as a fundamentally different modality of emotion, through its theorization as an affective quality with powerful impacts over adults, to the questions of adult–child relations in the fields of policy-making, professional practice or just everyday politics of co-being, geographers’ attention to emotions charts new lines of what it means to be a child and an adult. Situating some of these questions in specific spatial contexts, section 3 discusses the formative role of emotions in some of the most important spatial spheres of children’s lives.

3

Spaces of Childhood and Emotions

Family spaces are at the heart of geographers’ interest in childhood and a major focus on children’s emotions has been located here. In the example of children’s knowledge about alcohol drinking, Valentine et al. (2014) emphasize the affective qualities of family spaces, engendered through the everyday proximity and regular encounters of family members. These qualities can be diverse and even contradictory. Kassa’s (2016) research on intergenerational relationships in Ethiopia portrays family as an affective space of care and intimacy, but also of pressure and expectations. Everyday practices and interactions of parents and children are driven by parental perceptions of children’s performance in school (among the more affluent families) or household duties (among the low-income families), and they in turn stir contrasting feelings of affinity and alienation in children. Examples like this, or like the work of Valentine et al. (2003) on the process of young lesbian and gay people’s coming out in the family contexts, highlight that family is the space of children’s intense emotional engagements that are embedded in everyday intimate relationships with parents, siblings, and others (Evans 2011a), and also that children’s emotional experiences in the family are further intertwined with other societal institutions, ideologies, and practices – whether it is the parental expectation of “doing well” shaped by classed identities (in case of Kassa), or the negotiation of sexual identities in the context of generic discourses of heteronormativity (Valentine et al. 2014). Children’s emotional experience of family space is not framed only by the regulatory functions of family life. Another type of literature actively emphasizes children’s agency and the importance of emotions in its constitution. Wilson (2015), for instance, highlights how children experiencing parents’ substance misuse actively seek to get by in these challenging circumstances by actively making their “place” within the home in a material as well as emotional sense. Much literature on children’s emotions and agency (Robson et al. 2006; Evans and Thomas 2009; Evans 2011a) further considers children’s roles as carers in family environments and highlights not only the emotional distress and pressure children experienced while taking care of their family members but also the more positive impact of care provision such as emotional maturity, sense of pride or love, and belonging with other family members. As Evans (2011b) emphasizes, the emotional context of caregiving is again not limited to the context of family. Exploring the emotional impacts

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among young carers affected by their immigrant status, low income, and life with parents with HIV, she shows that the emotional insecurity formed at the intersection of legal, economic, and health factors consequently restricts young people’s everyday mobility and participation in the school and community. The geographical focus on emotions informs understandings of family space as mobile, extending family spatialities beyond the home. Murray and Mand (2013), for instance, situate family relations at a multi-scalar notion of belonging – from intimate to global ties, such as in the case of children from transnational migrant families – and explore children’s emotional experiences as they travel and adapt to different environments. At a more everyday level, Collins and Tymko (2015) theorize the car as a family space, considering how harmful practices (smoking) are negatively experienced by children and also how children’s views are absent in the public as well as family discussions of smoking. Beazley’s (2015) work discusses the emotional impact of children’s separation from their families while they are placed in institutional care after natural disaster events. She concludes that the family context and children’s relationships with their family members are a dimension that is not well attended in humanitarian and development practice. And finally, Holton’s (2017) research on the transitions of students from family homes to shared accommodation proposes the idea of home as a practice of place-making rather than a static spatial segment, pointing toward the importance of young people’s emotional links with their co-dwellers, whether family members or others. Another spatiality central to the understanding of contemporary children’s lives is that of school and education. In the rich scholarship that involves contemporary as well as historical (Cameron, 2006) perspectives, and mainstream as well as alternative forms of education (Kraftl 2013a, c; Germann Molz 2017), several themes stand out. One is the place of emotions in the interplay of learning, social and “more-thansocial” relationships in schools and educational spaces, and particularly the themes of inclusion and exclusion. Three types of relationships and their entanglements with emotions have been addressed in particular. The first is that of children’s mutual relationships and the ensuing emotional landscapes of peer cultures. Kustatscher (2017), for instance, explicates how performances and perceptions of intersectional identities take place from the early age of primary school and that emotional experiences of belongings and difference are fundamental to the intra-politicization of children’s own cultures. Exploring peer bullying, Andrews and Chen (2006) likewise highlight that school is not just a space of learning but also of socialization and subjectivity formation through shifting identities of bullying and being bullied. Working through the topics of socio-emotional (Holt 2007) and embodied (Fenton et al. 2013) difference among children, geographical scholarship emphasizes how such relational dynamics are not produced in autonomous contexts of children’s lives, but rather that they are co-defined, reproduced, and also interrupted by institutional settings. The second type of relationships in the geographical literature on children’s emotions and schooling is thus the relationship of children and teachers or other adults. Windram-Geddes (2013), for instance, highlights how expectations, presumptions, and disciplinary practices of PE teachers enforce normative conceptions of health, body-image, and physical activity among female

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students. Considering specifically the “fear of fatness,” Windram-Geddes suggests anxieties and norms are reproduced within a wider affective space of PE that comprises other children’s despise and antagonism but teachers’ pre-conceptions and power enactments. Research on the third type of relationships explores the emotional dynamics of relationships between children and materialities of learning and education. Kraftl’s (2013b, c) research on alternative education, for instance, highlights the importance of design and objects present in the everyday schooling experiences, but he highlights how materialities are experienced and co-constitutive of the education process together with social habits, bodily presences (of children and teachers), rhythms, movements, and their orderings. Elsewhere, Procter (2015) emphasizes the multisensory nature of children’s engagements with nature, investigating the potential of outdoor spaces and children’s ties with their everyday environments in formal schooling. Situated in a dialogue with the so-called “new wave of childhood studies” and beyond bio-social dualism of childhood (Ryan 2012), these perspectives introduce and develop the notion of more-than-social contexts of emotions, such as through theories of attachment (Kraftl 2013b). Emotional geographies of education scale well beyond the spatialities of school. While the focus on immediate relationships, such as that discussed above, emphasizes the micro-scale, wider links in children’s lives, such as to the state, are as important. Another theme from the geographical scholarship on emotions in school contexts is thus the interplay of emotional learning and the governmentality of childhood in preparation for citizenship. Gagen’s (2013) analysis of UK educational programs integrating emotional literacy into curricula shows how emotions are seen as central for the production of certain types of subjectivities based on self-regulation (especially of anger), different gendered norms, and promotion of certain emotions over others. In a related study from New Zealand, Wood (2013) argues that the programs of citizenship education act through young people’s emotional experiences in relation to various layers and scales of their identity, including race, gender class, and relationships with their peers as well as members of the wider community. Emotional geographies of citizenship are not restricted to the forum of formal educational systems. Young people’s negotiations of citizenship governance exercised by states unfold within a much wider range of spatialities. Tang (2015) illustrates this by analyzing Singaporean young people’s responses to the performance of table tennis players from Mainland China representing Singapore. He suggests that young people’s refusal to identify with the success of those whom they see as foreigners brought to the country via the governmental program of talent recruitment is a sign of the wider counter-politics targeting multiculturalism asserted by the Singapore state. Elsewhere, Cheung Judge (2015) showcases a connection between citizenship discourses contained in institutional youth programs and the emotional experience of young people attending such initiatives. Exploring the volunteering trips of young people from a low-income London neighborhood to Sub-Saharan Africa, she demonstrates the importance of multi-scalar relations of young people’s positionalities. Their negotiation of local (in relation to their own community) and global (in relation to the visited locality in Africa) connections

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embodied as a form of performative self-identification results in a form of quiet politics that develops well beyond the initial formative agenda of the volunteering trips (also Cheung Judge 2016). Cheung Judge’s research relates to two other spatial contexts attended by geographers interested in childhood and emotions: youth work and community. Work on the former is significant by articulating spaces of youth work as providing young people with social and spatial autonomy in which they can explore their own subjectivities (Dickens and Lonie 2013), with particular types of relationships with other young people and adults (Langager and Spancer-Cavaliere 2015), but also with specific materialities through which a children’s agency can be re-constructed (Blazek 2016). Blazek and Hricová (2015) more specifically theorize youth work as a mode of engagement between adults and children that intrinsically challenges the spatialities of power in which young people’s lives are entrenched and thus opens up possibilities for children’s becoming in different ways. Geographical research of youth work thus often points toward the role of community and neighborhood in children’s emotional geographies, but these two spatial realms necessitate a considerably broader approach. Neighborhood has been a key theme in public emotional discourses about childhood for a long time, particularly in association to fears over children’s unsupervised presence in the public space (Pain 2006). Bromley and Stacey (2012) show how this theme intersects with conceptualizations of social difference as children’s fear of public space in the UK varies according to class and gender. Whereas children from low-income neighborhoods in Swansea (Wales) find the central zones of the city safer than their own community spaces, those from high-income areas identify fear as associated with the city center rather than their own neighborhood. Also, while boys and girls present similar concerns over safety in their neighborhoods, boys find the center safer. Elsewhere in the literature, Andrews and Chen (2006) trace the spatialities of peer bullying and suggest that the subjectivities of children as victims or perpetrators of bullying might be fluid and shifting as they traverse everyday spaces, such as from the school to the neighborhood. The research of children’s emotional geographies of community and neighborhood reaches well beyond the issue of fear and safety, however. Geographers working across diverse spaces of the Global South (Radcliffe and Webb 2016) and North (den Besten 2010) have explored multi-scalar dimensions of the impact that community ties have on young people’s senses of identity. Radcliffe and Webb (2016) illustrate how children’s and parental aspirations in Chilean Mapuche communities are interlocked with racialized exclusion of young people of indigenous background. They especially highlight the emotional commotion experienced by young people as they navigate their life trajectories through a cascade of contradictions due to their dynamic socio-spatial positioning within and beyond their community. In den Besten’s (2010) account, young immigrants’ attitudes to their neighborhoods in Paris and Berlin emerge across a variety of scales, including mundane access to material resources, everyday experiences in the school, and also understandings of one’s migration history in the context of wider geopolitical narratives. Community and neighborhood are crucial to children’s emotional experiences, but they are inter-scaled with family, peer connections, and the global.

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Recently, much attention in research has been given to the emotional fabric of children’s everyday experiences in communities. Bosco and Joassart-Marcelli (2015) explore how children’s emotional links with an area can be appropriated by adults within the complex apparatus of urban planning activities. Their analysis makes an important link between the semi-autonomous children’s emotional experience of a neighborhood, and its regulation and framing through adult-centered power dynamics as children are enrolled in the planning initiatives. Working through different vectors between neighborhood planning and children’s everyday experiences, Horton (2017) explores the emotional geographies of families with disabled children in the context of their engagement with outdoor play areas. He concludes that the barriers experienced in these spaces by children with disabilities have strong emotional impact on the families, as the parents and carers articulate them as a sense of failure with regards to “normative ideals of parenting and family engagement” (Horton 2017, p.1154). However, he is also attentive to the shared positive experience of working through difficult moments, emphasizing how the family dynamics and outdoor neighborhood spatialities can intersect in a manner crucial to children’s emotional lives. Along with the body of work explicitly addressing the material and social infrastructure of neighborhoods, a number of authors have concentrated on the more transitory aspects of children’s lives in their communities. Pyyry (2016) stresses how the simple act of hanging out with friends constitutes an enormous aspect of young people’s building of their subjectivities, as the events of “actively doing nothing” (p.9) actually stand for enchanting and experimental engagement with the city, world, and imagination. Elsewhere, Jarvis et al. (2017) portray how children’s spatial literacy and their mobilities, memories, routines, and emotions are embedded in each other. Their research highlights the links between fleeting everyday moments that go seemingly unnoticed and the foundational cognitive capacities that guide children’s movements in their neighborhoods. The range of spatial contexts in which children’s emotions play a formative role spans well beyond the physical and social spaces of family, school, citizenship, and community. In parallel to wider geographical interest in virtual spaces, increased attention is being given to how young people’s emotional subjectivities are formed online and how the online and offline spatialities evolve in the context of each other. On the one hand, the research by Preece (2015) on suicide and Rooney (2015) on shame, professes that identities that young people develop in the virtual environment are distinct from their offline contacts, resulting in dissimilar social dynamics. On the other hand, Andrews’s and Chen’s (2006) research on bullying or Longhurst’s (2013) on Skype calls as extensions of familial relations and practices through the computer screen highlight the interconnectivity of children’s lives online and offline. Numerous examples in the previous paragraphs indicated how different spatialities of children’s lives are interlinked and fluidly merge with each other, but the research on the virtual experience shows an even higher degree of multi-scalar interplays in which children’s emotional experiences are shaped. The shifts between offline and online spaces also amplify questions about the need for appropriate methodologies and the methodological apparatus of children’s emotional geographies will be discussed in the following section.

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Methodologies

Research on children’s emotional geographies has been dominated by qualitative approaches, not unlike the individual sub-disciplines of children’s and emotional geographies themselves have been. Yet, there is an important sample of innovative methodologies that draw on quantitative and spatial tools in analyzing emotional geographies of childhood. Echoing the roots of (some) research on children’s and emotional geographies in environmental psychology, Curtis et al. (2015), for instance, integrate sketch-map techniques with geographic information systems (GIS) to map, represent, and analyze the spatial perception of fear among Los Angeles youth in gang neighborhoods, along with the associated emotions the experience of the city elicits (see ▶ Chap. 17, “Affective Geovisualization and Children: Representing the Embodied and Emotional Geographies of Children,” by Jung in this volume). Elsewhere, Jarvis et al. (2017) bring together Global Positioning Systems (GPS) records of children’s movement, Google Earth images from the attended sites, and semi-structured interviews with children to provide an account of how children’s spatial literacy emerges from their everyday experiences. In both cases, spatial and quantitative data are parts of a broader multimethodological design, however, and the sole use of a single quantitative technique in research on children’s emotional geographies remains rare. A fairly distinct feature of research on children’s emotional geographies is the lack of methodological primacy of interviews. While narrative techniques are crucial to the geographical studies of children’s emotions, they are relatively rarely used as a single methodological tool, reflecting on the established concerns about the limits of language in understanding both childhood and emotions. Interviews are instead often elicited with the help of visual techniques, including the aforementioned GPS records and Google Earth images (Jarvis et al. 2017), but also videos (Murray and Mand 2013; Tang 2015), photographs (Oh 2012), or mood boards (Pimlott-Wilson 2012), of other non-textual contents such as music (Dickens and Lonie 2013), or they are employed as part of broader ethnographic or participatory action research (PAR) activities (Yuli Hastadewi 2009; Ardoin et al. 2014; Evans 2017; Lloyd-Evans 2017). The significance of the active engagement between adult researchers and child participants in ethnographic and PAR research reflects the relational nature of emotions and the difficulties in seeking to encapsulate emotional contents solely from narrative representations (Bondi 2005, 2014). While still an emerging methodological debate, a number of implications for the prospects and limitations in research on children’s emotional geographies can be seen. One such issue is the connection between embodiment and emotions. Holt (2007) illustrates the potential of ethnographic research in the exploration of the wider interrelated registers of embodied, intellectual, and emotional diversities among younger children, while Windram-Geddes (2013) highlights the importance of the researcher’s own body as a medium through which children can interrogate and convey their embodied emotional experience. Another important aspect of ethnography is its ability to engage with emotional experience beyond the “here and now” encounter. Procter’s (2013) work shows the possibilities of using video recording of ethnographic

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research to enhance the reflexive scrutiny of emotional content by repeated engagement with the material. Blazek’s (2013) research highlights how long-term relationships established between researchers and child participants in the course of ethnographic research, and particularly their unconscious elements, are themselves devices through which emotions can be explored beyond children’s narratives. And finally, Bartos (2013) emphasizes the nuanced capacities of ethnographic research to engage with the multi-sensory aspects of emotional experience, and its situatedness in particular places and environments. Reflections on PAR also provide some important conclusions on doing research on children’s emotional geographies. Cahill’s (2007) work emphasizes how collaborative critical reflections and dialogue between the young participants and researchers do not just generate an emotional account of young people’s experiences, but they also highlight how children’s subjectivities are fluid, multiple, and subject to change. Blazek and Hraňová (2012) highlight that participatory research is situated within pre-existing emotional relationships among the participants, and its ongoing process helps both to surface and transform these relationships. Evans and Thomas (2009) further discuss participatory research as a shared space in which participants’ and researchers’ emotional experiences intersect and possibly amplify each other, and they call attention to the issue of emotional management and support. Finally, Evans’s (2016) account of participatory dissemination highlights the eclipsed issue of the emotional impact of research. She advocates sustained proximity and engagement between researchers and participants, particularly in sensitive and emotional charged topics, and she problematizes how university audit cultures fragment and dismiss the emotional value of participation in both research and further engagement, such as dissemination. Not restricted to PAR, emotional reflexivity and attention to researchers’ own emotions has been important in understanding children’s emotions also in other types of fieldwork. Benwell (2009) for instance discusses self-censorship in interviews on sensitive themes, while Procter (2013) explores how researcher’s personal histories and the spaces and places they inhabit influence their research engagements, thoughts, and feelings. Whereas ethnography and PAR are among the most popular methodologies of children’s geographies in general, a number of approaches that are otherwise more limited in the general research on childhood have become instrumental in the research on emotions. First, it is the use of memory and auto-ethnography, through which adults reflect on their childhood experiences. A simple translation of memories has been largely problematized as an accurate account of children’s worlds (Jones 2003), although it is present, for instance, in quantitative research on the memories of past contact with urban green spaces (Rupprecht et al. 2016). More elaborate approaches include juxtaposing memories of childhood with other activities or stimuli. Philo (2003), for instance, theorizes the engagement with daydreaming and art as a way to re-shape memories into a more complex account of children’s emotional experiences, while Burrell (2011) works with materialities and objects to stimulate narrative articulations of memories. Rather than isolating memories of childhood as a matter of the past, Horton and Kraftl (2006b) bridge memories and immediate experiences to generate a non-representational account of

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the fluidity and connections between childhood experience and adult subjectivities. Second, and related, research on children’s emotional geographies has been unfolded also through historical and archival work. Along with the aforementioned examples of Cameron’s (2006) archival study of alternative education in the Malting House School, Hörschelmann’s (2015) historical research on war representation and promotion establishes parallels between the affective role of childhood in military politics across different spatial and historical contexts. This overview highlights how methodological approaches to children’s emotional geographies are rooted in the sub-disciplinary scholarship of children’s and emotional geographies, but they at the same time exceed them. The challenges in addressing the epistemological distance between adults and children, as well as in understanding and conveying the fleeting character of emotions, have been addressed by methodologies that tend to integrate multiple techniques, often reach beyond narratives, and in general welcome experiments. Intersecting with themes of temporality, memory, embodiment, or visuality (among others), the methodological debates in children’s emotional geographies thus consequently relate and open new prospects also for conceptual advancement of the discipline.

5

Concluding Remarks and Further Agendas

The scope of this chapter is inevitably partial, and its focus was threefold: to theorize how emotions can serve to speculate about the relational constitution of childhood and adulthood; to explore the spatial diversity of the role emotions play in children’s lives; and to discuss key methodological approaches and challenges in researching children’s emotional geographies. To conclude the chapter, the following paragraphs briefly outline three themes that have been addressed in the existing scholarship, but all of which still pose a significant challenge as well as promise to the advancement of the sub-discipline. First, studies of children’s emotional geographies would benefit from a more sustained consideration to the implications of similarities and differences across the globe. As the case studies presented in this chapter suggest, the theorization of emotions in children’s lives has been concentrated largely within the Global North, although there are significant exceptions situated in the Global South (Robson et al. 2006; Evans 2011a, 2012; Ansell et al. 2015; Beazley 2015; Radcliffe and Webb 2016; Kassa 2016) and, to a lesser extent, in post-socialist regions (Disney 2015; Blazek 2016). Research exploring global and transnational mobilities, experiences, imaginations, and connections might in particular facilitate the development of such a relational approach (Pain et al. 2010; Cahill 2010; Burrell 2011; Pratt 2012; Wood et al. 2012; Baillie Smith et al. 2013; Moskal 2015; Mas Giralt 2015; Cheung Judge 2015, 2016), but theorizing emotions has yet to take place more firmly within the wider debates about “global” childhoods (Wells 2015). Second, there is further scope for explorations of compound relations between children’s lives, emotions, and particular facets of social difference. Research on axes of social difference in relation to children’s emotional geographies is profound and includes considerations of disability and bodily difference (Skelton and

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Valentine 2003; Holt 2007, 2010; Davidson 2007; Fenton et al. 2013; WindramGeddes 2013; Horton 2017), gender and sexuality (Valentine et al. 2003; Cahill 2007; Davidson 2007; Bromley and Stacey 2012), class (Brown 2011; Nayak 2015; Kassa 2016; Pimlott-Wilson 2017) and race, and ethnicity and religion (Botterill et al. 2016; Cheung Judge 2016; Nayak 2017). Yet, there is arguably an added potential in paying more attention to intersectionality (Richter 2015; Kustatscher 2017) as both an epistemological and methodological tool (Rodó-de-Zárate 2017). Attending to the emplacement of social difference across various domains of children’s lives generates the potential to shed light on how systematic marginalization of children in “different spaces, places and times” (Konstantoni et al. 2017, p.1) as well as children’s resistance entails and generates emotional dynamics. Finally, while emotions have been central to geographical conceptualizations of childhood over the last decade, there is arguably a significant scope for questioning how the category of childhood can provide alternative theorizations of emotions (Higham 2017). Relational perspectives on childhood and adulthood (discussed partly in section 2), research on intergenerationality (Vanderbeck and Worth 2015; Richardson 2015a, b), or intersections of geography and psychoanalysis (Aitken and Herman 1997; Holt 2013; Blazek 2013; Thomas 2014) are just a few examples in which the theorization of childhood can help geographers think through the particularities of emotions.

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Contents 1 2 3 4

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spaces of Affect in Children’s Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deep Mapping of Children’s Emotions and Affects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Engaging with Affective Geovisualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The Mood Meter and Bio Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Smiley Sticker Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Ethnopoetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Creative Mapping and Geovisualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Children’s geographers have particular interests in children’s embodied experiences of space, and how those experiences are spatially and socially constructed. The theory of affect presents us with a unique way of understanding children’s creative and emotionally engaged interactions with people and places in their community. This chapter introduces affective geovisualization as a qualitative and emotional form of geographic visualization through which children may elicit their own accounts and feelings. Affective geovisualization provides a visual meaning-making process to both researchers and children for building digital deep maps and an array of visual representations of children’s hybrid experiences of the physical and emotional worlds, as they are experienced between their bodies and environments. I pay particular attention to emerging discussions of emotion and affect across various disciplines and their intersection with J.-K. Jung (*) Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington-Bothell, Bothell, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_22

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geographic visualization, which offers a new way of articulating and representing children’s experiences and their contextualized spatial narratives. This chapter also makes an effort to represent non-representable children’s affective and emotional geographies by contributing to the theory of emotion/affect and children’s geographies in relation to mapping and geovisualization. Keywords

Affective geovisualization · Nonrepresentational theory · Visual methodology · Children’s geographies · Deep maps

1

Introduction

On September 30, 2003, an 11-year-old girl, Melinda (all participating children’s names are pseudonyms to protect their identities), was shot while playing cards with her cousin on the sidewalk along Massachusetts Avenue near her home in the Westside neighborhood of Buffalo, New York (Thomas2003). The bullet tore through her right shoulder, but thankfully she survived following surgery to close the wound. Nonetheless, she experienced ongoing suffering due to the resulting pain and stress and was very afraid to go home again or was fearful when she went to the outside world. I heard about these events from Johanna, one of the children participating in a local research project, who lived in a multicultural Hispanic Lower Westside neighborhood that was not far from where the shooting occurred. The project was a multiyear research collaboration entitled “Children’s Urban Geography”; my research was particularly focused on examining children’s meanings of community and combining child-centered research and qualitative geovisualization methodology (see Cope (2008) and Jung (2015) for more information about this project). As part of my research for that day, I planned an outside community photo activity: kids would tour the neighborhoods around the club (one of the organizations in Buffalo providing an after-school program that the kids often called “the club”) and take their own community photos while collecting Global Positioning Systems (GPS) waypoints of their interests. I also planned to ask them to write narratives of what they took photos of, where they took photos, and, more importantly, why they took these as their community photos. Using photography as a (visual) research method (i.e., photo elicitation) is often discussed in research with children and young people (e.g., Leonard and McKnight 2015; Pyyry 2015, 2016), and I hoped that a visual method like community photos would increase the children’s power to express their perception of their community in ways that might not be possible through writing or verbal conversation. However, the activity was postponed, as the shooting had made most of the participating children very frightened of venturing outside of the club. Fear (of violence) was a key factor controlling their movement in cities; accordingly, it is increasingly discussed regarding the socio-spatial mobility and exclusion of children and youth (e.g., Skelton 2000; Gough and Franch 2005; Benwell 2013). Instead, we stayed at the club and did an improvised project. I photocopied a map of the inner city of Buffalo and asked the

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children to mark and talk about their most and least favorite places to hang out. Mi-Mi said that she rarely went out to play around her home neighborhood because she had often heard scary stories of crimes and dangerous people. She once told me that she had even heard a shooting while she was lying on her bed. Her favorite places were mainly the club and her school, where she could interact with people she wanted to. Jay was marking places on a printed Google Map I had provided and showed me areas he thought were not at all safe to walk along. He said, “my mom said there are a lot of thieves, and if people are scared, they will stab you.” Frisiosa heard Jay’s comment and responded, “I would rather go to New Jersey [where her aunt lives]. I am really scared to go [to that place].” Even though there were some fun places to go, the dominantly marked avoidable spaces on the map clearly visualized children’s emotions (i.e., fear of violence) toward particular places in their community. Emotion and affect invite us to pay attention to children’s encountering capacity formed through interaction, engagement, and emotional exchange with other children. These terms do not merely refer to the individual’s present emotional state; rather, they capture how affect and our bodily expressions of it are already “mediated” and particularly emerged from specific material, social, cultural, and political arrangements (Anderson 2015). Here, affect refers to the process of transition our body goes through when we encounter other bodies, and affect occurs in relations between objects or entities and their interactions with other entities or the broader environment (Anderson 2006). Thrift (2004, p. 58) called this “the spatial politics of affect” and considered it central to the life of cities and how we conceive of urban spaces. He argued that individuals experience enormous emotional costs and benefits in being shaped by particular institutions in particular ways, and urban spaces and times are designed to invoke affective responses according to practical and theoretical knowledge derived from and coded in urban spaces (Thrift 2004, pp. 67–68). Although his focus was on articulating an engineered form of urban landscape, and how this could be affectively registered within cities, this insight helps to clarify the significance of affect in cities, and how affects have always been with us in considering what urban landscapes “do” and how people perceive them. It also illuminates the critical point that affect is not merely individualized emotions but is understood as a form of “thinking” that is often indirect, non-reflective, and nonrepresentational (Shields 2008). What it suggests is a new possibility and recognition of affect as a different kind of intelligence and suggests that much of the discussion of affect in urban literature, in particular, has been limited and neglected. We need to be attuned to research the spatialities of affect and to recognize the importance of affect to the experience and production of not only emotional but also social, cultural, and political spaces. Additionally, the consideration of affect and emotions, and their intersection with geographic visualization, will also offer a new way of articulating and representing children’s and young people’s experiences and their contextualized spatial narratives. Scholarship addressing children’s urban geographies has focused on rethinking of children as “agents” with their own will, regarding children’s conceptualization of the places in which they live and emphasizing the role of space in supporting

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children’s geographies. James et al. (1998) advocated thinking of children as “beings” rather than “becomings” to emphasize their distinct politics and identification as children rather than becoming adults from the developmental perspective of becoming. However, Aitken (1994, 2001) and others have contested this by arguing that children are “becoming others” (from a Deleuzian affective perspective) rather than “being the same” as adults. This particularly connects with theories of agency, embodiment, and emotion and research examining children’s experiences of urban spaces (Hackett et al. 2015). Regarding the discussion of emotion in children’s geographies, some researchers have already considered emotion as “relational” and have identified how emotion might constitute children’s experiences of place at various geographic scales (Bartos 2013; Blazek 2015; Blazek and Kraftl 2015). I agree that children’s emotional and affective embodiment and engagement with their spaces are important topics and that they particularly make us consider that we cannot merely “represent” what children already know and feel but must be part of the process of representing their affective spaces. In order to do that, we need to reconsider the geographies of emotion and affect and continue developing and reflecting new theoretical and methodological possibilities in mapping out children’s and youth’s emotional and affective geographies. Affective geovisualization is the visual representation of emotional and affective forms of individuals’ spatial knowledge and narratives and their embodied experiences of spatial relationships; it offers a means of representing children’s emotional spaces, and how children’s visual meaning-making process is not only “felt” but also felt as it is sensed through their “embodied” experiences. That is, research should not only focus on merely visualizing children’s emotions in/of spaces but also address how emotions and affects (the definitions of affect and emotions vary, and these two concepts are often used interchangeably. However, I distinguish affect from emotions as the how of emotion or the motion of emotion (Thien 2005, p. 451). Affect is often prior to a knowable/expressed emotion, and it has a (more) transpersonal capacity of “affecting” and “being affected” (Anderson 2006; Pile 2010; Simpson 2014). The question should be how emotions constitute, and are constituted by, a range of places in various scales and geographical contexts (Blazek and Kraftl 2015). Under the name of “geographic visualization” or “geovisualization,” geographers have long explored ways of visualizing spatial information and the spatialization of geographic data (e.g., geographical information science (GIS) maps). Geovisualization particularly makes us see the visualized material more personally and closely, with a great deal of context, in order to reveal new things from the visual (Dykes et al. 2005; Slocum et al. 2009). Another important characteristic of geovisualization is the integration of multi-format data (e.g., texts, tables, photos, and audio and video data) with spatial information. Traditional maps based on Cartesian logics usually provided the visualization (only) based on quantified numerical values (Seigworth 2011). To fully understand the significance of geovisualization, qualitative geovisualization supports the idea that the visualized data should not be limited to quantitative and numerical data but could be also expanded to multi-format qualitative media (Jung 2015). This expands the capacity of geovisualization to better represent people’s experiential and interpretive

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knowledge of geographic spaces, as these often have qualitative forms. Blending of qualitative geovisualization and children’s geographies facilitates research with children and enables learning with them by allowing further insight into children’s understanding of geographic spaces. Additionally, affective geovisualization further extends a new possibility of geovisualization, in particular, not only supporting a more nuanced children’s experiential and interpretative knowledge but also displaying emergent processes and affective capacity. Affective geovisualization addresses geovisual representation’s capacity to elicit and represent “affective” meanings and thereby facilitate children’s representation of space and place. We can create affective geovisualization by displaying where particular sensed information (e.g., the moods, emotions, sounds, smells) is located and linking this to children’s commentaries, photos, or other multimedia contents. However, the inclusion of multi-format data does not automatically and fully convey individual meanings, feelings, or emotions of spaces; this establishes a need for a more appropriate and nuanced geovisual representation of affects. In this regard, the discussion of affective and emotional geography and visualization alongside children’s geographies is timely and relevant. We can particularly draw from the earlier works of children’s cognitive mapping, critical and qualitative GIS, and geovisualization in children’s urban geographies and connect with recently emerging scholarship in nonrepresentational theories. Particular attention should be paid to how and what this previous research allows us to see as an innovative potential for integrating geographic visualization and mapping with new forms of data grounded in children’s experiential, interpretative, and emotional/affective understanding of geographic spaces. This chapter consists of four parts, this introduction being the first. The following section presents discussion of the geographies of emotion and affect, in relation to children’s urban geographies (due to the focus of my research interests, I mainly focus on the urban in this chapter; however, the present discussion of affects and affective geovisualization may also importantly relate to research with children in rural areas). The third section will focus on deep mapping and geovisualization of children’s emotions and affects and their affective spaces. Various theories and practices of affective geovisualization will be discussed, in relation to earlier research in critical and qualitative GIS and a recent convergence of geographic visualization, art, and the digital humanities. Particular modes of engaging with children and youth affective geovisualization will be presented in the fourth section. The final concluding section will reflect on the potential of affective geovisualization regarding the study of children’s emotional geographies.

2

Spaces of Affect in Children’s Geographies

The overlooking of ineffable facets of emotional experience and spaces was common until their recent enframing as important components of understanding the spatialities of children and their embodied sensory engagements with their environment (Anderson 2006; Horton and Kraftl 2006; Bartos 2013; Blazek and Kraftl 2015).

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Simpson (2014) argued for greater emphasis of the significance of affect regarding the experience and production of social spaces. Particularly regarding children’s geographies, Aitken (2005) proposed that all relationships are emotionally charged, and the emotional spaces between adults and children – in his case, between parents and children – are no exception. The starting point of an analysis of affect and affective mapping is closely related to a range of “nonrepresentational theories,” which has become almost an umbrella term for diverse work including more-than-textual, multisensual, and “more-than-representational theory” (Lorimer 2005; Anderson and Harrison 2010; Anderson 2015). Works on nonrepresentational theories have examined a break with any assumption that life is organized through some types of transcendent form (Anderson 2015, p. 21) and opened up renewed attention to affectively imbued experience in cultural studies (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Lorimer (2005) proposed that many seemingly insignificant phenomena and experiences in our everyday life are often taken for granted; for example, emotion and affects may be components of “busyness” (Lorimer’s term) that constitute plentiful evidence of “more-than-representational” thinking being put to work and emerging in unexpected forms (2005, p. 84). Building out of the phenomenological tradition, Thrift (2004, p. 60) considered affect as a set of “embodied practices” that produce visible conduct. This proposal understands affect as the richly expressive and aesthetic combination of feeling, behavior, and continual becoming that is provided mainly by bodily states and processes. This is a constitutive characteristic of affect. Additionally, emotional and affective relations and embodied experiences were central to the Situationist International (SI) revolutionary project of urban exploration in France in the early 1950s (McDonough 2002; Pinder 2005, 2008). The members of SI understood the everyday life experience by truly engaging with the city and aimed at openness to encounter with people and place. The Situationists called for exploring the city by “drifting” [the practice of the dérive] freely through it, “where the principal activity is continuous drift. . .encounters with other people and with places, and of ideas about enhancing those encounters-those situations” (Sadler 1998, pp. 93–94). They also described their work as a science of relations and ambiances and examined the specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals (O’Rourke 2013). Current interests in embodied practices with roots in the SI project provide access to the emotional and imaginative aspects of city life (Pile 2010). The SI project offers a way to think about the city as “a sensuous realm that is imagined, lived, performed and contested” (Pinder 2008, p. 730). The SI project’s artworks took place in the streets, finding meaning through embodied action and drawing attention to the psychogeographical experience of the city. The movement of emotion in urban space was an integral part of these works (Thrift 2004; Perkins 2009; Hawkins 2011). Affect is also a momentary, and often arises in the midst of, in-betweenness in the capacity to act and be acted upon (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, p. 3). Gregg and Seigworth (2010, p. 2) propose that affect is in many ways synonymous with forces or forces of encounter, which often emerge from muddy, unmediated relatedness and not in some dialectical reconciliation of clearly oppositional elements or primary

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units. This claim resembles that of Anderson’s (2015). As a general characteristic of affect, Anderson (2015, pp. 13–14) considers affect as a constant and active process that is, what he calls, “always-already mediated.” This expression means that affects are not reducible to the material collectives that they emerge from. He particularly argues that the thinking and expansion of the affectual and emotional begins with an alternative attunement to affect. It considers affect as a “capacity” rather than existing property of the body, which a body must be affected by and affect (Anderson 2015, p. 10). The idea of being affected/affecting implies that that a body is always imbricated in a constitutive set of relations. For example, regarding the affectual and emotional elements of social and cultural geography, Anderson (2006) found that the realization or disappointment of hope (as examples of affects) may animate or deplete music consumption and the affective geographies of everyday life. These discussions of affect invite us to see how and why affect is nonrepresentational and to think about affect’s implication for children’s and youth’s geographies. Nonrepresentational theories keenly point out the limitations of “representation,” particularly considering that representation cannot fully represent affect and our attention to affect. However, such theory also notes that affects need not preclude an attention to representation. In fact, it prompts us to redefine representation. Attention must remain focused on how representations function affectively, and how affective life is implicated with representation. The relationship between affect and visualization/representation remains important and grounds analysis of affective geovisualization or geographic visualization of affects, in relation to children’s geographies. Blazek (2015) recently overviewed the history of children’s geographies and emotional geographies and proposed the importance of “children’s emotional geography”: children’s emotions are inseparable from their social, cultural, economic, and political environment and should be “situated” within the wider context of their lives, through a thread of themes connecting various theories and practices of children’s emotions and space. Similarly, Horton and Kraftl (2006) suggested the importance of “mattering” in children’s lives and the co-constitutive nature of emotional geographies based on the relationships between children and adults. This places emotion in the context of intersubjective relations, rather than merely in the realm of personal feelings, which may be considered separate from other contextual issues and relations (Thien 2005). Once we understand the importance of children’s embodied and affectual geographies, the next question concerns ways we may articulate and represent children’s emotional spaces. Continuous development of and attentiveness to theoretical and methodological innovations including children’s emotional experiences are required. Following Horton and Kraftl (2006), we might not only miss an important portion of what matters in children’s lives but also fail to grasp the role of emotions in children’s geographies. We need to continue thinking about how we might attend to children’s emotional experiences of space and engage with them. Such consideration requires an engagement with innovative methodological frameworks, both inside and outside geography, that fully appreciate the spatialities of children’s emotions and affects. This is an invitation to the deeper considerations of children’s

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spaces, in relation to the social, the cultural, and the emotional (Horton and Kraftl 2006; Thien 2011; Blazek and Krakfl 2015). The key questions (often neglected in engagement with children) are how to embed affect in children’s space and time and how to map the spatial play of affect. Answering these questions will illuminate the complex process of affective practices.

3

Deep Mapping of Children’s Emotions and Affects

Children’s urban geography is a field that focuses particular attention on how children’s experiences and opportunities of urban space are spatially and socially constructed. There is now a rich body of scholarship in children and youth geographies arguing that children and young people play a critical role in the making of urban spaces and providing insightful accounts of children’s experiences and interpretations of urban space (Aitken 1994; Skelton and Valentine 1998; Aitken 2001; Christensen and O’Brien 2003; Malone 2003; Horton and Kraftl 2006; Hörschelmann and van Blerk 2008). Much scholarship on the geography of children and youth in the 1970s and 1980s was located in the intersections of geography and environmental psychology and planning; additionally, much attention has been given to children’s environmental and spatial cognition (Blaut and Stea 1971; Bunge 1973; Hart 1979; Lynch 1979). These projects focused on children as becoming adults from a developmental perspective and carefully examined children’s spatial ability and cognition by asking children’s memories and experiences of space. Children became a subject of research; children’s environmental cognition and their different use of space were researched, in particular, by applying various innovative methods that remain in use now (e.g., sketch mapping, auto-photography, and community wayfinding/journeys). Although a focus on emotions and affects is mostly unconcerned with cognitive development, that topic constituted an important development, given that few studies have focused on children and addressed children’s perception of urban space. Nonetheless, the tradition of developmental and environmental psychology was limited by its focus on spatial cognition. Matthews and Limb (1999) argue that this often undermined understanding of the social and cultural aspects of space and their intricate relationship with environmental and spatial cognition. Subsequently, various aspects of children’s and young people’s perspectives on space were further discussed, leading to a more theorized social, cultural, and urban geography of younger people (Skelton and Valentine 1998; Matthews and Limb 1999; Holloway and Valentine 2000). Children have very creative ways of articulating their conceptualization of urban space by capturing nuanced and fluid meanings of it; these conceptualizations include a range of social, cultural, and spatial elements. For example, exploring diverse meanings of community through the eyes of children, Jung (2015) examines children’s meanings of community in order to make children part of the research and allow them to reach a self-generated understanding of what constitutes community for them, rather than simply to represent children’s understanding of the concept of community. Creating a research process and various kinds of activities that permitted

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children to fully express their thoughts (e.g., neighborhood walks, community photos, arts, and mapping) was thus an important part of the project; this was considered ‘doing community’. This research also focused on developing a hybrid framework integrating a range of forms of data, analysis, and representation often seen as incompatible (e.g., qualitative and quantitative, maps and texts, and visuality and numeracy) (Jung 2009). It is now time to extend this discussion of integrating multiple modes of data and representation through participatory mapping and geovisualization by developing a new integrated approach that can generate stronger and more nuanced geographical insights into children’s emotions/affect and their emotional/affective geographies. The important question here is the extent to which we might be able to represent children’s emotions and affect, and what might be other new modalities of children’s embodied experience beyond traditionally used modes reliant on speaking and writing (which may not fully reflect children’s emotions and affect). Affective geovisualization is a way to engage with children’s emotions and “map out” children’s emotional geographies by channeling their various articulations and expressions. Children’s emotional practices in urban space are quite often negotiated, contested, and resisted differently at different scales. I propose affective geovisualization as a way of cocreating visual representations of children’s geographies that can affect and be affected. Affective geovisualization can be placed in the domain of critical cartography and spatial humanities. The notion of deep mapping is helpful, which is a term first coined by William Least Heat-Moon (1991) in PrairyErth. It was an approach that attempted to present “the grain and patina of place” through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, and the discursive and the sensual (Bodenhamer 2010, p. 27). In relation, Harris (2015) opted for the term deep geography, spatial storytelling, and spatial narrative and attempted to situate these concepts within a conceptual and methodological framework that could be brought to bear to deconstruct, reconstruct, and redefine these concepts. He suggests that the final goal of these efforts is to explore and attain a deeper understanding of places, as distinguishable from that of physical space (Harris 2015, p. 29). The notions of deep mapping and deep geography help us to move from the Cartesian world of observation to a living world where the physical world is experienced through our embodied sense of being in the world. It is an acknowledgment that accurate and precise mapping may not fully represent the significance and contextual meanings of place and people, which are often engendered by a nuanced, non-reductionist and deeply contingent conceptualization of place. Furthermore, the characteristics of place and people’s perception of it are often “qualitative,” such as sound, smell, images, emotions, and affects. The past two decades have seen a tremendous growth in efforts to understand the roles of the traditional position of geographic information science (GIS) and their underlying theories in both research and everyday life. These are all parts of numerous emerging ways of conducting critical scholarship with mapping that can be defined as diverse evolutions of critical mapping and critical GIS. Critical GIS, in particular, has increasingly challenged the use of GIS in nonconventional ways (e.g., feminist GIS, Kwan 2002; Schuurman and Pratt 2002) and tried to find a

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way to reflect various epistemologies and ontologies and unfolded the mutual relationship between GIS and society (Sheppard 1995; Schuurman 1999; Knigge and Cope 2009; Elwood 2010). A new evolution, resulting in the discussion of affective geovisualization, is the convergence of geography, mapping, and the humanities and arts, which may be conceptualized as “spatial humanities” or “geohumanities” (Daniels et al. 2011; Dear et al. 2011). By extending the emerging discussions of critical mapping and GIS, and spatial humanities, we can also move deep mapping into the “digital” in the contemporary hybrid digital/material world we live in. I particularly suggest various forms of affective geovisualization as innovative ways for us not only to describe space but also to imagine and produce qualitative, artistic, and humanistic experiential, visual, and “emotional” deep maps in virtual space. This trend represents an evolution of our ways of integrating critical research of mapping and geographic visualization with children’s geographies, which has challenged the use of maps in creative ways. This perspective helps us to move from the Cartesian world of observation to a living world where the physical world is experienced through an embodied sense of being in the world (Jung and Hiebert 2016). The expansion of the practice of geographic visualization to include emotions can help to represent children’s lives and experiences better in the visualized forms and has great potential to reveal often intangible and non-representable affective relations, along with the social, cultural, and political relations that constitute the meaning of space that children experience, interpret, and feel. Previously, qualitative GIS has attempted to build a GIS that combines traditional geographic information systems and geographic visualization with qualitative interpretive information as a multimedia form, including audio, video, and texts (Cope and Elwood 2009; Jung and Elwood 2010). The effort to incorporate GIS and geographic visualization with emotions and affects and their representation encourage us to go beyond conventional research methods that often guide researchers who work with quantitative and spatial forms of data, as well as innovative scholars who engage with qualitative forms of data. The integration of unprecedented forms of data (e.g., representation of children’s emotions and affects in space) will create a new form of geographic visualization – affective geovisualization – one related to but not limited by other innovative and traditional approaches to data gathering and visualization. How effectively affective geovisualization can produce and represent children’s emotional geographies and how the process of creating geovisualization may also affect the formation of children’s geographic knowledge are important questions we need to keep in mind and answer. We need to envision a new possibility of geovisualization, in particular how geovisualization may grapple with the questions of embodied experience, multiple representations, and emotions and affect of children and youth. There are already innovative interdisciplinary scholars who have engaged with these questions, especially with artistic and humanistic concepts and approaches, to create various modes of mapping. The following section will provide these great examples and approximations of “practicing” children and youth affective geovisualization.

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Engaging with Affective Geovisualization

Aitken and Craine (2006) first coined the term, “affective geovisualization,” and they considered that affective geovisualization functions by creating an affective embodiment that exceeds the spatial bounds of the organic body (Craine and Aitken 2009, pp. 151–152). It is fascinating to hear how they clearly demonstrate that “affectivity” can introduce the power of “creativity” into the experiential process. Here, geographic data may function to trigger affectivity and operate a transfer of affective power from the image to the body, thereby allowing the body to become virtual. Instead of a static dimension intrinsic to the image, affectivity thereby becomes the medium of interface with the image. What this means is that affectivity, as the crucial element, is neither image nor body alone but a dynamic interaction allowing any visualized geographic data set (e.g., GIS maps, films, and/or movies) to impact our embodied affectivity directly and more intensely. In other words, our geographical engagement with the data – and with a geovisualization in particular – becomes more rewarding. Craine and Aitken (2009, p. 160) also argue that “affectivity” may require a different form of geovisual analysis. In other words, the viewers of a digital image (e.g., a cinema film) may enter the experiential, affective realm between objective seeing and subjective feeling. Here, the user becomes an active participant through a virtual, yet tactile, interface with the image. An image spatializes the body through empirical experience with technology and interfaces that “connect and interfuse different spheres of activity on the same operational plane.” (Massumi 2002, p. 192). What we may learn from these arguments is that maps that represent the world also take the viewer into an imagined and emotional space. It is a conceptual shift to realize that our understanding of the power of representation is moved to “nonrepresentational” ways of knowing. Affective geovisualization, as an example of the extended realm of geovisualization, should not be just data driven but also context-driven spatial visualization that values not only quantitative positivistic perspectives but also qualitative, artistic, and humanistic aspects that will be well coordinated with an unbounded multiplicity of place-based meanings, experiences and interpretations, and “affects” that children have in their spaces. Constructing affective geovisualization to display the transformative nature of new types of data and visualization will allow us to see new insights into the diverse, often intangible meanings of space held by children. The development of geospatial and mapping technology (e.g., GIS, GPS) helps to entail emotional involvement and to express meanings, memories, feelings, and emotions in a digital mapping environment (Kwan 2007; Young and Gilmore 2013). Geographic visualization becomes more “expressive” than “representational” and “analytical” as it takes distinctly visual, artistic, and humanistic forms (Kwan 2007). It is a demonstration of how affectivity and its engagement with a digital technology introduces an array of (non)representations of people’s mediated hybrid experience on the real and virtual worlds. This could include what Wilson (2011, p. 370) called “conspicuous mobility,” which forms “emergent cartographies of mediated everyday life and various activities through geo-visual technologies.”

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These discussions emphasize the importance of bodily affective and unrepresentable dimensions of existence and turn our attention from a god’s eye perspective of representation to more grounded and contingent bodies, emotions, practices, and performances. Kwan (2007) well articulates the implication of geospatial technology including mapping that entails people’s emotional involvement and that it helps to express emotions, feelings, memories, and meanings. In this context, what might constitute an example of the (geo)visualization of children’s emotions and affects, in relation to GIS and geovisualization technologies? I present four potential modes of affective geovisualization for representing children’s embodied and emotional geographies.

4.1

The Mood Meter and Bio Mapping

Various methods exist for identifying and labeling emotions, among them is the “Mood Meter,” which is increasingly being adopted in schools and has become part of the K-12 (K-12 refers to primary and secondary education in the US and Canada, and it is a shortening of kindergarten for 5- to 6-year-olds through to 12th grade for 17- to 18-year-olds) school curriculum in the US and Canada. The Anchors of Emotional Intelligence project was initiated by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (http://ei.yale.edu/ruler) and aims to enhance emotional intelligence among school leaders, teachers, staff, and students. The Mood Meter, in particular, is used for projecting the condition of students’ emotions in class throughout the day and learning how students’ emotions subsequently affect their actions. The theory behind this tool is that emotional literacy strongly affects student development and outcomes and may enhance academic curriculum achievement and teaching-learning interactions. Students typically plot their emotions on the Mood Meter in the morning, which helps students and educators to recognize the scope of students’ emotional state on that day (see, Fig. 1). As students’ emotions change throughout the day, the students move their emotional marker among the Mood Meter’s quadrants. The Mood Meter appears to fully use the power of geovisualization to help students to locate their emotions in the physical feeling of their body; it allows any children who may lack the vocabulary to talk about emotion to usefully and visually communicate their emotions. It can also effectively help teachers and children to maintain and manage their emotions, allowing them to make better decisions for themselves and others around them. Nonetheless, I doubt this quadratic plane fully captures the emotional climate of each student at school and how their emotions affect their actions and how others feel. Additionally, this tool seems intended to facilitate measurement and regulation of children’s emotions rather than their appreciation and empathy. Despite the potential of emotional literacy and visualization as key components of social emotional qualitative of classrooms, the Mood Meter appears to primarily constitute a form of monitoring or surveillance of children and their behaviors in the classroom. Bio Mapping and neuroscientific approaches provide another way of thinking about and visualizing children’s affects. Christian Nold (2009) stated that Bio

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Fig. 1 Children’s emotions located on the mood meter (Image from elementarycounseling. blogspot.ca)

Mapping is emerging as a critical reaction toward pervasive technology, which aims for new technologies to be integrated everywhere, including in daily life and bodies. His “emotional cartography” project was particularly intended for recording, visualizing, and sharing people’s intimate body states. The key technologies were GPS, galvanic skin responses (GSR), and GIS. The project participants wore GSR sensors to record a simple indicator of emotional arousal, in conjunction with GPS points and digital maps. The emotional maps showed a series of variations in arousal and represented these on the map as dots of various colors. GSR is able to approximate a range of emotional states; however, it is not able to distinguish between (different) forms of emotional arousal (e.g., between happiness and anger). The visualized information is limited to people’s scientifically measured/ quantified biometric data. A typical outcome of the Bio Mapping project shows all the participants’ tracks in a popular digital mapping interface (e.g., Google Earth). More impressively, participants’ annotations to point along their track that they considered important or memorable were added later. Despite this limitation, Bio Mapping shows a significant attempt at recording and measuring different levels of affect and demonstrates that maps and mapping may be performative, participatory, and interactive representations of emotional and spatial information. It presents a powerful methodological tool for representing children’s feelings along with their movements and permits particular examination of affect as a nonrepresentational modality.

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Smiley Sticker Project

Children have a creative ability to represent their experiential and emotional understanding of their environment. The improvised mapping activity mentioned earlier in this chapter took such a creative turn. Angie, a participating child, started to place round stickers on the printed Google Map I had provided. She had brought these stickers as good behavior rewards for her little brother. They depicted smiley faces and used a range of color and types of (funny) face. She used these as map symbols that uniquely represented the meanings she associated with particular places in the neighborhood (Fig. 2). Different smiley face stickers represented different associated feelings, for example, preferred and undesirable places. She attracted considerable attention from the group, with all the children wanting to get stickers from her and placed them on their own maps. This became one of the most popular projects for many of the children. This moment reminded me of children’s creativity and agency, and these properties’ ability to animate projects with children, especially when children are fully included in the research process. Angie pulled in tools (e.g., stickers) designed to be used in a different affective context – rewarding good behavior by her little brother – and linked these tools with an emotional mapping activity connected with emotions and experiences. She could see an affinity between the two and provided an innovative way of enhancing the geovisualization of her map. Simultaneously, each sticker held a special spatial meaning that could be understood as constituting affective geovisualization. The children created their own map symbols for representing their emotions and affects toward particular places in the city. This also prompts us to be open to a creative platform allowing children to freely encode

Fig. 2 Smiley face stickers as children’s own visual symbols of their emotions

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and coproduce visualizations better representing their emotional and affective understanding of their environments. These smiley stickers are a simple example of affective geovisualization; however, they show how affective geovisualization can invite children to be part of the research process as producers of affective geovisualization.

4.3

Ethnopoetics

Aitken (2014, 2015) suggests a transformative esthetic method he calls “ethnopoetry,” as an attempt to create a critical map that speaks to/from young people’s emotional landscapes, regarding youth engagement and activism. Ethnopoetics responds well to the call for an analysis of the affective and nonrepresentational aspects of visual representation in/with maps. It explicitly considers the emotions that undergird the ways political changes occur from the perspective of children and young people. Ethnopoetry is a representational method differing starkly from traditional social science uses of multi-format data (e.g., texts with images); it particularly provides an artistic and humanistic rendering of “emotions” that exceed the text, especially by intermingling images, dialogic devices, and “poetic stanzas” (Aitken 2014, p. x). Aitken (2014) argues that spaces are transformative and that complex social, cultural, and political practices are interwoven and simultaneously embolden young people in spaces. He visualizes the complexity of young people’s geographies “poetically,” so as not to undermine the importance of affect and emotions (See, Fig. 3). Speaking of his lyrical experiment with visual media, Aitken (2014, p. 9) said that “if poetry is an emotive construction of language, then, his arrogance [attempt] is to re-visualize, contort and arrange Fig. 3 The story of Mason from the San Diego homeless youth project (Included in Aitken’s (2014) “The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation”)

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people’s words and gestures to create something that speaks to their emotions.” This clearly reflects his attempt to represent the non-representable elements of stories or emotions drawn from among marginalized young people and shows that young people’s affective capacity may be enriched through ethnopoetry. Ethnopoetry is often derived from qualitative ethnographic research methods (e.g., interviews, transcripts, and participant observation and experimentation with visual and playful methodologies). For example, images are used where appropriate to highlight the importance of spatialities that embolden emotions, and text is used to provide contexts that reveal the emotional power of a visual rendering. Aitken’s intention is to offer a space where the participants can create the genre mixing of poetry with dialog, images, and maps, and thereby revisualize, contort, and arrange their words and gestures to create something that speaks to their emotions. Various modes of engagement and methods of analysis are applied in working with children and young people. Drawings or sketches have become an effective research medium, both for the production of tangible data and for stimulating conversation on relevant topics (e.g., community, neighborhood, cities, and social relations; Fig. 4). This may be expanded to include more qualitative and affective data (e.g., texts, photos, and children’s poems) that are linked to particular places (e.g., Puerto Rico) that children are attached to and places they would want to further discuss. A drawing with associated lyrics, composed by a child of Puerto Rican heritage, offers insight into the production of place-based identity and the visual meaning-making process. Viewers can begin to perceive the emotive and affective spaces of a child in this drawing. It will be always partial and incomplete; however, simultaneously, a “sincere and promising attempt” (Aitken 2014, p. x) is required to represent children’s emotional spaces of children and also in order to enrich their affective capacities. Affective geovisualization (e.g., through ethnopoetry) provides a multisensory ontology of the individual that proffers a very different understanding Fig. 4 The community sketches with a narrative

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of the affective condition, and it may open up a deeper geographic analysis of children. I believe Aitken’s ethnopoetics is a powerful example of deep mapping and affective geovisualization and the one through which we may attempt to represent the non-representable children’s emotional and affective geographies.

4.4

Creative Mapping and Geovisualization

A humanistic and artistic alternative to GIS, mapping, and geovisualization provides promising examples of affective geovisualization with children. In particular, the current discussion of the geographical study of artworks (e.g., paintings, photos, sculptures, and music) contributes to contemporary disciplinary debates around embodied experience, practice, and more-than-human worlds (Hawkins 2011) and provides another framework for affective geovisualization. This attentiveness to art practices and theories reconsiders art as a “site” rather than the finished object and allows us to appreciate what “art” has to offer to the development of geographical knowledge and the formation of geographical subjects. Chiming with current interest in embodiment and experiential knowledge, some geographers have provided access to the imaginative and emotional aspects of city life (Ingold 2000; Pinder 2005, 2008; Pile 2010). A wide range of visual methods (e.g., photography, video, mind mapping) have been used in children and youth research, often in creative ways (Horton and Kraftl 2006; Leonard and McKnight 2015; Pyyry 2015, 2016). For example, Pyyry (2016) suggests that the everyday emotions or affect are inherently valuable, and not merely as outcomes or educational instruments. She argues that a feeling of some significant events often exists in these encounters between the researcher, teacher, and students. She particularly applies photography as a multisensory and embodied practice, and focuses on the creative potential of taking photos (termed the “photo walk”) and the subsequent engagement of “thinking with” children in an interview (termed the “photo talk”; Pyyry 2015, p. 150). Pyyry’s approach to photography shows that affectual space in the everyday life may be touched when they are read and discussed together, as well as when photographs are taken. This reminds us that more important values are given, and new insights may be unfolded when we focus on the process of doing research “with” children and young people, rather than on applying a new method and merely collecting data. Here, Pyyry’s use of photography is an example of creative mapping as well as affective geovisualization, since the photograph, as a visual representation, is understood to be performative, and reading with photos is an event of “becoming” with the data (Anderson 2006; Seigworth 2011). Critical creative spatialities also highlight how “art” and “art practices” offer the potential to think and practice space differently (Hawkins 2014). Creative mapping particularly values creative (artistic) practices and thinking for their ability to “question, refunction, and contest prevailing norms and ideologies, and to create new meanings, experiences, relationships, understandings and situations” (Pinder 2008, p. 730). For example, Pinder (2008, p. 468) offers a way to think of the (urban) space as “a sensuous realm that is imagined, lived, performed, and contested.” In the

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Errant Paths project, following the SI legacy, Pinder (2011) aims to talk about “walking” as art and cultural practice, as well as a map of urban space, as it is performed, experienced, and felt, rather than viewed, observed, and represented. The outcome is the replacement of a fixed and static view from above with an emancipatory understanding of the city as subjective and fragmentary. Considering the propinquity of mapping to practices and theories of arts, Powell’s (2010) multisensory qualitative research method constitutes another example of affective geovisualization. Powell (2010) addresses mapping as a powerful mode of visual research that offers a means to (re)present place as lived and embodied. The case study is based on a community-based learning and research experience in El Chorrillo, Panama City. The purpose of mapping is not only to reveal the complex narratives of a particular place but also the development of students as public scholars. The photo collage method was used as a visual research method, and it served as a creative map that depicted a physical, as well as, social, cultural, and political sense of place. In terms of visual and art-based creative mapping approaches, the participating students’ collages push the limit of the cartographic conventions of mapping to the esthetic and generative potent alternatively representing the lived experience of space (see, Fig. 5 for the use of collage maps as a visual research method). This collapses space and time to evoke relationships and patterns between places and lived experiences. This method is closely related to Mitchell’s (2005) use of the concept of the palimpsest, which is an important theoretical lens that itself lends itself to multisensory analysis of the visual. The palimpsest refers to layers of rewritten text, but poststructuralist and postcolonial uses of the term have underscored palimpsest as a metaphor for the re-inscription and legibility of discourses situated within institutional power structures and for the reexamination of subjectivity (Nagel and Staeheli 2015). This is a multisensory

Fig. 5 Collage map depicting structural elements of El Chorrillo’s lived environment created by Gillian Speers (Powell’s (2010) “Making Sense of Place”)

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method or “mixing media approach” between text, photographs, and sketches to fill in the gaps with meaning. Creative mapping practices (e.g., collage maps, sound or scent walks) draw our attention to visualizing the affective experience in space with evolving visualization in various forms and offer us a rich means to destabilize Cartesian understanding and representation of space, in favor of a more artistic, generative, and relational way of depicting children’s affective geographies. Conducting creative mapping may also function as experiments of “becoming” or “becoming otherwise” for children and young people and open up new spaces for thinking. In addition, generative processes in creative mapping may attempt to consider what matters in everyday encounters (Taylor et al. 2013; Pyyry 2016). These creative practices may foster and cultivate our understanding of children and their geographies.

5

Discussions

Affective geovisualization emphasizes a “processual” logic of transitions that take place during spatially and temporally distributed encounters (Anderson 2006, p. 735) and represents how affects occur in relations between objects and entities and how these interactions or affects are “felt” as intensities in the body. Considering the relationship between “affect” and “geovisualization” in studying children’s geographies particularly requires us to address how representation and visualization also affect the production of affect; how representations may be bound up in nonrational forms of communication that have an impact upon the body but not necessarily in completely rational or reflexively considered ways (Simpson 2014, p. 332). The various modes of affective geovisualization illustrated in the previous section all present critical analyses of geographic data and ways to visualize alternative narratives that allow us to see more than we already know. One way we see and show more than we already know about children and young people is by embracing new possibilities of affects and geovisualizations in children’s geographies. Such atmospheres hold a complicated relationship with the experiencing subject, and they are, in fact, always in the process of emerging and transforming and being taken up and reworked in lived experience that becomes part of feelings, emotions, and affects. As discussed earlier, this is related to Anderson’s (2015) conceptualization of the always-mediated nature of affect. Though affect cannot be fully presented or represented, we may constantly try to map and evoke moments when affect is evident or try to believe in the affective power of maps while studying and working with children. It may be that “affects are always already ungraspable and unpresentable by thought” (Pile 2010, p. 12). However, we can continue trying to represent these (often) unpresentable or non-representable affective elements if this allows us to show more than representable in terms of our understanding of children’s affective geographies. The discussions of nonrepresentational theory do not involve a dismissal of representation but instead emphasize the importance of representation. They value representation in a different way by addressing its emergent, processual, and performative

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characteristics, which traditional maps notoriously do not display (Whatmore 2002; Anderson and Harrison 2010; Seigworth 2011; Gerlach 2014). It is time to include affective geovisualization as a way we can challenge the Cartesian representation of children and their places by moving away from presenting children’s emotions toward the emergent and processual rendering of what affects their emotion. Affective meanings can be understood by the perceptions, experiences, and interpretations that children can ascribe to a specific physical, social, or even virtual and digital space. This will lead us to contemplate a dynamic rendering of children’s geographies, rather than a static one. It will also involve rethinking the potential of geographic visualization and mapping in children’s geographies; affective geovisualization is a hitherto unmapped area that we need to fully open up and proliferate. Affective geovisualization may be what Guattari (1989) called “speculative cartograph[y],” which requires us to continue to experiment with nonrepresentational affect and affectivity while working on the map. Without dissipating the affective and immaterial elements in understanding children’s geographies (which are often ignored by the conventional process of representation), it celebrates the process of mapping of children’s emotions, and their “affective” process. Here, “affective” refers to how children are affected by their social, cultural, political, and physical environments and are affecting the way in which they experience, interpret, and feel the geovisualized (mapped) space. Therefore, it also extends discussion of how the representation of children’s emotional space and place can enable and be enabled by visualization, and how it may elicit and represent their affective meaning in the mapping process. The Mood Meter is a good example of affective (geo)visualization, as discussed above; however, it provides a limited and metricized way of representing children’s emotions. Given this, how might we visualize and represent children’s affect and affective spaces and what specific forms or data might we include in an effort to visually convey their meanings or the real “mood” of their spaces? Our intention should be less to present an ultimate measure or answer to represent children’s emotion and rather to develop new perspectives and interpretations on, and further imagine what is unknown about, children’s emotions that are spatially situated in their everyday lives. Qualitative and critical GIS researchers and their work in children’s geographies have demonstrated how we might integrate spatial information with more comprehensive and contextual information; in particular, using multiformat data (e.g., textual comments, photographs, and video and audio recordings associated with locations). We have also discussed how the recent development of post-representational interpretation and thinking of maps and “spatial turns” in many disciplines (including the arts, humanities, and media studies) might help us rethink maps (Bruno 2002; Craine and Aitken 2009; Bodenhamer 2010; Daniels et al. 2011; Rossetto 2014). Rather than the mere projection of children’s emotions onto the rigidly drawn quadrant space, we would like to embrace a critical interpretation of the children-space relationship and draw qualitative and affective “deep maps” of children, in respect to their spatial experience, for example, Cooper and Gregory’s “mood map” (2011), instead of the Mood Meter. It is also time for us to extend the discussion of children’s emotional geographies by considering affective information

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and its mutual relationship with maps and geographic visualization. This may allow for the development of new mapping possibilities that support the emergence of more hybridized practices and concepts of cartographies and mapping (Caquard 2011; Rossetto 2014). Recalling my encounters with the children in Buffalo, I rethink about the importance of children’s emotions and affect, emotional geographies, and affective geovisualization. It is now possible to clearly discern the affective atmosphere [of children] (Young and Gilmore 2013) and see how mapping and geovisualization may also produce an affective atmosphere that is set free from emotional representation. Children and young people are affected by their everyday lived experiences, thoughts, and memories about their places and, as active agents of their own, possess the capacity to affect (Pyyry 2016, p. 109). Acute fear may motivate action (e.g., being afraid of going outside and making others feel and act similarly), or it may prevent children from having sensuous experiences. Affective geovisualization visualizes and embodies a narrative voyage in a spatialized form and “an itinerary of emotions” that makes a world of affects “visible to us” (Bruno 2002, p. 6). Mapping favorable and unfavorable places in different colors, expressing emotions using stickers showing facial expressions, and multisensory mapping of children’s communities, Aitken’s (2014) “ethnopoetics,” Pyyry’s creative uses of photography (2015), and Leonard and McKnight’s (2015) and Powell’s (2010) “collage map” all demonstrate innovative and interdisciplinary possibilities for integrating the theory and practice of affective geovisualization with children’s and young people’s geographies. Franco Moretti (2007, p. 3) observed that maps might function “as analytical tools [that bring to] light relations that would otherwise remain hidden.” We may explore and experiment with the use of mapping and geovisualization as methodological innovations for representing children’s affect and affective places; however, we may also extend this discussion by opening up a new space allowing alternative ways of engaging with children and their emotional spaces. This starts with mapping affective geographies of/in children in order to map the so-called unmappable emotional space of children and young people. Affective geovisualization creates room for conversation about, and the imagining of, other ways of knowing about children’s places; it prompts us to probe the situated knowledge of children that resides in dynamic and contested memories, experiences, and feelings and to represent children’s embodied and affective geographies.

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Part IV Spaces and Places of Play, Learning, and Spirituality

Play and Playgrounds in Children’s Geographies

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Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 What Is Play? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Play in Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Play in Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Play in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Play in Children’s Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Playground Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Background in Playground Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Current and Future Directions in Research on Play and Playgrounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Research on play and playgrounds covers a huge swath of literature in children’s geographies. Studies on play can be both abstract and material and range from the well-debated differentiation between work and play to the essential nature of children and childhood. Playgrounds on the other hand are concrete, historically public, spaces. Some of the earliest research in the geography of children explored the role of the playground in children’s lives, and their playful activities in the city and country. This chapter will explore theoretical and empirical research on play and playgrounds in children’s geographies. As a review of the field, this chapter will highlight the foundational and current literature on play and playgrounds, including the origins of the Playground Movement, and will

A. M. F. Murnaghan (*) Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_12

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integrate the literature that the student of play and playgrounds in children’s geographies should know. Keywords

Play · Playgrounds · Playground Movement · Psychology · Sociology · History

1

Introduction

For many in the West, childhood is seen as a time for play; this idea is so fundamental that the right to play is entrenched in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Toys and games are important consumer goods worldwide, for children and adults alike. Play invokes ideas of leisure time, recreation, sports, and fun. Playfulness is seen to be at the core of children’s identities, and their ability to play alone, and play well with others is indicative of their normal development. Achieving certain types of play by certain ages are markers of social development. For geographers, playing is an activity that is always spatialized: it happens somewhere. This chapter will examine both the abstract and material elements of play in contemporary children’s geographies and its disciplinary precedents. It will discuss how play has been considered and how it has been spatialized in the landscape. This overview of the research on play and playgrounds will cover both the historical and contemporary literature, highlight current fields of study, and what the future may hold for research on play and playgrounds. It will attend to the geographical differences that arise in this research and integrate the important scholarship that exists outside of geography. While not an exhaustive survey of the field, it attempts to address the diversity of the perspectives on play and playgrounds, noting the historical origin of the playground, and attend to the problematic dichotomies that arise when investigating this common concept of play. The chapter is organized into four sections. The first section examines definitions of play. The second section examines the Playground Movement that created many of the playground and park spaces in North American cities. The third section discusses play in the antecedents to and earliest children’s geographies. The fourth section examines the current research on playgrounds in contemporary children’s geographies emphasizing the global variations in the content and style of these studies. Together this landscape of play introduces the reader to the key works in this broad and integrative field.

2

What Is Play?

In The Ambiguity of Play, play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith organizes the concept of play into seven rhetorics: progress, fate, power, identity, the imaginary, the self, and frivolity (2009). Through these seven lenses, Sutton-Smith highlights both the ambiguity of play, that is, its lack of precision, and its wide-ranging experience for

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animal and human, child and adult, across numerous disciplines, with different functions, forms, and players (2009: 215). The rhetorics of play range from the essential thing for human development (progress) to games of chance (fate) to the most inconsequential (frivolity), and Sutton-Smith discusses the important theorists in play from Huizinga (1949) to Piaget (Piaget and Inhelder 1969). Some geographers have critiqued the usefulness of these rhetorics as leading to a deterministic definition of play (Harker 2005; Woodyer 2012), but Sutton-Smith offers an adequate mapping, a thorough and flexible set of discourses, of how play is employed in diverse disciplines and topics. He argues against a fixed definition and instead points to play’s use in history, language, and scholarship. Thomson and Philo echo SuttonSmith’s perspective on the ambiguity of play and argue that play is a problematic category, often influenced by adultist perspectives on what looks like play, instead of a child-centered notion of play (2004). Others argue that play is not as ambiguous and each of the disciplines that Sutton-Smith brings together takes different stances on what play is and what play does; this chapter examines three fields: psychology, sociology, and history.

2.1

Play in Psychology

G. Stanley Hall earned the first doctorate in psychology in the United States and was one of the most influential thinkers in early theories of play (Hall 1883; Ross 1972). Hall was fascinated by and wrote a considerable amount of educational psychology, with his research on adolescence dominating thinking on the topic for decades (Hall 1904). Integrating the research of Freud, Jung, Darwin, and Haeckel, Hall argued for a theory of recapitulation that saw children’s development as evolving the way that societies had: from the most primitive to the most advanced. Thus children “became civilized” in their move away from beastly, wildness through different types of play. Children’s rough and tumble play gave way to more rule-based play and complex games (Frost 2009). In this view, cultural aspects emerge from a biological basis, and this change is acted out on the playground. Sigmund Freud’s work, developed further by Anna Freud (1937/1992), Erickson (1940, 1950), and Winnicott (1968, 1971), argued that play was integral in children’s integration of the material and symbolic worlds (1909/1955). Through play, defensive expressions can be practiced in a controlled environment, and the young person can use imaginary identities that would be subversive in their regular social lives. Klein further explores the role of play in psychoanalysis with children arguing that their play should be interpreted for meaning as talk is with adults (1929). Using toys, art materials, and role-playing, the therapist plays with the young person in order to interpret their interior and external conflicts. This type of play activity is still used in contemporary therapeutic practices. Anna Freud departed from the uses of play in her father and Klein’s work, arguing that play was an activity that was purposeful and should be accompanied with children’s own interpretations of the play located in the context of their lives (Blazek 2013).

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Following the work of Piaget, play was linked to children’s cognitive development from sensorimotor (birth to 18–24 months), pre-operational (18–24 months to 7 years), concrete operations (7–12 years), to formal operations (12 years and up) whereby young people assume relations to others and the world (Piaget and Inhelder 1956). Play begins as solitary where the baby plays alone, to parallel play where the baby or child plays alongside another, to cooperative play where the young people play together. Piaget noticed a relationship to space that was implicit in each of these stages. Geographers have expanded and critiqued this scheme exploring children’s spatial awareness and abilities with more attention to the individual child and the importance of diverse and varied methodologies in apprehending spatial knowledges (Hart and Moore 1973; Aitken 1994). For Piaget, play is an important indicator of the various stages, for example, the sensorimotor stage marks the child’s engagement with an object or itself, whereas the pre-operational incorporates symbolic elements, and the concrete operational integrates increasingly complex rules and systems. This movement away from the self-focused earliest stages shows how the child increasingly moves toward a world-centered type of play. Methodologically, play in psychological studies is often observed through developmental testing and experimental techniques. Thus play is both an indicator of some benchmark achieved and a way of learning about cognitive and social processes. Hall saw play as a means of recapitulation and a way to develop civility among “wild” young people. The psychoanalytically focused work of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott saw play more as means to communicate underlying attitudes of the child. The developmental psychologists following Piaget saw play as a marker of stages achieved. In contemporary psychological work, play is still considered in these different ways although the interpretation of play itself is still mainly the purview of the researchers themselves.

2.2

Play in Sociology

Sociologists and educators have argued against the developmentalist perspective on childhood that sees play as representative of stages of development from infancy to adulthood (James and Prout 1990; Prout and James 1997). Instead the New Social Studies of Childhood argued for a more contextualized examination of play in the context of a constructivist notion of childhood where the child and play are historical and geographical constructions themselves. One thus apprehends what both the child and play are through ethnographic examination. This mode of analysis helps to understand how children are embedded and act within broader social forces and situations which enable and disable certain types of play within their cultural framework (for a geographical exemplar see Katz 2004). Just as child is not set in opposition to adult, here play is not set in opposition to work or education but seen as a part of the complex world of childhood and whose study requires a sensitivity to time and place-specific examination of children as actors in their own right. Play thus can be a reflection of other social processes, or a way to escape from the here and now. One could group the study of particular play practices among children, their

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games, stories, and routines in this sociological category. The documentary work of the Opies, the English folklorists who investigated with meticulous detail the myths, stories, games, songs, and cultures of playgrounds in the United Kingdom, is particularly important for its collection of children’s cultures (Opie and Opie 1969). Using description, maps, and photographs, they categorized play into a typology of games including chasing, catching, seeking, hunting, racing, dueling, exerting, daring, guessing, acting, and pretending. They highlight the similarities and regional differences of children’s language and thus are interesting to the geographer. Less interested in why children play, the sociological perspective examines how children play and the particularities of their activities and systems. From here interpretations can be made to broader social, political, cultural, and economic process in which young peoples’ lives are embedded. Those working in sociology and education are often employing ethnographic and observational methods ranging from playing with children, to interviewing children, to observing their play from afar. This work can be interpretive where the researcher assumes the meaning of types and forms of play or determined by the players themselves if the researcher asks the meaning or rationale behind a game or behavior. The findings of this type of research illustrate how diverse play is, often interwoven with work, education, and daily lives for children around the world. Perhaps playfulness becomes a disposition that is enlivened by any opportunity that arises and allows for fun.

2.3

Play in History

Historians have also made critical investigations into play and have argued for a need to examine how play has changed overtime. Two influential historians, Huizinga and Ariès, have examined play, albeit in different ways and with different key findings. Huizinga’s Homo ludens: a study of the play element in culture argues that play is natural to the human condition and examines its history in language, law, war, knowledge, poetry, philosophy, and art (1949). Using cross-cultural examples ranging from ancient times to the early twentieth century, Huizinga showed the similarities among cultures to argue his view of the irrationality of play and its existence in adult life as much as children’s. Ariès is widely known for the argument that childhood was an invention of the seventeenth century (1970). Using historical material, like diaries, art, and court documents from France, Germany, and England, Ariès illustrates this argument noting how children and adults dressed and played similarly until well into the 1600s. Indeed, children and adults engaged in games, song, dance, together until, he argues, class differentiation precipitated the differences in amusement by age. Both of these viewpoints locate play in societal cultures and do not focus solely on its relation to children or childhood. Significant critiques have been lodged against these important histories in the intervening years, for example, ample proof has disputed Ariès’ denial of childhood in the Middle Ages (Shahar 1990), and Huizinga’s essentialist treatment of play may not be sufficiently theorized or effective (Anchor 1978). Similarly, the disuse of

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artifacts generated by children evades the possibility of observing children’s agency and capacity for self-expression. The monolithic child is often represented, and more recent historians have argued for the importance of differentiating experience based on a diversity of individuals and groups (James and James 2001).

2.4

Play in Children’s Geographies

Geography, as a synthetic discipline, draws differentially on psychology, sociology, and history, among others, in order to examine the centrality of place and space in understandings of play (Evans and Horton 2016). Recently Woodyer has argued that play, in the form of ludic geographies, can be an important organizing principle for studying all types of play, not just that of children (Woodyer 2012; Woodyer et al. 2016). This chapter will focus on the ways that play is used in children’s geographies research and also how it has been observed and studied in the landscape in the form of playgrounds. The chapter now turns to the earliest roots of children’s geographies in order to explore the role play played in its founding. The earliest studies in the field that would become children’s geographies looked at children in their environments from two directions: the behavioral and the criticalpolitical (Hart 1979; Aitken 1994). These two responses could be seen as humanistic and Marxist reactions to the dominating quantitative revolution in Geography that had preceded them. As topical and methodological shifts from adult-focused research and methods, new research required innovative ways of thinking (Skelton 2009). Play is visible in two senses in this early research: as a methodological technique to engage children in the research process and substantive focus of research on children’s daily lives. Play as a method was dramatically different from the observation or interviewbased elicitation in humanistic geography and was to set the stage for the methodological contributions that children’s geographers would make to the field of geography as a whole (Kesby 2007). Blaut, Stea, and their colleagues and in the Place Perception Project brought toy-play into their research with young children (Blaut and Stea 1971, 1974). By integrating toys into their mapping activities, they methodologically questioned Piaget’s research. They illustrated that research findings are often based on research techniques, thus changing techniques could allow for children’s cognitive development to be measured in terms that were more fitting to the research questions. The methodological importance of play continues from this research, for example, Katz’ research in Howa, Sudan, and New York City, USA, employed play in order to learn about games as well as children’s responses to broader programs of economic restructuring (2004). Aitken argues that “children’s geographies draws heavily on anti-essentialist ways of thinking and playful methods,” marking the core of thinking and learning about children with a playful engagement with the world (2004: 173). Different types of play have been incorporated as methods in children’s geographies. For example, drawing and art-based projects like quilting, crafting, and photography illustrate how play can be used creatively to produce artwork as a form of expression (Cope 2009). Kinesthetic play,

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for example, in dance, theater, and games, has also proven to be an important expression of children’s understandings about the world around them (Kesby 2007; Woodyer 2008; Rees et al. 2016). Symbolic play, for example, in Blaut’s work on mapping abilities, is still popular with researchers, for example, in the recent work of Hayes that uses story and narrative to alter traditional research methods (2016). Planners and others interested in urban redevelopment draw on these types of roleplaying activities to explore children’s spatial knowledge and elicit their feelings about questions of interest to the researchers (Freeman 1995a; Woolley 2008). Playing is a useful methodological tactic in children’s geographies because it is familiar. For most children, play is a part of their everyday life, whether it is organized or not, whether it takes the shape of work or not, and whether it appears as play or not. In the political realm, William Bunge and his colleagues’ research on children in Detroit and Toronto examined children as marginalized in the urban environment, forced to play and exist in an adult world that prioritized “machine spaces,” like parking lots and roads, over “children spaces,” places where children could play and live free from endangerment by injury or death from cars (Bunge and Bordessa 1975: 91). Bunge pointed out early on that most playgrounds, that is places set aside for play, were in fact “playless” or “anti-play,” built only to justify to adults that there was space for children in cities (Bunge and Bordessa 1975: 92). By mapping children’s play, these scholars made findings that would echo the work of Jacobs (1961) and Whyte (1980) about the liveliness of diverse urban spaces. Instead of the playgrounds, working class children would play in high-rise stairwells, whereas middle-class children would play in organized sports areas. R. Moore’s important book Childhood’s Domain: Play and Place in Childhood Development (1986) further focused on the places that children liked for play in their local environments. With precision and dedication to the microscale, this text integrates maps, photographs, children’s drawings, and extensive qualitative and quantitative findings from interviews that show when children live in particular residential locations, they favor different sites for play. Research has followed up on this importance, foregrounding spaces that are not typically thought of as children’s spaces, like the street (Tranter 2016) or marginal spaces in cities (Kelley 2016). This research notes how urban public spaces are essential to young people’s identity formation and freedom. Children’s play as a substantive topic has continued to hold interest for geographers and will be addressed further below, but first the most commonly researched space of children’s play, the playground, will be discussed.

3

The Playground Movement

When considering play in urban environments, the playground is seen as children’s space (McKendrick 1999). Playgrounds are so common in urban environments, beside schools, in parks, and in town squares that their construction is often overlooked. Considerable research in North American social histories from the 1970s aimed to uncover this important urban space and highlight these sites as important places for struggle over the use of the urban landscape and the treatment of

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young people on the playground. One of the first histories of the playground movement illustrated how playgrounds in New York were created through struggle and the problem of children playing in the streets for a city that was growing with changing technology (Goodman 1979). Research on the social movements to “save children” (Platt 1977) from the evils of urban industrialization and vice were key to the moral reform efforts that swept over North American urban places in the late 1880s (Cavallo 1981). Training children in physical activity would displace their “animal instincts” and help to create a model citizen from a largely immigrant population. Anti-child labor advocates and other progressives fought for children’s education in public playgrounds and argued their cases about the problems of a corrupt urban environment (Nasaw 1985). The vast expansion of the Playground Movement developed from a single sand pile in Boston in 1885, an idea imported by a physician who had seen their popularity in Germany, grew to dozens of cities in North America in 15 years (Frost 2009). Women’s groups, church groups, physical educators, and other philanthropic agencies were supporting playgrounds in their cities, and the Playground Association of America was established in 1909. In one of the earliest retrospectives, Rainwater describes the Playground Movement in four stages: the sand garden, the model playground, the recreation center, and finally the civic art and welfare stage (1922). This scheme runs parallel to the changing control of the playground from a private philanthropic venture to one entrenched in the state. Advocates for playgrounds tied their cause to the parks movements that altered urban environments in the image of the City Beautiful movement (Cranz 1982). The City Beautiful movement was a North American planning effort that sought to elevate and uplift urbanites from the 1890s to the 1920s. Based loosely on the English Garden Cities model of the utility of nature in the moral regulation of humans, urban reformers created networks of parks, promenades, gardens, malls, and other public spaces to bring beauty and order to cities that had become “ugly” in the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth century using architecture and design. This short-lived movement was followed by the City Functional movement that sought to make the city efficient at the expense of the aesthetic (Peterson 1976). These playgrounds were not just enclosed urban places with equipment or apparatus, but supervised sites of public recreational and moral programming that sought to teach values of citizenship and exercise (Fig. 1). Most playgrounds were closed to the general public, locked and apparatus removed, except when supervised by professionals. These professionals provided daily activities for children in the summer months when school was on vacation, thus their early title as Vacation Schools. Extensive programs for playground supervisors were taught in universities and colleges, and playground experts multiplied as the science of playground instruction incorporated knowledge ranging from the physiological to psychological. Playground routines were timed to the second, and playground festivals showed the local community the dances, calisthenics, plays, and sports that the children had learned and practiced through their daily summer activities (Murnaghan 2016). Children were often divided by gender, race, and size inside the playground, with older girls acting as junior supervisors for the younger children, older boys playing

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Fig. 1 Regent street playground (Toronto, Canada). October 1, 1913. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 153

“rougher” sports, and younger “tots” using the sand piles and toys (Gagen 2000b). Racially segregated playgrounds, by either by time or place, were common in cities across North America since playground origins in the 1900s and persisted in the South until the 1960s (Farrar 1998;Verbrugge 2015). Playgrounds were important in reshaping urban environments; they were often used as slum clearing programs whereby cities would appropriately land in dense urban centers for a playground, effectively destroying what they thought were poorquality houses (Howell 2008). Young’s research on San Francisco parks notes the lasting legacy that this discourse of play had on the urban landscape (2004). Similarly in Montreal, the city founders used playgrounds and parks to alter the design of the city, beautifying and shaping certain parts of the city that were in need of “breathing spaces” in the form of trees and gardens (Dagenais 2006). The playgrounds spatialized beliefs about physical education from the turnvereins, or outdoor gymnasia, of Germany to the United States at a large scale (Wassong 2005, 2008). Some of the only research in children’s geographies that uses historical material is Liz Gagen’s on Playgrounds in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1910s (2000a). In this research, Gagen illustrates how gender was an important identity to be constructed and resisted in the playground through visibilities and performance (2000b). Similarly, an important contribution of Gagen’s work is its attempt to find agency in the archives through children’s resistance to the playground programmers’ edicts (2001). Murnaghan has similarly examined the growth of the Playground

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Movement in Toronto, and how the playground was an important site of racial formation, and discriminatory nationalisms whereby children were inculcated with the racist beliefs of their playground supervisors in the playground performance of minstrelsy, and colonial narratives of stereotypical identities and the decimation of Indigenous populations (2013). Paying particular attention to how the playgrounds were organized and set up, one can see how reformers saw their projects differently around the world. One of the more striking effects of the political impact of playgrounds is how, inspired by Hall, American playground workers transported their ideas to Tahiti, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, India, Hawaii, China, and Panama (Gagen 2004: 24). Through their playground work, these reformers departed from colonial notions which saw Indigenous peoples as uncivilized and backwards, but American imperialists saw development of civilized cultures as possible through a Hallian notion of play. Playgrounds could help cultures to evolve to a more advanced state, just like it would in children. The playground was a site that could channel the “play instinct” into civilized forms through teamwork and sports. “Racial uplift” was possible in the minds of these reformers, and they saw the playground as the prime site both at home and abroad.

4

Background in Playground Geographies

In Europe and North America, the playground is still the space that is children’s place in the city or town (see Pellegrini 1987, for an early review and McKendrick 2000) or in Moore’s words “playgrounds can carry substantial social value to children” (1986: 108). Children’s play and playgrounds were important fields of study in the 1960s and 1970s, when the first research began documenting the traditional and adventure playgrounds that had emerged in Scandinavia, Germany, and the United Kingdom (Allen 1968; Lambert and Pearson 1974; Frost and Klein 1979; Frost 2009). G. Moore and colleagues described the problem of homogenizing populations of young people early on examining the experience of children with disabilities in play (1979). R. Moore also noted that city children had to play in playgrounds and that public authorities must commit to providing play apparatuses near parks for children (1986). Other researchers in the 1970s and 1980s were concerned with the quality of children’s outdoor lives, and their connections with the natural environment (Tuan 1978) and play outside of playgrounds (Ward 1978). Hart’s early examination highlights the importance of playgrounds for children’s spatial experience but, more broadly, the importance that play has in the daily lives of young people in his study of all 86 children in a small New England town (1979). Hart’s expansive analysis of “free range,” detailed array of maps, models, photographs, and drawings, highlights children’s being in place, their feelings and thoughts toward places, and their relation to their families. Bloch and Pellegrini’s edited book took a behaviorialist approach to the topic in order to see what activities children actually performed in the city, the types of play that they engaged in, and the types of spaces that they inhabited (1989).

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Since the Playground Movement’s control of the recreation programs provided as a public good, play spaces are appearing to be increasingly privatized with the rise of commercialized leisure spaces for children (McKendrick et al. 2000). Looking longitudinally, playgrounds are becoming less common spaces for children to frequent independently as children’s spatial range are diminishing in many parts of the west and urbanized Asia (Tandy 1999; Karsten 2005; Loebach and Gilliland 2016; Chaudhury et al. 2017). Some children’s spatial ranges are higher than would be expected either because of cultural values on children’s independence in Japan (Malone and Rudner 2011) or Finland (Kyttä 2004). That said, places for children’s play are not correlated with children playing (Valentine and McKendrick 1997), and recent research has shown that a diminished sense of community and safety are cited as the reasons why parents are increasingly reluctant to have their children play outdoors (Tezel 2011; Holt et al. 2015).

5

Current and Future Directions in Research on Play and Playgrounds

Current research on play and playgrounds follows from some of the key themes that are addressed above. Parks are not addressed below since their purpose is broader than just children’s spaces, although it should be noted that the research on parks and playgrounds often overlaps (Wridt 2004; Veitch et al. 2007). Similarly, children’s experience of place and public space in the city has a broad literature that often relates to the concept of play but will not be explicitly addressed here in order to keep the focus on the issue of play and playgrounds. Examining diverse groups in terms of their access to play spaces and their differential play in those spaces has been an important contribution of geographers in the play and playgrounds literature. Holt has discussed the experience of young people with disabilities in the playground using examples from two primary (elementary) schools in the United Kingdom (Holt 2007). In this work, she explores how the playground is an enabling and disabling space for children because of the inclusive and exclusive nature of playground games and play behavior. This raises an important aspect about the darker side of play, when teasing and taunting lead to bullying, exclusion, and violence. Yantzi et al. (2010) have discussed the disabling nature of playground structures for young people with mobility impairments. Here the issue of exclusion is explicitly spatial in terms of building materials and the materialities of the playground equipment. Pyer’s research on wheelchair users examines the home and public space (2016), and Stephens and colleagues’ work situates play in life in terms of the home, school, and neighborhood (2017). Karsten’s research in Amsterdam points to playgrounds as important sites for identity formation and challenges to fixed, normed identities of race, gender, and class (1998, 2003). Using the example of sports and types of play, Karsten takes an intersectional approach to difference highlighting how gender, class, and ethnicity come together in children’s experiences of the playground. Karsten finds gender to be a key organizing variable for young people’s play but also finds that many girls use the

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playground as a site of negotiation and challenge of gender roles they experience in other places. More recent work in this vein has explored a variety of sites and subjectivities where playgrounds are places of identity formation and socialization, often distinct from spaces dominated by parents and adults (Worth et al. 2017). School grounds are an important and growing research topic for play and playgrounds in the United States and United Kingdom (Thomson 2005), which is probably unsurprising since children spend the majority of their young lives at school or involved in programs that use schools as community hubs. Thorne’s ethnographic research on two American playgrounds and young adults’ reflections on their childhood play highlighted “a familiar geography of gender,” where boys’ and girls’ separate play was both a product of top-down school divisions on the basis of gender as well as students’ (often antagonistic) choices about what to play with whom (1993: 1). Thomas’ research focuses on the social spaces created by girls in an ethnically diverse, working class, Los Angeles high school (2011). Here the school ground is an important site of identity protection through particular ethno-racial groups’ associations with locations on the school ground. This segregation is also an influence on the racially inflected riot, a form of violence that deeply affected the school before her study. In contemporary media, the school ground is more often seen as the site of bullying and assaults (Aitken and Colley 2011) than of the celebrations of play of prior years. Aitken and Colley argue for the importance of seeing social relations in schoolyard violence and the ways that regulations around bullying and violence create particularly unhelpful spaces. Researchers have investigated how the types of materials and design of a school playground affect the type of play behavior children display (Dyment and O’Connell 2013) and the intensity of their physical activity (Dyment et al. 2009). Similarly, school ground greening, or naturalized playgrounds, where trees, flowers, grass, and boulders are increasingly being incorporated into playground design (Dyment and Bell 2007), are becoming an important feature for particularly affluent schools (Dyment 2005; Tranter and Malone 2004). These researchers have amassed a voluminous literature on the relationships between natural elements and children’s affinity for particular types of play (Murnaghan and Shillington 2016), particularly in the affordances literature (Änggård 2016). The environmental benefits of trees, for example, as shade, and soft-fall surfaces, for example, wood chips and grass, echo the arguments of the earliest playground reformers who were advocating for forest schools, that is, education in outdoor environments, at the turn of the twentieth century. The creativity that can be fostered with movable parts, building materials, and natural features like ponds, hills, forests, and gardens also echo the arguments of the adventure playground enthusiasts of the 1970s (Kraftl 2013). Hemming has also discussed the school ground in order to understand how emotional geographies fit into broader discussions of health and social policy in the United Kingdom. His work critiques the mode of health promotion in schools that ignores children’s agency and perspectives on their active play (2007). Hemming found that young people were more likely to be interested in participating in sport that they thought was fun not just because it was seen as healthy. This research raises the issue of the affective in play that appears to be somewhat overlooked in the

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research in children’s geographies despite the richness of recent research in emotional geographies (Harker 2005). Again children’s perspectives on their own lives reveal important findings for broader social policy implications, in this case in education and health promotion (Evans and Horton 2016) . Studies from more diverse sites than the United Kingdom and United States are expanding what is known about how playgrounds work around the world, for example, research in Hong Kong (Karsten 2015) has pointed to the importance of playground sites in dense urban environments. Research in Catalonia (Baylina Ferré et al. 2006; Baylina et al. 2016) also points to the differences of public spaces in Mediterranean cities, for example, in the density of their land-use, their weather, and their importance for group socialization. Freeman’s extensive work on New Zealand has illustrated how play environments exceed playgrounds and how a holistic approach to children’s spaces will help to picture a rich narrative of children’s play (1995a, b; Freeman and Tranter 2011). Kearns and colleagues’ recent work also highlights how important the neighborhood is for play and wellbeing in New Zealand (2016). Benwell’s research in suburban Cape Town, South Africa, highlights how adult supervision in outdoor spaces are important to children and locations such as a shared playground are good intermediaries between children and parents’ needs and fears (2013). Hancock and Gillen’s video-oriented research on 2-year-olds in Italy, Peru, and the United States points to the home as a “safe playground,” where microgeographies, embodied enjoyment, and everyday geographies can be studied (2007, 349). Tezel’s research on Istanbul highlights how playgrounds within gated, high-rise communities still hold many of the concerns for parents (mostly mothers) around safety, children’s independence, the quality of the facilities, and the social elements that playgrounds impart in children’s lives (2011). Licitra’s research in Benin (2015) echoes Katz’s earlier research in Sudan (2004) about the mimetic nature of play in non-Western cultures. Both authors explore how children’s playgrounds are expansive and not always demarcated as they are in Western or urbanized spaces. Similar to children’s rural play in the West (Jones 2000), in Lictira’s and Katz’s rural African examples, children’s play and toys are highly tied to imitating adult activities like animal tending, farming, and cooking and as such are highly gendered. Katz’s research following Benjamin (1978) also points to the revolutionary and transformative nature of play whereby new outcomes can be imagined in otherwise repetitive tasks. Issues around risk and play are also becoming important contributors and add to the debate that was begun in the 1970s around adventure playgrounds (Talbot 2013). Counter to the safety narratives that seemed to dominate playground design and equipment in the 1980s onward, the new research on risk argues that children need to have controlled environments in which to experience risk. Without this practice at overcoming their fears, and learning to trust their own ability to negotiate an uncertain or new experience, young people are unprepared for risks, and decisions about risks, that they will face in the future. This illustrates a return to arguments similar to the psychological approaches that the earliest play scholars made.

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Conclusion

Play is a core concept in children’s geographies (Holloway and Valentine 2000). Its conceptual and methodological utility has been repeatedly illustrated in the literature. While it may seem like a simple concept to observe and research, scholars have both problematized it and studied it in a variety of ways. Psychological, sociological, and historical perspectives on play have influenced scholars conducting many studies seeking many answers, and these different approaches all contribute something to the diverse meanings of the word “play.” From Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics to Hall and Freud’s applications and from the New Social Studies of Childhood to Huizinga and Ariès’ historical work, play is both expansive and specific, changing but stable, imbued with power and meaning. For geographers, the site of the playground has been an important place for understanding the changing nature of play, in material and symbolic terms. Playgrounds, a late nineteenth-century urban construction, emerged to change children’s moral and physical behavior, since then, generations of researchers have examined it in order to study identities, and children’s place in broader urban society. Research has shown that playgrounds are important social spaces for children and adults and these grounds of play may be formal or informal, near schools or parks, and treasured or avoided. Similar to the research on play, the context in which the playground is embedded is tremendously important to its meaning. Some of the most recent research in this field is still struggling against adultist notions about what play is, the affective elements of play, and what play means for children in different social and physical locations. What play is and where it occurs around the world is still a topic of continued study. Different cultural values, norms, societal organizations, climatic, and geomorphologic influences all create and foreclose opportunities for play, its definition and actions. If we follow Benjamin’s notion of the revolutionary potential of play, its ability to reform the familiar, we can locate our possible futures in this playful field.

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Geographies of Architecture, Children’s Geographies, and Nonrepresentational Theory

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Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Nonrepresentational Theory: What “Matters” in Geographical Research on Architecture and Childhood? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Nonrepresentational Children’s Geographies and the “New Wave” of Childhood Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Geographies of Architecture and Nonrepresentational Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Children’s Geographies and/or Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 School Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Urban Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter examines scholarship that combines geographies of architecture with children’s geographies. Initially, the chapter is couched within recent nonrepresentational theories (NRTs) in geography, which have challenged dominant approaches to research within both sub-disciplines. However, following recent scholarship, it highlights the importance of a more-than-representational approach to both the geographies of childhood and youth and architectural spaces. Such an approach values the innovativeness, creativity, and richness of NRT – and especially attentiveness to emotion/affect, embodiment, and materiality – but does not efface the importance of particularly politicized facets of life, like voice, agency, and symbolic meaning. With these ideas in mind, the chapter P. Kraftl (*) School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_16

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then examines the relatively small but important body of scholarship that has directly and explicitly examined children’s lives in architectural spaces. The chapter examines two sets of case studies that have been the predominant focus for that work: research in schools, which focuses on participation in design, critical analysis of school-building policies, and the material construction of childhood, and research on urban architectures, which focuses on urban sports (such as parkour) and the experiences of children and young people living with sustainable urban design. In conclusion, it is noted that there is significant further scope for what could be called “children’s architectural geographies,” particularly that which deploys a more-than-representational approach. Keywords

Architecture · Buildings · Urban · Materiality · Emotion/affect · Participation

1

Introduction

For decades, social scientists have been interested in the idea that childhood is a social construction. Underpinning the so-called new social studies of childhood (Jenks 2005), this philosophical and methodological principle has in turn guided much of what now passes as “children’s geographies.” Moreover, a cursory look back in time provides compelling evidence that the social construction of childhood has frequently tended to involve the institutional construction of childhoods. That is, efforts to define childhood – and to plan for and control young subjects – have overwhelmingly entailed the institutionalisation of children in schools, asylums, hospitals, correctional facilities, and other institutional spaces. These processes have been well documented by burgeoning literatures on the geographies of education (e.g., Holloway and Jöns 2012) and work on institutional and carceral geographies (e.g., Philo and Parr 2000; Moran et al. 2016, 2017a). Critically, as they have looked at power, exclusion, friendships, and more “within the school walls” (Collins and Coleman 2008: 281), geographers have attended to some of the many ways in which the construction of childhood and youth is as much spatial as social (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Aitken 2001a). However, in the wake of geography’s “cultural turn” in the 1990s, children’s geographers have arguably attended in less detail to the material features of the spaces in which young people spend their time. Very often, a focus on the material environment would be deemed a simplistic or deterministic one, insensitive to the spatialities of life and the arguably more pressing demands of children’s voice, agency, rights, or marginalization (Kraftl 2013). As discussed later, considerable work has taken place in urban environments, in homes, schools, and other buildings, and plenty of reference is made to material objects. Yet there have been two important critiques of such research (which are presented a little superficially in this introduction). First, as Skelton and Gough (2013) persuasively argue, the considerable work undertaken by children’s and young people’s geographers and others in urban environments has tended to go unnoticed in the broader oeuvre of

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contemporary urban studies scholarship. Simply put, the effect is that we know an enormous amount about children’s and young people’s experiences of living in urban places but, for whatever reason, that work does not “speak back” – conceptually or pragmatically – to urban studies scholars. Thus, it is far from clear whether and how children’s geographers have influenced thinking around the rematerialization of urban studies (e.g., Lees 2002) or the practice of urban design. Second, that material objects – alongside other aspects of children’s and young people’s everyday lives, like emotion, affect, and embodiment – have tended to be neglected and, especially, under-theorized by children’s and young people’s geographers. Again, scholarship in the sub-discipline and elsewhere – particularly but not uniquely that going under the banner of “nonrepresentational geographies” – has attempted to address this imbalance. Yet, the effect is that despite a range of studies taking place within institutions like schools, their material, physical, and designed qualities – their architectures – very frequently evade critical attention. In other words, there are strikingly few studies that explicitly articulate children’s and young people’s geographies and architectural geographies, together. This chapter addresses both of the above critiques. In order to do so, it focuses on architecture, understood in two senses. On the one hand (taking the second critique first), it examines children’s geographies in and of individual buildings, rather than the broader sweep of work that focuses (somewhat more obliquely) upon children and young people’s engagements with, and (political) agency in, material aspects of built environments more generally (e.g., Gagen 2004; Jupp 2008; Skelton and Gough 2013; Christensen et al. 2017). Taking its cue from recent “critical geographies of architecture” (and especially Lees 2001), it is argued that children’s geographers could make a significant contribution to understanding the geographies of individual built forms – from their symbolism to their décor and interior design, to the emotions that may be felt therein. On the other hand, it examines what could more broadly be understood as “urban architectures” (Kraftl 2014; Horton et al. 2015). That is, albeit inspired by the rich heritage of broader urban-located work in children’s geographies, it attends more specifically to aspects of design, planning, landscape architecture, and built form in urban environments. There is, of course, as noted later, a rather blurry line between these broader and more specific research agendas, but it is probably most helpful here to think of this agenda as one that attempts to presage a heightened attention to the material practices, processes, and constituents of designed urban environments. The aim of this chapter is, then, to review the relatively little work that exists in children’s geographies and cognate research, which focuses on architecture (what could tentatively be termed “children’s architectural geographies”). Following sub-disciplinary conventions (and indeed the naming of the eponymous journal), the terms “children’s geographies” and “children’s architectural geographies” are used in this chapter for shorthand. The terms are used to encompass both children and young people, although it is noted at the outset that the majority of studies in this area focus on children. Throughout the chapter, however, examples of research with older young people are included where possible. Its second aim is to place those few studies within three broader fields of study: nonrepresentational children’s

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geographies and the so-called new wave of childhood studies, geographies of architecture, and children’s geographies scholarship on the urban and on institutions (especially schools). The next main part of the chapter focuses on these first two fields. It provides an introduction to nonrepresentational theory (NRT) for those readers not familiar with those approaches, especially given that NRT is not covered in great depth elsewhere in this volume. It then briefly reviews some of the scholarship in children’s geographies that has both responded and contributed to the development of NRT. Subsequently, it introduces geographical research on architecture, outlining how NRT has influenced geographers’ approaches to buildings since the early 2000s. Throughout that section, attention is also afforded to some of the key critiques of NRT – not least surrounding the politics of both children’s lives and architectural forms/processes. The remaining main section of the chapter provides a series of indicative case studies that exemplify extant research on children’s geographies and architecture. Aware of some of the above critiques, it does not simply demonstrate how NRT has been simplistically “applied” within those studies but, rather, how materiality has been theorized together with notions such as symbolism, participation, politics, power, and affect, toward more-thanrepresentational children’s architectural geographies. The examples are split schematically in two, which mirror the above discussion: the first focusing on individual school buildings and the second upon urban architectures. As hinted above, it does not present these studies as exemplars that somehow stand apart in their treatment of materiality and architecture. Instead, it demonstrates how they afford heightened attention to materiality and architecture in the context of wider work on (first) geographies of education and (second) urban childhoods. The chapter closes with some prompts and questions for further research.

2

Nonrepresentational Theory: What “Matters” in Geographical Research on Architecture and Childhood?

Nonrepresentational theory (NRT) has become relatively popular and influential in some parts of disciplinary human geography and beyond. In particular, its influence has been felt in cultural geography, where it has (somewhat ironically) added to the lexicon of analytical terms available to study cultural processes and spaces. The term implies a kind of break from representation – an implication that for many scholars is problematic. Nevertheless, NRT emerged in response to what were perceived as fundamental lacunae in social and cultural geography in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Britain. That is – to generalize wildly – British social and cultural geographies were disproportionately concerned with representation, in two senses. First, inspired by approaches from feminism, critical race studies, queer theory, and beyond, social geographers had become increasingly concerned with the politics of representation. As Rose (1993), Massey (2005), and many others have argued persuasively, conventional conceptions of space see space as a noun: a container or blank canvas for human action. This rather static view of space underpinned an elitist, largely masculinist “gaze,” wherein physical spaces and their less powerful

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inhabitants (including women, children, and ethnic minorities) could be objectified, measured, and controlled. In the case of children, this meant both a turning of the empirical lens onto children as subjects of research and also questions of children’s right to participate and have their voices heard – in academe and wider society (Matthews and Limb 1999). Second, cultural geographers had become increasingly occupied with representation – and text – as a device for understanding landscapes. Pragmatically, they turned to analysis of a diverse range of representations – films, paintings, music, landscape gardening, and, to a limited extent, architecture. Conceptually and politically, they sought to understand the power of such representations in excluding, marginalizing, or silencing particular groups in society. In the case of buildings, this meant that several classic studies sought to “read” architectural facades to understand the financial and social imperatives of their owners – which were often overtly elitist and masculinist in nature (e.g., Domosh 1989). Yet, to put it baldly, there arose increasing frustration with a pervasive – albeit hugely fruitful – preoccupation with representation. In particular, cultural geographers became concerned that to see the world as a text was a hugely reductive move and one that risked omitting vast spheres of life from geographical analyses. A concern for nonrepresentation was, then, a concern for those elements of life that exceed representation – not only those actions or feelings that cannot be written down but those that elude categorization, or which exceed our capacities for perception, or which habits or reflexes happen so fast that they precede cognitive reflection. NRT, then, offered an opportunity for questioning – for “witnessing” – those realms of life that apparently refute representation in one way or another (Dewsbury 2000). As Massey (2005) exemplified, spaces are far more lively and dynamic than representational geographies (and histories) had allowed. For her, spaces are “thrown together” – an admixture of people, processes, things, and power. But spaces are coproduced with very uneven power geometries, such that apparently “local” places may embody or hide forms of marginalization near or far. Critically, Massey’s approach – and the critique of many NRT scholars – enables a conception of the heterogeneity of space and the multiplicitous human and nonhuman actors engaged in its making. In turn, such approaches can (although do not always in practice) enable us to “understand how fights over space and place might be understood as fights about spatialized power” (Callard 2011: 301). As many geographers have highlighted – and, indeed, as many chapters in this collection demonstrate – children and young people are very often a group caught up in these kinds of tussles. While Massey’s work has taken hold across and beyond the geographical oeuvre, the influences upon NRT are many and varied and not without contestation. Indeed, it is probably fairer to talk of many NRTs instead of one, although for the sake of readability, this chapter retains the term NRT. The key influences upon NRT were outlined in a much-cited paper by Thrift (2000) and, later, summarized in Harrison and Anderson’s (2012) excellent edited collection and include the following. (This is far from an exhaustive list. Given the need for brevity in the present chapter, readers seeking a more detailed introduction to NRT will find the introduction to Anderson and Harrison’s (2010) chapter particularly helpful.)

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• Phenomenology: a recognition that humans’ knowledge about the world is produced through our bodily engagement with it. NRT has, in particular, drawn upon Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of how humans engage with the world through senses and proprioception (Paterson 2011). • Emotion and affect: with varied philosophical heritages, these terms both attempt to witness the ineffable – how we feel. Somewhat divisively, emotions and affect have been attributed to separate theoretical lineages in disciplinary human geography (Pile 2010). Emotions are understood as nameable senses that are felt by individuals – like anger or happiness – and have been associated with feminist theories. Affects are understood as shared emotions or atmospheres that are distributed between and question the sovereignty of individual bodies (whether human or nonhuman). Affects are – in geography – most commonly associated with poststructuralist theory and, particularly, the work of Giles Deleuze (Anderson 2009). • Theories of materiality: including actor-network theory (ANT) and science and technology studies (STS), these approaches emphasize the significance of nonhuman animals and objects in social life. Not only do they constitute the glue that holds together social relations, but nonhuman objects may have certain kinds of “agency” – they may break, interrupt, or actively shape social relations as technologies fail or misfire or as nonhuman animals or diseases introduce unexpected challenges to human health (Murdoch 1998). • Wor(l)dplay: inspired by the broader poststructuralist oeuvre; some geographers sought both to delegitimize the primacy of texts in faithfully representing the world and aimed to engender more playful, experimental ways of writing the world that were not tethered to social structures or identity categories (e.g., Doel 1999). A principal effect of this work has been to examine how taken-for-granted spatial discourses or categories – like scale or border – might in fact be the product of ongoing, processual energies (e.g., Marston et al. 2005; Wood 2015; Spyrou and Christou 2015). • Performance and performativity: in emphasizing how the world is not merely produced in or through texts, geographers called for increasing attention to how spaces are produced by bodies. On the one hand, bodies may be inscribed by or reproduce social norms that can be “represented” in relatively traditional socialscientific terms (such as gender). Hence, following Butler, many geographers have demonstrated how women’s bodily performances in public spaces either reinforce or resist patriarchal expectations (e.g., Longhurst 2000). On the other, there has been a drive to understand how bodies engage in a variety of performances – sporting, musical, and dancing – whose importance may exceed representational categories and which may simply be about getting on with life or having fun (for a summary, see Horton and Kraftl 2013, Chap. 7). NRT has been subject to a variety of critiques (see Lorimer 2008). The more sympathetic critiques have questioned the supposed “break” between representation and nonrepresentation that the prefix “non” implies. They have pointed out that, for instance, practices of dance involve performances that exceed textual categorization

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but that are also shot through with politicized, gendered, and classed concerns (Nash 2000). While, in reality, few NRT scholars sought to introduce a duality between representation and nonrepresentation, some commentators have therefore used the term “more-than-representational” to denote how NRTs both question and supplement previous approaches to social and cultural geography (Lorimer 2008; Horton and Kraftl 2006a, 2009; Ansell and van Blerk 2007). Some of the more vehement critiques have centered around the (non)ability of NRT to contribute to geography’s longer-standing engagements with social (in)justice, social difference, and the political and thus (for instance) to arguably more politicized projects that seek nonetheless to witness the liveliness of space (e.g., Massey 2005). A decade ago, an apparent schism appeared between feminist-inspired work on emotion and poststructuralinspired work on affect (undertaken largely by men) (e.g., compare Thien 2005; McCormack 2006). More recently, some critics have charged NRT with being most concerned with for-the-moment, small-scale ephemera that efface the political possibilities presented by scholarship that engages and advocates for marginalized groups (e.g., Mitchell and Elwood 2012). Again, while valid in some cases, these critiques flatten out differences within diverse deployments of NRT, assuming that they tend to exclude the “representational” when there are many studies that attend to both. Most importantly – as expanded below – there has been a clear turn to consider the political implications of NRT, not least in considerations of biopolitics. Here, NRT has been successfully mobilized to demonstrate how constellations of human and nonhuman bodies, affects, and performances – the swirling energies of life itself – are subject to increasing control by powerful political actors (e.g., Anderson 2014).

2.1

Nonrepresentational Children’s Geographies and the “New Wave” of Childhood Studies

Children’s geographers were not particularly visible during the early development of NRT. Moreover, it would be inaccurate to claim that NRT is a key theoretical concern for research in the sub-discipline. However, children’s geographers have used – and contributed to – NRT in a variety of important ways, albeit not necessarily using the term. Four key contributions stand out, echoing the key theoretical influences listed in the previous section. First, children’s geographers have – arguably since the 1990s – been interested in emotions and affects experienced by and swirling around childhood (Blazek and Windram-Geddes 2013). Although rarely using the term “affect” (preferring to frame their work in contemporaneous notions of social constructivism), several early studies noted how children were characterized by adults in Apollonian or Dionysian terms (Jenks 2005) – as either Angels or Devils (Valentine 1996). Concerned with representations of and discourses about children that circulate in policy-making and popular media, these studies nevertheless showed how such notions – which are profoundly emotive and culturally widespread – are in effect large-scale affects. Since then, children’s geographers have expanded their purview of the sheer range of affects produced for and about children – from hope (Kraftl 2008) to despair

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(Ruddick 2003) to anxiety (Katz 2008; Evans 2010a). Commonly, such affects – often felt as widespread fears for future generations – are mobilized in order to propel particular policies or practical interventions aimed at children (Evans 2010a). Rather differently, and in the interest of understanding children’s own experiences, many studies have sought to examine children’s emotions – particularly in terms of their feelings about public spaces (Wood 2015). Indeed, again, much of this work was not framed as “nonrepresentational” in approach – although it illuminated important findings about emotions such as safety, risk, boredom, belonging, and fear (e.g., Skelton 2000; Matthews et al. 2000; Aitken 2001a; Nayak 2003). Most recently a handful of children’s geographers have sought to examine how emotions are experienced relationally, between adults and children, between children, or between children and nonhuman objects (compare Bondi 2005). Whether characterized as emotion or affect, such work demonstrates how feelings are shared and produce atmospheres within spaces – for instance, during play (Harker 2005), within intergenerational or family settings (Aitken 2010; Curti and Moreno 2010) as groups of young people “sense” their outdoor surroundings through collective emotions (Pyyry 2015), or as emotional “moments” emerge between researchers and young people in the course of research (Aitken 2001b; Blazek and Hraňová 2012). Some specific examples of emotion, affect, and feeling, in/of architectural spaces, are discussed in further detail in the penultimate section of the chapter. Second, children’s geographers have attended to a range of ways in which children and young people’s geographies are embodied (for a review and indicative collection, see Hörschelmann and Colls 2009). As Colls and Hörschelmann (2009) point out, some of this work predates the claims by nonrepresentational scholars that children’s bodies could be theorized through an NRT lens (e.g., Horton and Kraftl 2006a). For instance, Gagen’s (2004) wonderful studies of the early-twentiethcentury playground movement in New York City demonstrate how anxieties about US national identity were addressed through the gendered and racialized disciplining of migrant children’s bodies through play. More recently, critical studies of obesity have highlighted how children’s bodies have become an increasing focus for anxieties about an “obesity time bomb” in Britain (Evans 2010). Herein, important questions have been raised about whether and how child obesity should be tackled and, crucially, who should be responsible – children, parents, governments, or food outlets (Colls and Evans 2008; Pike and Kelly 2014). At a somewhat different scale, other children’s geographers have attended to the embodied practices of children, which in turn produce particular (often local) geographies. Arguably, again, these embodied practices were implicit in much early work by children’s geographers and others. This is especially the case since the tacit forms of subversion and resistance demonstrated by young people included strategies as diverse as evasion, hiding, developing particular mannerisms, privileging particular styles of dress, and parody (e.g., Skelton and Valentine 1998; Matthews et al. 2000). However, arguably prompted by NRT, children’s geographers began to more explicitly articulate such strategies as “embodied geographies.” Thus, some scholars have used methodologies such as autoethnography (Kraftl 2017) to demonstrate the complex, messy, contradictory ways in which our bodies do not simply “grow up” into adulthood, but

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how mannerisms, feelings, and ways of sensing the world carry through into adulthood (Horton and Kraftl 2006b; also Woodyer 2008). Other important work has demonstrated the multiple embodied techniques used in some sub-Saharan contexts – particularly by girls – in order to avoid difficult encounters with adults, to stay safe, and to provide intimate domestic care for family members (e.g., van Blerk 2005; Evans 2010a). Third, mirroring (and in some ways anticipating) a recent turn to politics in NRT, children’s geographers have, since the early 2000s, excavated what it means for children to act “politically” (for an excellent, critical introduction, see Skelton 2013). As Kraftl (2013) argues, children’s geographers have broadened out from an important but rather narrow concern with voice and participation to consider a full range of ways in which children may act politically. Indeed, many of the above examples are suffused with children’s political agency – from acts of protest, resistance, and subversion (see also Jeffrey 2013) to the ways in which children negotiate power relations in the street, home, school, or work (see also Kallio and Häkli 2013; Curti and Moreno 2010; Bartos 2013). As Kallio and Häkli (2013) argue, these are very often forms of politics with a small “p” – micropolitical geographies as distinct from the Politics of voting and formal representation in democratic processes. The relationship with NRT is a somewhat uneasy one. As indicated in the previous section, some critics have suggested that nonrepresentational children’s geographies are politically vacuous, especially when it comes to enabling children’s voices (Mitchell and Elwood 2012). However, this critique effaces in turn the vast range of ways in which NRT and related approaches have been used in new articulations of children’s agency and participation (e.g., Kraftl and Horton 2007; Jupp 2008; Waite and Conn 2011). Moreover, there have been urgent calls to consider what else matters, besides voice, agency, and politics, in children’s lives – since quite commonly, children’s lives are reduced to these (and related) frames (Kraftl 2013; Horton 2014). A particularly helpful example is provided in recent work by Luke Dickens and Douglas Lonie (2013), who undertook research about a youth music volunteering charity in the UK. On the one hand, youth policy-makers and practitioners seek to fund musical activities for disadvantaged youth to engage them in “positive” activities that may lead to demonstrable improvements (e.g., a pathway into education or paid work). On the other hand, young people themselves valued their participation in music-making for a range of emotional and practical reasons (not least having fun and feeling good), which inevitably exceeded the goals of the program. Yet, despite including evidence about the diverse ways in which music mattered to young people, formal documentation about the program’s impacts reduced young people’s experiences to a range of instrumental indicators and “acceptable” emotions. Although an extreme example, it is similarly not uncommon for children’s geographers to search for ways to recursively and quite reductively link such diverse experiences and feelings to questions of voice, agency, or politics – to always search for meaning – when, sometimes, such things simply matter (Horton 2010). Thus, recent work by children’s geographers has both expanded what counts as political and sought to question whether or not it is either possible or desirable to reduce the diverse facets of childhood experience to identifiable P/politics.

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Finally, NRT has offered a point of articulation for questions of materiality in children’s lives. Again, the argument is not that material objects have been ignored or gone un-theorized in children’s geographies (see, for instance, Aitken and Herman 1997). Rather, material objects have tended to be treated in one of two ways. On the one hand, they have been described, rather a-theoretically, as banal, everyday objects to hand in children’s play or in their experiences of urban places. In that work, various facets of the urban environment are listed, rather baldly – dogs, cars, litter, broken glass – as it is taken for granted that children tend to pay greater attention to their immediate, physical environment. (Given the nature of this critical observation, it seems unfair to pick upon particular examples of such scholarship. Therefore, as an indicative example, readers are referred to an example from the author’s own work – an audit of children’s play in a London borough – where many features of playgrounds and children’s wider urban environments were simply listed in tables, with little additional explanation or theorisation (Armstrong et al. 2005).) On the other hand, material objects have been afforded an elevated status in studies of subculture and children’s popular cultures. In that work, clothing, makeup, technologies, and modes of transport are interrogated for their symbolism and meaning in supporting processes of identity construction (Horton 2010). Perhaps the most obvious examples are those emergent from early subculture scholarship – from the use of safety pins and bandages by punks to symbolize and parody their material poverty (Hebdige 1979) to the homologies between music, dress, and transport (motorcycles) that differentiated the Mods and Rockers. A key critique – in line with the discussion of P/politics above – has been that, surely, material objects matter, in other ways. In particular, as Horton (2010, 2014) argues, it may be that, for some young people, relatively few of the thousands of material objects they encounter on a daily basis actually hold any political or identity-related meaning. Rather, he shows – compellingly – how children use popular cultural objects for all kinds of reasons, whose meaning is fuzzy and obscure to adults: from props that tack together friendships to tools that enable games and, simply, an ability to have fun. It is in this light that – perhaps more so than in any of the three previous contributions – NRT-inspired studies of materiality have contributed to a so-called new wave of childhood studies, which slowly emerged in the mid-2000s but which gathered pace since 2010 (Ryan 2011; Christensen et al. 2017). Paralleling the insights of nonrepresentational children’s geographies, this small but growing “new wave” of scholars has sought to de-center the doxa of the new social studies of childhood and, in particular, the idea that childhood is purely a social construction (Prout 2005). The implications of such a move are in part quite straightforward. For instance, as explained below, children’s geographers have sought to understand not only how children’s lives are constructed by (educational, psychological, and political) discourses in schools but how the very materialities of a school building interact with such social processes (Kraftl 2006). In a more complex sense, childhood studies theorists have sought to de-center humans – both adults and children themselves – from academic understandings of childhood experience. They have witnessed – via actor-network theory and new materialist philosophies – how nonhuman agents, including toys, animals, plants, and other everyday objects, are vital to the

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constitution of childhoods (Kullman 2012; Änggård 2015) and the playfulness and vitality of life (Christensen et al. 2017; Children’s Geographies 2018). As Prout argues, this is a “requirement that childhood studies move beyond the opposition of nature and culture [to] a hybrid form [wherein] children’s capacities are extended and supplemented by all kinds of material artefacts and technologies, which are also hybrids of nature and culture” (Prout 2005: 3–4). Rautio’s (2013) exemplary work offers a conceptual and methodological entry point. Starting with apparently simple observations of children who carry stones in their pockets, often for no clear reason, she opens out a range of complex practices that blur culture and nature, intentionality and contingency, and meaning and mattering. In sum, Rautio (2013: 405) argues that: [w]hen we carry stones, for no particular reason, we engage with a practice that celebrates also being in the present rather than only knowing for the future. We have a vantage point into a mode of being that requires no words, no particular rationale and no rules. In carrying stones, just like our children do, we know ourselves as part of the world: simultaneously interdependent and unique.

Meanwhile, Lee and Motzkau (2011) remind us that – unlike Rautio’s perspective – such “hybrid childhoods” are not divorced from or devoid of political meaning (cf. Mitchell and Elwood 2012). Rather, ANT and new materialist philosophies can help scholars better attune to how childhoods are not only constructed by but regulated, controlled, and institutionalized through governmental regimes that seek to intervene into all aspects of their lives: emotional, neurological, material, bodily, and more. Lee and Motzkau (2011) demonstrate how children’s bodies are, perhaps more now than ever, subject to biopolitical governance – the elision of the biological and the political, often operating via careful intervention into the material, embodied and emotional geographies of children’s lives (also Kraftl 2015). Herein, for instance, devices like the mosquito box – a piece of technology fixed to the outside of some UK shops and which emits a high-pitched whine only audible to those under 25 – have been used to regulate and exclude young people from particular places (Lee and Motzkau 2011). In such scholarship, and in emergent work on the elision of neuroscientific knowledges with citizenship education in UK schools (Pykett 2012; Gagen 2015), we witness the importance of a hybrid or “more-than-social” perspective for examining pressing questions about contemporary childhoods (Kraftl 2013). As with broader bodies of NRT-inspired work, nonrepresentational children’s geographies are not without their critics. Indeed, many of the same criticisms hold for that work in the sub-discipline. Perhaps the most important observation to make here is that few children’s geographers have sought to completely divorce themselves from previous attention to representation – particularly children’s voice, rights, and participation – and thus few have adopted NRT wholesale or in dualistic opposition to those more “representational” studies. Rather, they have sought to offer something more – even if only in some cases a supplement – to what previous approaches could provide (Kraftl 2013). This is a particularly pertinent observation, since it resonates with geographical approaches to the study of architecture (dealt

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with next). Moreover, this logic – that the representational and nonrepresentational are entangled – is also important because it undergirds the majority of studies that bring together children’s and architectural geographies (dealt with in the subsequent section of the chapter).

2.2

Geographies of Architecture and Nonrepresentational Theory

This section provides a rather briefer introduction to geographical scholarship on architecture. It is necessarily briefer because there exist several introductory/review pieces on the geographies of architecture, which provide more detail (e.g., Lees 2001; Kraftl 2009, 2010a, b; Horton and Kraftl 2013, Chap. 4). Moreover, given that geographers’ work on architecture has tended to mirror the conceptual developments described in previous sections about representation and nonrepresentation, there is little value in repeating that material. Rather, this section provides a short overview of how three lines of conceptual inquiry – focusing on representation and symbolism, everyday practices/feelings of inhabitation, and materiality – have been applied in that scholarship. It is also worth noting that the geographical study of architecture remains a relatively small – although longstanding – component of geographical research. Notwithstanding the influence of the Berkeley School (Lees 2001), the study of individual buildings was a small but arguably important facet of the cultural turn to representation and symbolism in geography during the late 1980s and 1990s. Once again, only in this case in terms of buildings, the conceptual focus was on representation and, in particular, symbolism. The study of buildings followed, more or less, the models that had been developed for studying landscapes more broadly (e.g., Duncan and Ley 2013; Cosgrove 1998). Therein, landscapes – whether physical or in the form of films, paintings, or fiction – were viewed as texts, which, with the correct tools, could be “read.” Critically, however, efforts at reading were not confined to the symbolism of a landscape or building in terms of its intertextuality within artistic or architectural styles. Rather, informed by a heady (and sometimes volatile) mixture of humanist and Marxist theory, landscapes could be carefully read for what they told us – or what they hid – about the social relations that produced them. Clearly, this lent a critical edge to studies of landscape, wherein the apparently benign, bucolic imageries of the English landscape garden could be unpicked for the ways in which they relied upon, and obscured, trenchant class differences in eighteenth century England (Daniels 1993). In terms of buildings – a subset of those studies – the argument was regularly made that the facades of buildings could be read in a similar way. Two classic studies of two quite different buildings stand out. First, Domosh’s (1989) reading of the New York World Building demonstrated how particular facets of its facade were intended by its original owner – Joseph Pulitzer – to convey particular values about the newspaper and the man. Notably, the building’s facade contained reference to Renaissance and Ancient European architecture – especially that of Rome – and hence was designed as a symbol of the

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paper’s commitment to civic duty and democracy. In a very different context, Goss’ (1993) study of a contemporary shopping mall examined how the landscaping, interior design, and advertising present in the mall sought to evoke imageries of other (apparently “exotic”) places so as to promote sales. As he puts it, malls and their designers “strive to present an alternative rationale for the shopping center’s existence, manipulate shoppers’ behavior through the configuration of space, and consciously design a symbolic landscape that provokes associative moods and dispositions in the shopper” (Goss 1993: 18). Second – and strongly influenced by NRT – geographers sought to emphasize other ways in which buildings might be understood, experienced, and felt through inhabitation (Paterson 2011). Principally, the approaches that they developed were again founded on the assumption that the world cannot be reduced to representations – to texts and cognitive reflection. This seems particularly pertinent for buildings, where a desire to look beyond the facades of a building could be understood as a perfectly legitimate compulsion to look under its skin – to look inside – at the multiple lives of a building (Kraftl 2010a). In other words, buildings are not simply “read,” using a range of tools that can be more or less opaque to most of us. Rather, they may, variously, be points of reference in a city, extraordinary or spectacular objects of fascination that can attract visitors (Kraftl 2009), thoroughfares that may channel or prevent particular kinds of people from moving through them in particular ways (Adey 2010), or volumes that provoke or enable certain kinds of embodied or emotional responses – such as silence in a library or reverence in a religious building (Kraftl and Adey 2008). One of the earliest and most instructive examples of such research is Loretta Lees’ (2001) call for a “critical” geography of architecture. There, Lees recognizes the benefits of earlier (what have been termed here “symbolic”) methodologies yet argues that NRT could offer more, particularly in terms of understanding how individual buildings are inhabited, in diverse ways. She states: [t]raditionally, architectural geography has been practiced by putting architectural symbols into their social . . . contexts to tease out their meaning. But if we are to concern ourselves with the inhabitation of architectural space as much as its signification . . . we must [also] engage . . . actively with the situated and everyday practices through which built environments are used. (Lees 2001: 56–57)

Thus, as per Thrift’s (2000) cue, rather than deploy methods inspired by semantics and iconography, Lees used participant observation to produce a number of vignettes about the everyday, embodied practices of the diverse users of a public library in Vancouver. Her examples included interactions between homeless people and other library users in the toilets, and (briefly) children’s subversive use of the escalators. Critically, to repeat a point made several times already, Lees (2001) again does not divorce the representational from the nonrepresentational, as she sets these vignettes within very public debates in Vancouver’s city newspapers about the building’s unusual design (which mimics a Roman coliseum). As will be outlined in the next section of the chapter, more recent examples of NRT-inspired architectural geographies have also grappled with questions of emotion and affect (Kraftl and Adey 2008; Rose et al. 2010).

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Third, architectural geographers have also sought to de-center humans as the primary agents in the production of architectural spaces (both with reference to, and beyond, overtly “nonrepresentational” frames of theoretical reference). Thus, several innovative studies have emphasized the materiality of built forms. Jane Jacobs’ (2006) work has been particularly instrumental. Critiquing the “critical” geographies of architecture espoused by Lees and others, she argued that their emphasis had been too strong upon processes of inhabitation – which she (rather provocatively) branded as a form of “post-occupancy” study. Instead, inhabitation is but one of the social and material processes to which buildings are subject. Rather, buildings are planned, designed, built (Sage 2013), maintained, and demolished – and they may variously deteriorate or mature with age, sometimes regardless of human interventions. Thus, on the one hand, Jacobs’ (2006) intention is to argue for an expanded purview of “architecture” that may better articulate how what eventually becomes “a building” is materialized. Buildings – perhaps more so than other objects produced by humans – are incredibly complex socio-technical achievements, whose design may be informed by stylistic and technological logics from around the world. Yet, at the same time, they (usually) remain rooted in place. As Jenkins (2002) aptly demonstrates, what eventually becomes a building is a complex and sometimes unpredictable outcome of a range of planned and unplanned forces: indeed, a finished building rarely matches its design however accomplished the latter. On the other hand, and as a result, Jacobs et al. (2007) deploy perspectives from ANT and STS to examine how particular material constituents of a building – its component parts – become fixed in place. They examined the construction and fabrication techniques that enabled large-scale high-rise housing blocks to be constructed around the world from the early twentieth century onward. For instance, rather than focus solely on residents’ experiences, they recount the stories of particular component parts – such as windows. Thus, they neatly demonstrate how contemporary glazing technologies from an earlier era interacted with architects’ and planners’ contemporaneous concerns about building standards and how in the early-twentyfirst-century residents feel about and value the windows in their apartments. The key benefit of this materialist perspective is, then, a move not only from the symbolism of buildings but from the anthropocentrism that had undergirded more “critical” approaches to inhabitation. In sum, geographers of architecture have opened out a range of approaches for studying buildings. Over time, these methodologies have de-centered the apparent power of the architect and owner, by shifting the focus away from symbolism and architectural style (Kraftl 2010b). In one direction, they have emphasized the practices, emotions, affects, and sensations that constitute inhabitation. In another related direction, they have attended to the materialities through which buildings acquire form and significance. In practice, however, these three approaches (and others besides) are not incommensurate, and most architectural geographers tend to retain at least traces of each in their work. Therefore – mirroring the earlier discussion of nonrepresentational children’s geographies – discussion of the case study research in the next section of the chapter combines representational with nonrepresentational frames. In other words, it continues on the premise that there is a

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distinct advantage to seeing neither childhood nor architecture as wholly “nonrepresentational” – rather, to see both as more-than-social and more-thanrepresentational.

3

Children’s Geographies and/or Architecture

As noted in this chapter’s introduction, there exist relatively few studies that explicitly link geographical research on architecture with that on children’s geographies. Indeed, although set in and around schools, institutions, and other built forms, children’s geographers have offered surprisingly few reflections on the implications of their work for architectural geographies. Nevertheless, this section of the chapter examines some of the relatively few extant studies by children’s geographers that have offered more overt analysis of the built forms in which children may be living, learning, playing, or participating. It is split into two sections. The first focuses on school buildings. The second section focuses on urban architectures and, to a lesser extent, on sustainable urban architectures.

3.1

School Architectures

As Holloway et al. (2010) observe, children’s geographers have been at the forefront of the development of research on the geographies of education. In particular, they have examined how school spaces – like corridors – might offer key milieu in which children construct and negotiate their identities (Valentine 2000; Hyams 2003). Similarly, classrooms and dining halls are spaces in which power relations between adults and children are played out and where children may find small opportunities to resist or subvert adult power through a range of micro-spatial strategies (Pike 2008). Yet in most of that work – indeed in the research that Holloway et al. (2010) review – the material, physical, designed spaces of schools receive relatively little explicit attention, appearing more as containers for action or tapestries against which the sociabilities of school life are set. Nevertheless, a few, relatively recent studies have sought more explicitly to reflect upon school buildings themselves, in four senses. Firstly, in an innovative article using audiovisual and filmic techniques, and in a rarer example focusing on older young people, Thornham and Myers (2012) examine what they term “the architectures of youth” at one secondary school (for 11–18 year olds) in the UK. The school had been recently redesigned by a wellknown architectural practice. Thornham and Myers argue that in doing so, the architects reproduced and materialized particular preconceptions about young people and the institutionalization of childhood (cf. Philo and Parr 2000). Specifically, the school’s corridors and open spaces were given over to an ethos of visibility – wherein there were very few corners or hideaways, and the corridors were designed to enable flow rather than encourage loitering (see also den Besten et al. 2011). This ethos of visibility was also carried over into a central tower, redolent, as Thornham and

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Myers (2012) argue, of Foucault’s notion of a panopticon. The tower enabled teachers a line of sight along many of the school’s main corridors, while they themselves were not visible to pupils (and hence the latter did not know when they were being watched). This, then, is an example of how the affective (an atmosphere of “being watched,” which suffuses the school’s spaces) may work in tandem with the representational (in preconceptions about teenagers’ behavior). Significantly, however, Thornham and Myers (2012) do not merely critique this design move. Rather, they pose an important question as to whether and how the school’s pupils engaged in tactics – in visual or other registers – that might enable young people at least a measure of agency and power in the school. They gave several pupils video cameras, asking them to reflect on their experiences of the new school’s design and then reviewed the footage with the pupils. In the process, they found that one group had recorded footage of themselves in one particular corridor space. Rather than moving through that space (according to the ethos of visibility), they tended to repeatedly loiter there, simply hanging out, and hurling insults at those who were passing by. For Thornham and Myers, these were minor political strategies through which pupils attempted to disrupt the smooth, mobile, visual logics of the school’s design (cf. Kallio and Häkli 2013). These were, then, tentative encroachments both into and, crucially, on the visual register – a twisting of the visual to create moments of dissonance with the carefully programmed corridor spaces of the school (see also Kraftl 2014, 2015, on dissonance and “alter childhoods”). Secondly, and continuing on the theme of agency and power, several studies have sought to critically examine children’s participation in processes of school design (e.g., Burke and Grosvenor 2003; den Besten et al. 2008; Parnell and Patsarika 2011). The majority of these studies took place in the context of the then UK Labour Government’s ambitious policy (active between 2002 and 2010) to rebuild or redesign every secondary school in England (3500 schools) before 2020. Critically, as Parnell and Patsarika (2011) point out, the policy – called Building Schools for the Future (BSF) – was seen as a key cipher for both improving children’s learning and for fostering their participation in decisions that affected them. The BSF policy was suffused with rhetoric about pupil participation and the many benefits that children’s participation in the design of their schools would bring (especially increased senses of ownership and engagement in the school community). Drawing on literatures about children’s participation, Parnell and Patsarika (2011) offer a series of important and critical reflections upon the extent to which it is both desirable and possible for pupils to participate in processes of school redesign. They found that, despite willingness among teachers and design professionals, all too often, their participation was tokenistic and framed by unrealistic expectations about the relative effects of their participation, often leading to disappointment that children’s efforts had not been included in the final design. As den Besten et al. (2008) show in a similar study, children’s participation is frequently limited to such things as the color of toilet doors. Significantly, Parnell and Patsarika (2011) also demonstrate how engagement with the material aspects of design – for instance, interacting with design professionals and engineers – is often couched in extrinsic terms for young people.

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Teachers saw children’s involvement in design as an opportunity to “skill” them, making them work-ready for a neoliberal world. Moreover, pupils internalized those discourses – when asked about their experiences of participation, they spoke less about the design process itself than what their involvement would add to their CV (Parnell and Patsarika 2011). Third, and continuing with a focus on BSF and school redesign, scholars have offered critical analysis of the multi-scalar and more-than-representational geographies of BSF policy-making, contributing in turn about the need to descale children’s geographies scholarship, particularly beyond an attention to the local scale of the neighborhood (Ansell 2009). Whereas Parnell and Patsarika’s (2011) remark that, in BSF schools, pupils’ expectations as to the fruits of their participation were set unrealistically high, den Besten et al. (2011) argue that BSF gained its discursive power through a logic of promise. They see BSF as not only a policy but an event, which, in the words of the erstwhile New Labour Government, would sweep across the country in a series of “waves.” Accompanied by considerable fanfare, the policy sought – like other New Labour policies – to address a whole series of social and economic malaises through grand, even utopian visions (Raco 2005; Kraftl 2012). As Kraftl (2012) argues, three discourses were central to how BSF articulated its promise, each operating on representational and more-than-representational registers. 1. BSF sought to create the symbolic and material spaces that would house what New Labour called “twenty-first century education.” Critically, the buildings – with their apparently inspiring atria and fluid, flexible learning spaces – would also embody New Labour’s vision of the twenty-first-century child: responsible for their own learning, skilled flexibly, and able to compete in the global marketplace once in employment. 2. BSF sought to mobilize new forms of community. In the BSF program, communities were deployed in instrumental and affective modes. Instrumentally, a school community comprised groups of children, parents, teachers, design professionals, private contractors, and local government representatives who – under new public-private finance arrangements – would be deployed as a task force of stakeholders charged with the successful redesign of their school. In affective terms, the euphoria and sense of promise articulated in BSF policy-making were repeated – often verbatim – in local press releases, swelling aspirations, which new BSF schools would be the harbingers of social and economic regeneration, and hope. 3. These lofty ambitions were also articulated through an ambition that – unlike in previous waves of school design in the UK – the devil was in the architectural detail. BSF policy emphasized that the material and technical details were paramount – down to the finest intricacies of building regulations and the appropriate choice of construction materials. It would only be through attention to such socio-technical details that a school could work best at its most affective level – inspiring the kinds of aspirations and regeneration detailed above. Thus, Kraftl’s (2012) analysis of BSF demonstrates how some quite familiar discourses

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about childhood were entangled with and produced anew through affective and more-than-social (technical) registers. Finally, and relatedly, children’s geographers have used their work at specific buildings to develop the argument – prominent in the “new wave” of childhood studies – that childhoods are not only constructed socially but materially. Kraftl’s (2006) research at a Steiner School in Wales exemplifies this approach (also Kraftl and Adey 2008; Kraftl 2013). Following Rudolf Steiner’s educational philosophies, a Steiner Kindergarten is built to complement the developmental stage of a young child (aged 4–7). At that age, children are viewed as relatively vulnerable beings, unable to process the vast range of sensory and cognitive stimuli to which they are exposed. According to Steiner’s philosophies, they should, therefore, learn (and play) in a space that is protective – a kind of “haven” from the outside world (Kraftl 2006). However, Kraftl (2006) shows that this imperative is not only a facet of educational philosophy or, indeed, of the ways in which teachers treat the children in the Kindergarten in their everyday teaching practices. Rather, the building itself is meant both to symbolize and materialize a “Steiner” childhood and to work in constant, dynamic interaction with the social practices that enliven it. Thus, the Kindergarten is almost womb-like inside – it is curvilinear, with no straight lines, and a series of cubbyholes divided off from the main classroom by soft drapes. The walls are painted a soft off-pink, and the use of hardwoods is intended to provide a sense of solidity and safety. As Kraftl (2006) recounts, the Kindergarten teachers tried to create a gentle, welcoming, safe atmosphere with the building and, particularly, a sense of “home.” The teachers attempted to create these affective atmospheres (Anderson 2009) in several ways by adopting an apparently “motherly” persona (including the male teachers), by baking bread and cooking apple crumble to evoke (rather conservative and ethnically normative) smells and tastes of home, and by engaging the children in a series of everyday rituals – such as eating together at a table – to engender a sense of “family.” While concerned with bringing a building into the foreground in his study, none of the teachers Kraftl (2006) worked with viewed the building as of paramount importance in what they did. However, since it had been purpose-built as a Steiner Kindergarten, the teachers found that it offered affordances that they could work with to create the affective atmospheres of safety and home that they required. There is probably nothing particularly surprising to many readers about the ways in which childhood is being constructed here – the vulnerability of early childhood is a familiar trope (cf. Valentine 1996). Although it should be noted that, as an alternative education space, a Steiner school does diverge from more “mainstream” ways of understanding childhood, albeit if similar terminology is used (see Kraftl 2013 for detailed discussion). Yet, that is precisely the point – this study sought to supplement that previous work, which was most concerned with representations, to demonstrate how material and affective (more-than-social, more-than-representational) registers are an important but oftenoverlooked facet of the construction of childhood. Thus, couched within the conceptual frames of architectural geographies, the Kindergarten both symbolized and embodied a particular vision of childhood (and, of necessity, excluded others).

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For another (much briefer) example of how a building might both symbolize and embody a particular view of childhood – and instill very different emotions such as fear – readers might consult de Leeuw’s (2009) excellent historical analysis of Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

3.2

Urban Architectures

This chapter began by arguing that children’s geographers have regularly examined children’s lives in urban settings. Yet, to repeat an argument made there and elsewhere (Skelton and Gough 2013), the impact of that research has been rather patchy on scholarship in urban studies, urban geography, and, indeed, architectural geographies. Moreover, while many studies report on material and designed aspects of urban environments, such elements are not necessarily subject to explicit analysis nor discussed in light of the analytical frames of geographical research on architecture. Nevertheless, it is also the case that several studies – albeit a minority – have reflected in more detail upon the material details and designs of urban environments in such ways that they could inform wider urban studies. Moreover, those studies are more explicitly couched within the theoretical lenses of architectural geographies. Therefore, this section reviews research on childhood and youth that offers heightened and/or more consistent attention to the material, planned, and designed elements of urban space. This definition of architecture is rather broader than that used in previous sections and encompasses not only buildings themselves but the designed components of streetscapes – stairs, underpasses, roofs, swales, and more. In this light, two sets of work stand out: research on urban sports, such as skateboarding and parkour, and research on “sustainable” urban environments. In terms of the first strand of research, there has for a couple of decades been ongoing interest in young people’s participation in urban sports and especially skateboarding (Borden 2001). In one sense, several of these studies reinforce the observation made above – where young people are observed skateboarding in urban, public spaces, yet there is less detailed reflection upon the design and/or material aspects of those spaces. Indeed, this is perhaps neither surprising nor problematic, since a clear and important aim of those studies has been to recount how young people negotiate, appropriate, subvert, and transgress apparently more conventional uses of urban public spaces. In other words, participation in urban sports like skateboarding has been used as a cipher for understanding where, when, and how young people are “in place” or “out of place” in cities (e.g., Németh 2006). Nevertheless, as part of a resurgence of interest in such sports (particularly among Scandinavian researchers) in the early 2010s, scholars have sought to pay greater conceptual attention to the designed material architectures of urban space. In terms of skateboarding, Vivoni’s (2013) study of the Chicago scene is instructive. Vivoni focuses on a particular material practice engaged by young people in Chicago – the act of “waxing ledges.” This act entails applying wax to rough surfaces (e.g., steps, rails, or roofs) to enable skateboarders to attain greater speed and, therefore, heightened enjoyment as they move through the city. Yet the application of wax is not

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merely viewed by Vivoni as a mode through which young people transgress the norms of urban public spaces – rather, this act enables a far more complex and politically nuanced relationship with urban space. On the one hand – and harking back to the conceptual frames of architectural geographies – skateboarders’ passage over the wax leaves both material and symbolic “traces.” Symbolically, the wax is a banal symbol of skateboarding subculture in the city, which most passersby would ignore; materially, the wax leaves a trace in the city that communicates a route for other skaters to use and to enjoy. On the latter, as Vivoni (2013: 340) puts it, these are “traces engraved on the urban landscape [that] communicate to other skateboarders a pleasurable space.” On the other hand, Vivoni also demonstrates that skateboarders – in Chicago at least – do not feel that they are transgressing or pushing against some kind of urban-cultural norm. Rather, their acts of waxing are felt to be replete with an ethic of care, for their built environment. In particular, this is because skateboarding in Chicago is explicitly plugged into grassroots activism (i.e., skateboarders are also involved in such activism). That activism is directed and articulated around a range of community-based projects that engage young people in local projects for environmental sustainability. In this way, young skateboarders are involved in an alternative environmental politics and thus – in the terms of recent debate in children’s geographies – are acting “politically” through both the symbolic/material practices of skateboarding and their participation in grassroots activism (cf. Kallio and Häkli 2013). While skateboarding has attracted scholarly attention for decades, parkour (or free running) has been the focus for more recent research by youth scholars and others (for a full review, and for further consideration of the relationship between urban play and activism, see Mould 2009, 2015a, b). Parkour is a creative practice that involves moving through city spaces – over walls, down steps, across vertiginous gaps – through a fluid combination of running, jumping, rolling, and climbing (Saville 2008). In a well-cited paper, Saville reflects upon his own experiences of learning parkour and of interacting with other young people who practice the sport. His approach is one that draws knowingly upon geographical research on affect and architecture (e.g., Kraftl and Adey 2008), to examine the affordances and feelings that emerge as he learns different bodily routines. But, he argues, this emotional – often fearful – relationship with built forms presents an engaged, dynamic relationship with architecture quite different from other forms of inhabitation (cf. Lees 2001). Aware of the multiple meanings of the term, he calls this “a kind of play with architecture” (Saville 2008: 891). An extract from his field diary (published in Saville 2008: 894) exemplifies the interaction between architectural space, play, and emotion/affect in his work. Feeling so fragile all over. It was as if I could already begin to feel the jagged concrete below crunching through my spine, dislodging vertebra. Try as I might I could not focus my attention on the goal: a flat pink vertical wall which I wanted to jump to – gripping the top edge with my hands, letting my feet and legs absorb the speed of the impact, before pulling up and hopping over. After some time here considering from different angles, testing the surfaces, watching JZ jump the gap, feeling more and more shaky and sick(!), I moved on without trying it.

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In a later paper on parkour, based in Helsinki, Ameel and Tani (2012) reflect upon how young people (re)configure built forms through parkour. Like Saville (2008), Ameel and Tani see parkour as a form of play, especially since it requires what they frame as a “childlike” attention to the materialities of built spaces in the perfection of routes and tricks. But they term those spaces favored by parkour practitioners – especially old warehouses and other abandoned sites – “loose spaces,” since they reprogram the ordinary, habitual ways in which urban dwellers interact with their material surroundings. In doing so, they recall Ward’s (1978) earlier evocation of the ways in which young people appropriate waste grounds and building sites in their play (see also Kraftl et al. 2013, for a more recent example). In the second strand of research, there has been increasing interest in young people’s experiences and perceptions of living in “sustainable” urban environments. Since 2000, there has been a drive in various contexts around the world to promote forms of urban design that are more “liveable” – for diverse human and nonhuman lives alike (Kraftl 2014). A recent research project – the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project – sought to examine the experiences of children who live with sustainable urban architectures in the UK and offers a helpful case study. Between 2003 and 2010, the UK Government planned for (and in part funded) a large-scale house-building agenda that sought the construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes in southeastern England. These homes would be concentrated in new towns and suburbs, which would be planned to be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable. In order to address these different pillars of sustainability simultaneously (Raco 2005), many of these new communities were meticulously planned – from the inclusion of innovative technologies for producing energy to carefully designed swales and street surfaces designed to manage water to so-called “convivial” street design, which would encourage social interaction between residents. In these ways, the designs of these “sustainable communities” have been theorized as attempts to govern life itself, through planning and architectural design (Kraftl 2014). Within this context, the New Urbanisms, New Citizens team examined the multifaceted ways in which children related to and lived with sustainable urban architectures (for a full discussion, see Christensen et al. 2017). Two key findings might offer prompts for further reflection by children’s geographers and others. First, the team found that, overall, children and young people (aged 9–25) liked living in their new communities. They were proud of the “eco” features of their communities and felt that the innovative designs of their school and homes had enabled them to engage in environmentally relevant behaviors (Hadfield-Hill 2013; Horton et al. 2015). Yet children offered rich, detailed reflections on the various “missed opportunities” and disappointments with the design of their communities: sustainable technologies, such as boilers, which were so complicated that families often used more energy heating their homes than in their previous homes; delays and failed promises by developers (for instance, about the functioning of a wind turbine), which led to children becoming disillusioned with sustainable technologies; a range of myths and (often) conservative feelings about sustainable architectures;

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and especially a conception that eco-homes were “weird” (Horton et al. 2015). In these ways, the New Urbanisms, New Citizens research team demonstrated how children’s interactions with urban architectures combined the symbolic (“weird”) with material practices of inhabitation (the boilers). Their work offers a particular challenge to childhood and youth scholars because it moves away from what has been a predominant focus in environment/sustainability research upon environmental learning (Horton et al. 2015). Rather, they argue for approaches to children and sustainability (and especially urban sustainability) that account for what it is like to live with sustainable urban architectures, in the broadest sense. A second key finding of the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project was related to the “liveability” of sustainable communities for young people. On the one hand, again, children liked their new communities, finding them safer than where they had previously lived and demonstrating more extensive, intensive, and varied forms of mobility than the research team had anticipated. For instance, many children spent time “simply walking” around their communities, exploring, talking with friends, and playing (Horton et al. 2014). On the other hand, familiar tensions emerged with adults – for instance, over where children could play and – given the highly complex master planning of sustainable communities, who actually owned parcels of apparently “public” space. Yet, as Kraftl (2014) shows, these tensions did not manifest simply as oppositions or attempts by young people to subvert adult control. Rather, in specific circumstances, some groups of young people acted “dissonantly” – engaging in acts that would usually cause concern among adults but which actually contributed to the life – the “liveability” – of their communities in ways that benefitted children and adults alike. A vignette from Kraftl (2014: 286–287) provides a flavor of one of these kinds of dissonant acts (which, by coincidence, involves the kinds of urban sports discussed above), in a new community that the team called “Hettonbury.” This is the story of The Square in Hettonbury, as told by several residents. The Square is a public space provided by one of the developers. It is typical of the kind of public spaces created under [the erstwhile UK New Labour Government]: an open space with groundmounted fountains (switched on in summer), amphitheatre-style steps, water channels, and lollipop trees around the perimeter. The Square was completed during the early stages of Hettonbury’s development. It was subsequently surrounded by fences with the intention that it would be opened to the community (as a ‘gift’ from the developer) when it was enclosed by housing. For various reasons, the housing surrounding The Square was not completed until 2012. In the intervening years, young people from Hettonbury entered The Square through gaps in the fence and began to use it for skateboarding and BMX-ing. They made use of builders’ materials and advertising hoardings to make impromptu obstacles. Their presence caused concern amongst residents and developers; however, the developers’ eventual response was to open The Square for community use – several years before the surrounding housing was completed. The Square rapidly became a popular public space in Hettonbury, enjoyed by residents of all ages.

In this kind of example, it is rather unclear whether young people were acting “politically” in any sense, although the effects of their use of The Square have – however unintentionally – constituted a politicized, implicitly activist performance that led to The Square’s opening. This example, and others like it, raises a number of

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questions for future work in children’s geographies. In particular, if we were not to see this vignette as recounting a demonstrably political event, then how could it be theorized? Could it be theorized – along the lines of nonrepresentational children’s geographies and the “new wave” of childhood studies discussed above – as an event that mattered rather than one that held any overt political meaning? On a different, but related tack, what kinds of material engagements with urban space matter to scholarly and professional understandings of architecture and sustainable architectures? Do the above kinds of activities – and other forms of play on building sites (Kraftl et al. 2013) – matter that much? Certainly, it can be argued that the example of The Square is a multidimensional form of architectural engagement that is material, tactile, and performative (Paterson 2011). While far from the interests of the new cultural geography in architectural facades, young people’s use of The Square combined embodied engagements with architectural ephemera (builders’ materials) with an unsaid (and possibly illegal) critique of the processes through which urban environments are constituted (the delay in opening The Square). Added to young people’s more overt critiques of the developers of sustainable communities, and the many disappointments they identified, the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project demonstrated that research with children and young people can offer many and diverse reflections upon (sustainable) urban architectures.

4

Conclusions

This chapter has offered an introduction to nonrepresentational theories and their deployment by a subset of children’s (and young people’s) geographers. While subject to a range of critiques, it has been suggested that nonrepresentational approaches work most effectively when children’s lives are not viewed in a dualistic sense (i.e., representational/nonrepresentational). Rather, the chapter examined how various scholars have called for “more-than-representational” approaches to children’s lives, replete with a sense of what else might matter, beyond the traditional concerns of childhood studies scholars with voice, agency, identity, and politics. In this way, children’s geographers are at the forefront of a wider, so-called new wave of childhood studies. This wave is still nascent, and its impacts (and possible critiques) have yet to be fully articulated. Nevertheless, there is significant scope for children’s geographers to continue to shape this emergent, interdisciplinary line of scholarship. After discussing nonrepresentational children’s geographies, the chapter turned to a brief review of geographical research on architecture. Geographers’ research about buildings has tended to parallel both trends in cultural geography and the concerns that have surfaced in sub-disciplinary children’s geographies. Thus, of late, several geographical studies of buildings have focused upon embodiment, materiality, and affect. Yet – reflecting research in urban studies – there has been relatively little research that brings together the geographies of childhood and architecture. In a way, this is surprising, since, as this chapter has observed, the social construction of childhood frequently involves the institutionalization of childhood – which, in turn, is a process most commonly framed by (often imposing) built forms, such as schools.

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The remainder of the chapter reviewed the relatively few studies that have combined geographies of childhood and architecture, focusing on that research either located in individual buildings, and/or that which explicitly articulate the material or designed features of a particular space. While small in number, those studies offer a series of important prompts for future research, not least in theorizing and doing research on what one might term “children’s architectural geographies.” First, the examples offered accounts that drew upon and extended contemporary debates about children’s political agency. In particular, future work might consider not only the opportunities and pitfalls for children to participate in (for instance) school design or the planning of sustainable communities. Rather, it might also seek to capitalize on the multiple ways in which young people’s apparent transgression of urban-cultural norms may hold variable political meaning – from waxing ledges as an ethic of urban care to dissonant urban sports that make spaces more “liveable” for entire communities. Second, the case studies called for far greater attention to what it means for children to live with architecture and urban design. Specifically, it does not suffice to reduce their engagements with sustainable urban architectures to “environmental education”; rather, future work could examine the multiple ways in which sustainable urban architectures matter within children’s lives. Crucially, this does not mean a wholesale deployment of nonrepresentational approaches or a singular focus on the immediate, ephemeral, small-scale materialities of children’s and young people’s lives. Rather, as demonstrated in relation to the BSF program, it means combining such techniques with analyses of policy-making and engagement with practitioners so that the morethan-representational geographies of architecture come to the fore. Moreover, children and young people themselves frequently offer stinging but sensible critiques of the processes of planning and design; given that they are very often the predominant users of urban public spaces, greater attention might be paid to engaging children and young people in-depth with their views on and experiences of architecture and design. Finally, more-than-representational approaches to architecture may in themselves afford room for reflection upon the geographies of childhood and youth. Whether viewing childhood as a material and affective construction at a Steiner School, or exemplifying how children act in dissonance with biopolitical attempts to masterplan life itself, children’s and young people’s geographers might – in conversation with architectural geographers – continue to develop novel ways to research the spatialities of childhood and youthhood.

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Geographies of Youth Religiosity and Spirituality

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Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 From Geographies of Religion to Youth Geographies: The Emergence of a Subfield . . . . 2.1 Observing Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Contemporary Religious Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Relational . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Institutionalized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Racialized, Gendered, and Classed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Globalized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Spiritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Youth on Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter explores how geographers have studied youthful religiosity, tracing how geographic research has brought into being the figure of the youthful religious subject. The result is a genealogy of geographical thought, starting with a brief consideration of the role of religion in early geographical scientific production. This is followed by a reflection on the construction of the youthful religious figure in contemporary geographical work, which is marked by an interpretation and production of a young religious subject as relational, institutionalized, globalized, racialized/sexualized/classed, and spiritual. The emergence of geographies of religious youth as a historical field is outlined, in which the purposes and means of study that marked colonial preoccupations

E. Olson (*) · S. Reddy Department of Geography, University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_20

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with categorization are still evident but now rendered through, and arguably transformed by, a diversity of theoretical and empirical engagements. The resulting youthful religious figure of contemporary geographical scholarship is an active religious agent, but one who is always also part of broader social practices, and increasingly important as a national hope, a geopolitical concern, or the embodiment of transgression. It is also a creative figure navigating and negotiating personal religiosity with the symbols and meanings that might be associated with it. These figures of religious youth suggest promising directions for future research. In telling the story of the emergence of a subject of study, this chapter also tells a story of absences and closures, and as a result the chapter concludes by reflecting upon the youthful figures that are evident just beyond the frames of geographical analysis. Keywords

Youth · Children · Religion · Spirituality · Geography

1

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to understand how geographers have studied youthful religiosity. Far from being a subset of geographic literature, research on young people and religion has shaped the subfield of geographies of religion in significant ways. Indeed, in her review of the subfield, Kong (2010) identifies research on young people as key to our wider understanding of religious identity and religious difference. Since the time of her review, geographies of young people’s religious identities and practices have extended analysis into an ever-growing area of historical and contemporary research into the beliefs and practices of young people, the roles that religion plays in their lives, and the ways that their own religiosity and spirituality help us understand wider social changes, from the scale of the community to that of geopolitics. However, as geographies of religion continue to produce research which places young people at the center of analysis, childhood and youth geographers appear somewhat more ambivalent about including religion or spirituality alongside other concerns related to everyday practices or identities. Scholars wishing to review geographies of religious youth will invariably find themselves quickly doubling back on already discovered literature; why is it that religion has not been mainstreamed in childhood and youth geographies in the way we have come to expect from gender, race, class, and other critical social processes and experiences? In the vast majority of work on youth and childhood in geography, religion appears as a category of identity, or a nod to cultural context, or simply not at all. The absence could signal unease in studying religion from a geographical perspective more generally, and in the case of research with young people and children, there are concerns that many religious categories carry with them colonial (Moinian 2009) or adultist (Vincett et al. 2012) understandings. Yet the religious or spiritual encounters of young people often open new perspectives, meaningful issues, and insights that young people care about. Bereavement, creative inclusion,

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fear, intergenerational disagreements, sexuality, belonging in the classroom, future aspirations, and the transitions of early adulthood – these are a modest sampling of the kinds of conversations that follow from asking a young person about what they believe, what they think of religious or spiritual people, or the possibility of the sacred in their lives. This review therefore addresses how collective geographic research has brought into being a particular kind of figure, that of the youthful religious subject. The result is a genealogy of geographical thought intended to complement other more categorical reviews of the subfield (see Hemming 2017). In telling the story of the emergence of a subject of study, this chapter also tells a story of absences and closures and of a distinctive understanding of the religious subject that retains some traces of the colonial geographical endeavor of scientific observation. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of the role of religion in early geographical scientific production in the mid-nineteenth century. The analysis serves both practical and epistemological purposes. Practically, little attention has been given to how and when young people first emerged as legitimate subjects of historic geographical writing. Epistemologically, these early investigations pinpoint the emergence of geographies of religion within a colonial scientific tradition, prior to the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century that is the starting point of the vast majority of contemporary reviews of the field (Olson et al. 2013a; Kong 2010). This is followed by a reflection on the construction of the youthful religious figure in contemporary geographical work, which is marked by an interpretation and production of a young religious subject as relational, institutionalized, globalized, racialized/sexualized/classed, and spiritual. These figures of religious youth suggest promising directions for future research, and the chapter concludes by reflecting upon the youthful figures that are evident just beyond the frames of geographical analysis. Terminology can be both nuanced and problematic in the study of religion. In this chapter, the word “religion” refers to systems of institutions, people, texts, and practices centered on religious doctrines or beliefs. The most recognizable of these are the so-called “world religions” of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism, though we extend this category flexibly in order to include other practices that were excluded during periods of colonialism. Lived religion is the subjective, often embodied experience of religion or the beliefs, practices, and relationships that individuals or collectives produce while constituting the sacred and the secular. We also call this subjective positioning of religion “religiosity.” Spirituality is a reference to the experience or recognition of the sacred, and this can be either doctrinal or nondoctrinal.

2

From Geographies of Religion to Youth Geographies: The Emergence of a Subfield

Over a decade ago, Lily Kong argued that religion should be considered alongside class, race, and gender in geographical scholarship. Today, any claims of a field lacking robustness must be put to rest. The publication of several edited books,

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special issues in flagship journals, and Brunn’s (2015) The Changing World Religion Map, with 207 chapters and one of the most comprehensive reviews of geographic literature on a diversity of concerns to scholars of religion, leaves few subjects, locations, or themes untouched. Alongside this expansion of interest in religion, geographic scholarship has incorporated and responded to an ever-widening field of social and political theories of religion, as well as increased engagements with theology and with a significant focus on the ways that geographical research challenges and informs debates about secularization and post-secularism. A notable trajectory of this work is influenced and shaped by feminist theory, theories of space and place, and postcolonial perspectives, including intersections with work by non-geographers including Sarah Ahmed, Talal Asad, Kim Knott, and Saba Mahmood and the political theologies of secularization that are taken up by Jose Casanova, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor. Regardless of their theoretical touchstones, a common undercurrent in geographies of religion is an emphasis on empirical research on the role of religion, so that “places, networks, and spaces are revealed that would otherwise be obscured” (Olson et al. 2013a, p. 7). With all of this forward-looking productivity, the subfield has been less inclined to take a concerted look backward, not to the historical religious experiences of the people that constitute our study but toward the historical threads of inquiry that can be traced to the discipline’s role in scientific inquiry and scientific method. In the brief section that follows, consideration is given to the ways in which colonial scientific writing about religion produced certain kinds of religious figures which, though not deliberately maintained, operate as shadows in the framing of contemporary geographical approaches to religion. By seeking a longer historical perspective than existing overviews of the field (c.f. Olson et al. 2013a), the intention is to identify some earlier reflections on youth religiosity – those that might predate the 1990s – and also to consider how these shadows or traces remain part of contemporary scholarship.

2.1

Observing Religion

Early references to religion were often interwoven into the work produced by British geographers who were tasked with documenting foreign lands for scientific and popular audiences. Archival documents from 1831 to 1880 indicate that The Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London was an important source not only of scientific exploration but also a marker of the professionalization of geography as a distinct scholarly field. Though not the most common feature in publications during that time, religion features in descriptions of people and populations encountered in exploration. Two interrelated threads of analysis are elaborated upon here, which frame the religious subject in the practices of this era of geographic scholarship: the establishment of native religiosity as a comparative geographical feature and the importance of the material landscape as a reliable expression or coding of indigenous religiosity.

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Geography is well known for its contributions to the colonial enterprise and the establishment of human difference as a defining feature of the earth, and in the same way that landscape processes or the built environment might help us know the earth, describing the non-European other was an important part of early geographic science. An elaborate description is provided by Seemann (1862) in his Mission to the Fiji Islands, in which his reflections on the Fijian population equate religious difference with incivility and lack of morality. In describing Fiji and its people, there are explicit references to the civilizing influence of missionaries in a violent and disordered land: The top of the island, where you see the British flag waving, was formerly a mere receptacle for rubbish; but by the industry of the Wesleyan missionaries it has been converted into smiling gardens and eligible sites for dwelling-houses. Not without emotion did I land on this blood-stained island, where probably greater iniquities were perpetrated than ever disgraced any other spot on earth. The ovens in which human bodies were baked hardly ever grew cold. It was about eight o'clock in the evening when I stepped on shore, and, instead of the wild noise that greeted former visitors, family prayers were heard nearly from every house. (Seemann 1862, p. 55)

Though these might be dismissed as normative assessments of a colonial mindset of superiority, the comments also reveal the conviction of scientists in their ability to make accurate observations of the world, including understanding and appropriately ordering the character of religious lives with scientific confidence. This conviction is evident in other accounts from the mid- to late nineteenth century. Barker’s correspondence with the RGS from Eastern Africa illustrates the scientist positioning himself as an expert on the religious subject, referring to one group that he encountered as “a timid and inoffensive race. They are professedly Musselmans [Muslims], but do not appear to know much of the religion they profess” (Barker 1848, p. 132). Religion was appraised not only according to the religion of those who were conducting expeditions but also according to a foundation of knowledge and scholarship that made the scientist an expert in the capacity of judging the quality of indigenous religious practice. Landscape interpretation played an important role in evaluating religious forms, reflecting an interest in interpreting and conveying the built environment for a scientific audience in Europe. As in the case of religious practices, the material landscapes of the built religious environment provided an opportunity to build scientific knowledge and draw parallels or comparisons. Returning again to Seemann’s account of Fiji, he clarifies the relationship with the colonizing religion and also places the built landscape of Fiji within a typology of, in this case, pyramids which he compares with “those of ancient Mexico and Central America: indeed the Fijian temples may be said to be indifferent copies of these” (1862, p. 56). Landscape and other material markers of religion thus provided an important signal of both the presence and character of religious practices, whereby the presence of impressive structures was given as an example of the power and dominance of religious institutions, doctrines, or practices in the lives of the people living there. Like earlier geographies of religion more generally, young people’s religiosity occupies a distinctive role for the “religious other” in compiling the geographic

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historic record, but for the most part, it is absent beyond ceremonial function. One rare reference to young people’s religiosity can be read in the work of Orientalist scholar Georg Wallin, whose research on the Bedouin was published by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and also reproduced for a popular audience. Wallin’s 1845 study, Journey from Cairo to Medina and Mecca, referred to religious practice as an intergenerational cultural activity aimed toward social reproduction: “As in most of the Wahhaby villages, the youth are instructed in the dogmas and ceremonies of their religion, and the art of reading and writing is more general among them than even in the Turko-Arabian towns” (1854, p. 147). His account is exceptional for his treatment of young people’s religiosity, and his writing displays some unexpected qualities of religious youth in early geographic production: The children are instructed by their fathers in the first principles of religion, and from early years taught to read the Alkur'an and to recite the prayers. Whatever they else possess of lore and knowledge, they acquire for the greatest part by oral communication with the elder, from whose company the young are never debarred in Arabia. When I first came among the nomads, I was very much surprised to see how children of three to twelve years of age, not only were admitted into the company of old men and allowed to take part in their conversation, but were also consulted respecting matters seemingly above their reach, and listened to with attention. They live on the most familiar and intimate footing with their parents; and neither have I witnessed in the desert the disgusting scenes, so usual in Egypt, of an enraged father beating his son, nor the servile usage of Turkish children, who are never suffered to be seated or even to speak in the presence of their haughty fathers. And with all that, I nowhere in the world saw children more sensible and good-natured and more obedient to their parents than those of the Bedawy. (Wallin 1854, p. 186)

The passage is striking in several respects; it contains many of the characteristics of Orientalist scholarship, including the naturalized comparison of non-European cultures. We might also suspect that it is gendered, since his reference to “children” is most likely a reference to the boy child and not the girl child. However, the unexpected nuance of Wallin’s observation about the social lives of young people is notable and perhaps explained by his reportedly passionate attachment to the Bedouin. The passage is also notable as a foreshadowing of the themes that are evident in contemporary geographies of youth religiosity, such as intergenerationality. To conclude this brief reflection, among these early engagements with religion, geographical understandings focused largely on the distinguishing characteristics of the religious other as geographical descriptors, arrived at through both comparison and careful observation, coupled with a sense of scientific certainty and achievement. This aligns with other observations of the history of religious studies, in which non-European practices were not recognized as religion, but as magic or superstition. However, these examples, albeit few in number, suggest that scientific process was also a producer of the religious other through categorization and comparison, an approach which fits neatly with the nineteenth-century geographic focus on standardization and instrumentation. Though not secular in the contemporary meaning of the term, this early scholarship illustrates the secularizing effect of a scientific gaze, whereby religion becomes a descriptor or attribute of an individual. Wallin (1854)

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both exemplifies and breaks with this tradition, for, though his purpose is also categorical and comparative, he both notices and writes about young people as actors in family and social relationships that included religious training and study and highlights the ambiguity of the significance of age for the social positioning of the child. These two trends in early scholarship – scientific observation and youthful exceptionalism – foreshadow some of the key characteristics of geographies of religion in the twentieth century.

3

The Contemporary Religious Youth

Children and young people remain largely absent in geographic scholarship on religion through much of the early twentieth century as the study of religion in geography reflected scientific interests in tracking religious change across space and describing landscapes. The 1970s and 1980s mark the beginning of a shift from this positivist tradition, modified by the cultural turn in geography. In the USA, this began with work such as Wilbur Zelinsky’s mapping of religious groups in the USA in the 1960s and YiFu Tuan’s development of humanistic geography. Despite notably different approaches and concentrations – Zelinsky was more concerned with religion and Tuan with spirituality – they signal the treatment of religion as still a notable characteristic of an individual or population but also as beliefs, practices, and experiences. By the 1980s, a growing imprint of the cultural turn called for geographies of religion to move beyond description and toward theorization (Park 1994). Though describing the places and spaces of world religion remained an important endeavor, there was a growing critique of the scientific colonial enterprise of categorization, comparison, and blunt assignment of religion as pertaining only to culture. New critiques and new theoretical foundations moved geographies of religion toward questions of identity, subjectivity, and intersectionality (Valentine 2007), and these interests both contributed to and overlapped with an expanding literature on geographies of children and young people. Reflecting these new trends as well as new dynamics of multiculturalism and religious diversity in Europe, much of the earliest work on youth religiosity demonstrates an interest in understanding immigrant religion and religion’s role in places like multicultural Britain. Clair Dwyer’s research on Muslim girls and Islamic schools in England in the early and middle 1990s exemplified a new wave of geographies of religion that integrated young people as legitimate subjects of inquiry (e.g., Dwyer 1998, 1999; Dwyer and Meyer 1995). Recognizing children and young people as religious agents, Dwyer’s work challenged assumptions that youth religiosity might focus on the quality or type of participation in “adult” religion. Contemporary geographies of religion and young people are thus rooted in a distinctive disciplinary history, but it is likely that scholars were also tangentially influenced by the demarcation of the social study of religion as distinctive from divinity, which established institutional homes, journals, and research societies promoting the study of religion from a social-scientific or secular humanist standpoint.

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Existing research on religion and youth draws upon diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, albeit with a strong presence of feminist theory and participatory methodologies. The resulting body of literature produces a series of tropes that at times intersect with those of colonial geographic scholarship but at other points diverge radically. The following sections therefore describe five figures of the religious young person that are characteristic of the work in the field and which frame religious youth as relational; institutionalized; racialized, gendered, and classed; globalized; and spiritual.

3.1

Relational

First, youth religiosity is presented as emerging in and through relationships. From this frame, young people’s religious affiliations and spirituality are analyzed and presented as the outcome of interactions with families, teachers, youth club leaders, peers, and even strangers. Inspired by poststructural emphasis on social interactions as a way of understanding social production and feminist theories of embodiment, when this religious youth creates her own religiosity, she also produces new forms of religion in the wider society of which she is a part. The intergenerational relationships that fascinated Wallin are still evident in research on youth religiosity in geography and religious studies more generally, though many of the more influential contemporary studies have focused more deliberately on life course than on intergenerationality (see, for instance, CollinsMayo and Dandelion 2010; Madge et al. 2014; Smith and Snell 2009). Family is an important source of religious knowledge and practice, and most studies suggest that it has a disproportionate influence on religious affiliation in younger children. However, these relationships are more nuanced and complex than a one-way transmission of religious values from adults to children. In a study of self-identified Christians in Glasgow, some young people expressed a greater ambition to learn about their faith and participate in religious activities than did their parents, while others modified or moved away from parental practices and beliefs (Hopkins et al. 2011). Parent and grandparent relationships can shape how young people approached their spiritual lives, even when they changed their religious affiliation either due to overt rejection and rebellion or due to spiritual seeking. The consequence of intergenerational relations is not only limited to religious outcomes, however. In her study of Muslim girls, Halvorson (2005) reminds us that intergenerational relations are also sites of economic reproduction; in this case, changes in the economy can lead to changes in family labor and justify work outside of the household. In other words, intergenerationality can require shifts in religious doctrines or practices, for although generational differences can entail difficult negotiation, they are perhaps uniquely justified within the logic of generational change. Relevant relationships are not limited to intergenerational ones, however, and relationships formed with peers and religious leadership can also be of critical importance in young peoples’ religious lives. Research conducted with campus

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groups, youth clubs, para-religious organizations like Cub Scouts and Boys Brigade, non-school-based religious education groups, and missionary or volunteer groups adds to a relational understanding of young people’s religiosity (Hopkins 2011). Relating with peers and adults as a religious individual can be an important part of religious practices, often enhancing the kinds of options that young people have for engagements through style and dress or through the performative spaces of music and web-based chat rooms, in order to begin clarifying a religious life as a vocational future (Hopkins et al. 2015). The importance of peer relationships also highlights that youth religiosity can be dynamic over time and that intergenerational relationships centered on family may change from childhood to young adulthood (Madge et al. 2014). The religious lives and practices of young people also produce relationships, not all of which are religious in character. Religion can be an important part of relating to the world, not only in a spiritual way but also in providing places to go, people to be with, and on-line communities to join and in making decisions about romantic relationships. Sports might be scheduled around worship or integrated into worship as in the case of youth going to a religious service held at a skate park in Glasgow (Vincett et al. 2012). Religious relationships can also create the specter of community and make more tangible the sense of religious difference. For instance, in one of our studies, a young Pentecostal explained the sudden shift that took place in her workplace environment after she told her colleagues about a miracle that occurred in her home. After sharing this story, she was constantly reminded of her religious difference through taunts and religious slurs (Olson et al. 2013b). These relationships take on a different meaning in places where prior claims to the secularization of the public sphere are contested and young religious people attempt to create new public spaces not only for their religious identities but also for their religiosity. In short, the relational religious youth is embedded in her social and material context, whether informally religious or institutionally structured, and these relationships are co-constitutive.

3.2

Institutionalized

Second, youthful religious experiences are institutionalized, and the dynamics of religion in their lives are mediated through – and materialized in – educational environments, missions, and the community and neighborhood. As is true with much of the youth and childhood geographies literature, schools, universities, and other youth-focused clubs occupy the bulk of geographic concern in this area. The religious and spiritual life of the institutionalized religious youth thus develops partly in response to adults’ debates about secular and religious concerns, such as the balance between religious freedom and secular state agendas, the appropriate kind of religious nationalism, or the practical concerns about imparting religious doctrine. In many respects, these designated sites are also the landscapes where we most anticipate finding young people who either express a personal religious relationship or are enlisted in the work of constituting religious communities.

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The figure of the institutionalized religious youth emphasizes the importance of sites such as schools to concerns of religious nationalism. In her study of an Islamic school in Singapore, Lily Kong draws attention to educational sites as locations in which state visions of multicultural, multiracial societies are deliberated, enacted, and debated. Indeed, faith-based schools as sites of religious reproduction and faith formation set them apart from other educational environments, thus requiring different sets of questions and analytic approaches than those used for other educational environments (Kong 2013). In this context, the young person emerges, first, as a recipient of religious views (including views about religious people) and, second, as an individual who will reproduce those views. Religious youth might also require institutional accommodation or experience institutional repression. Jones (2014) analyzes attempts to accommodate religious minorities at British higher education institutions by building mosques and emphasizing hospitality. The provision of sufficient and even visible spaces of worship for a nonmajority religion is often considered a key step in both demonstrating and accommodating multicultural, diverse student bodies. He emphasizes that claims of hospitality were effective for “negotiating paths between secularism and religious accommodation. However, hospitality embraces difference selectively while emphasizing its otherness, and is a poor substitute for diversity or accommodation” (Jones 2014, p. 1995). The institutionalized religious young person can therefore pose disconcerting problems for states wrestling with what are widely perceived as failed agendas for multiculturalism and diversity. For state-funded faith schools in England, Dwyer and Parutis (2013, p. 280) expose how state expressions of secularism are “unstable and provisional” by focusing on community cohesion policies enacted with assumptions that faith schools were homogenous and therefore undermining social cohesion. Research which draws out the institutionalized youthful religious subject within state institutions tends to focus on restricted agency, whether it is the restriction of religious agency or constraints that might be interpreted as the governance of the youthful self in the logic of religious doctrine and state requirements for educational modernization (see Brace et al. 2011). Bailey et al. (2007, p. 144), for instance, illustrate “the reflexive incorporation of the past into the living body of the present” in nineteenth-century methodism in Cornwall. Here, the daily faithful requirement for temperance was enforced upon young people in family and church settings and also through the formation of national groups that encouraged rituals such as signing pledges to forego alcohol or obtaining a membership card. Throughout these institutional engagements, where agency is evident, it is often ascribed to the informal spaces that exist in-between, or sometimes in spite of, institutional agendas. In some cases, youth might be seen as constituting the informal spaces of interaction themselves, at the edges of adult religiosity and thus requiring a more ambiguous space dedicated to a more appropriate level of teaching or observation (see Kong 2013). In other circumstances, youthful religious agency emerges out of their need to negotiate between different institutions, such as the family and the university (Sharma and Guest 2013; Vincett et al. 2012). This restricted agency also makes young people ideal subjects for religious conversion, and religious institutions around the world

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create youth-specific spaces such as youth camps, courses, and mission meetings with the aim of capturing and shaping religious potential (Woods 2012). The geographical crafting of the youthful religious subject is therefore not entirely lacking agency but is perhaps better described as a figure that is embroiled in adult management of youthful bodies and minds. Within geography, the most visible bodies are those that represent some form of difference and threat, such as a Muslim student at a British university or a child living in an economically deprived area (Vincett and Olson 2012). When considered in secular sites, or as a religious other, young people might elicit both anxiety and desire, and it is within this framing that religious youth begin to consider deeply the meaning of their own identities and how they perform them.

3.3

Racialized, Gendered, and Classed

Third, geographers draw frequently upon the figure of religious youth who are simultaneously negotiating identities and subjectivities related to race, gender, and social class in ways that are distinctive from the experiences of adults. This is a familiar youthful religious figure in the subfield, most likely because it affords the most flexibility in its interpretation; identity can function either as a universalized classification schema (as in a survey of children’s self-reported religious affiliation), or it can draw attention to the intimate and everyday processes of performing and experiencing identity by the self and by others. The Orientalist sentiments expressed by colonial geographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still appear, albeit in more subtle ways, in the everyday lives of religious minorities. The young religious other might also be racialized or gendered, particularly in contexts of postcolonial migration, and these various intersecting identities are creatively managed by young people themselves, sometimes while facing overt hostility and exclusion. Through his work with young Muslim men in Scotland, Hopkins (2007) explores questions of belonging and the ways in which perceptions of Scottish nationalism collide with religious and gendered identity. While his research reveals how young men’s experiences of exclusion are based on the marginalized social categories assigned to them, he also conveys the artful ways in which young adults maneuver around these categories. This creative management of the self is a reminder of the agency of youth. However, such agency is always circumscribed by encounters with others and the need to situate one’s self against, in this case, a normative British white Christian man (Hopkins 2011). Religion lends itself, in a manner, to modifying other identities such as gender or social class. From this perspective, youth religiosity is not only relational (emerging through relationships with others) but also intersectional (informed by other identities that the young person himself might embrace or be viewed by others as possessing). The religious figure thus also emerges at the site of these intersections, working with and integrating various identities that become more or less important or taking on different characteristics as they move and shift through virtual or material space.

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Dwyer’s research with young British Muslim women (1999, 2000) and Gökariksel and Secor’s (2014, 2015) exploration of women’s veiling in Istanbul approach these questions from the space of the body which both intimately binds together, but also challenges, the associations that are drawn by their wider communities about religion, class, and belonging in space. In both the UK and Turkey, women deploy veiling strategically with the intent of participating in the ways that their clothing is read. However, the interaction between young peoples’ religious identities and their embodiment of this through overt religious references can also vary according to age and their context; in the case of a school-aged Christian woman in Glasgow, a crucifix worn around her neck was also the first target of anyone that she entered into a fight with; “. . .if you’re wearing a cross, they go for the cross. If you’re wearing something else, they go for the hair” (Olson et al. 2013b, p. 1431). Though few geographers have researched youth religiosity in an African context, scholarship from other fields suggests that religious affiliation and practice in Southern Africa can be a source for diverse vulnerabilities but also a source of resilience. Gunnestad and Thwala (2011) found that in Zambia and Swaziland, children who had suffered various forms of trauma relied upon prayer and the fellowship of a church community for positive coping. However, fears that negative life events might be the work of witchcraft augmented the anxiety felt by children. Thus, religious identities can be targeted, but they can also provide respite and opportunities for self-care and love. Being a religious youth in modernizing claims of secularization also means assessing your own position in relation to the decline in formal religious affiliation in society, and at least in Western countries, in relation to your peers. The possibility of new forms of sectarianism and revanchist politics emerge not only in the context of new religious others but also when young people find themselves feeling like religious outsiders in the context of declining religious affiliation in the UK and Europe. In short, religious identity can be formulated not only among the presence of religion but also increasingly as being a religious young person in and among friends and other peers who are not religiously affiliated or are agnostic or atheist (Olson et al. 2013b). Where religious identities are not racialized, other identities such as gender and social class become negotiated. However, when the youthful body is not overtly marked as religiously different, children might choose to contain these kinds of negotiations to spaces of the home or faith-oriented youth clubs. Sometimes religiosity pushes the young person to other spaces where the negotiation of the religious self becomes quite individual and personal, such as at a cemetery, or in a site of natural beauty (Vincett and Olson 2012), or through the anguish of bereavement. Though many of these religious subjectivities intersect with gender and class in diverse contexts (and in very diverse ways), sexuality is a broadly neglected topic (Olson et al. 2013a; c.f. Yip and Page 2014). The presumption underpinning this particular geographic figure of the youthful religious subject is that religion is, among other things, an identity. This identity is expressed and performed, is sometimes fixed, and is often negotiated by the young person, her community, and/or her nation. This image of the religious youth can be in tension with the actual practices that young people would like to engage in as religious or faithful individuals. The differentiation of this figure is occasionally

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celebrated as a manifestation of diversity in particular spaces but more often than not becomes perceived as a site of anxiety, requiring regulation and control. Because of this dynamic and the kinds of social and political responses that these identities engender, this religious figure could superficially appear as the most direct descendant of the religious other of early geographical exploration and the related tasks of categorization and description. Instead, what emerges is an individual of resistance and creative engagement with a range of self-identifications and subjectivities and with the governing effects of societies, states, and transnational networks. For instance, in the context of the segregation of immigrant populations in France, the specter of radicalized Islam among immigrant youths is used to help justify rightwing anti-immigrant politics of parties like the National Front (Douzet and Robine 2015). This leads us to our fourth figure of the globalized religious who both changes the religious landscape and is absorbed – and even comes to represent – its politics.

3.4

Globalized

Fourth, religious youth are globalized, not in the sense of transmission of religious beliefs across borders but as geopolitical actors. There are different ways in which young people might be thought about also as global, though youth geographies have in recent years emphasized global entanglements that pivot around politics and labor, though with calls to examine youth religion to find alternative interpretations of contemporary youth social movements (see Jeffrey 2013). Within this understanding, the globalized religious young person is therefore often described as a reflection and driver of new global flows of ideas and networks of faith and as a subject who must be managed – mobility monitored and rights restricted – according to the rhetoric of national security. In some cases, the globalized religious youth is mobile in a way that significantly influences their religious identities, their relationships, and the kinds of institutions that they encounter. More youth with means are traveling to volunteer for faith-based organizations overseas or participating in short-term missions, often with the intent of teaching in or building schools or providing other short-term voluntary works for partner faith organizations and their communities. How much difference the faithbased character of this work makes is somewhat up for debate, because even worship-centered practices can be marked with an awkward cosmopolitanism of the privileged Global North that reinforces tropes of those living in extreme poverty as happy and grateful despite their hardships (Baillie et al., 2013). While religious practices can therefore reinforce the differences between global religious youth and its other, producing certain regions as possessing a more pure faith (e.g., Hopkins et al. 2015), this kind of travel can also change a young person’s religiosity; transnational routes can also provide routes to religious adulthood. They can also provide important resources for young people’s search for authentic international engagements or what Desforges (1998, p. 183) referred to as “non-commodified relationships” among backpacking youth. Whether this be through the everyday task of leading worship and having conversations about faith independent from a parent,

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or from returning to home with a newly conferred status as mission participant, or even deciding to take up a religious career or return to mission work at home or abroad, faith-motivated and organized travel can be one means through which young people begin to think of themselves as a leader or teacher, either inside or outside of religious communities (Judge 2015). If this mobile, cosmopolitan religious youth is presented and often configured as a future of expanded opportunities and encounters, its antithesis is the religious young person whose gender, institutional affiliations, or relationships fix them in place and in religious meaning. This is a restricting vision of overdetermined religious identity, or a composition of young people as problematic in their religiosity or religious practice, and thus requiring adult intervention. Sara Smith’s writing about the intimacy of geopolitics provides one such illustration. Her work on the politics of reproduction, love, and marriage in Ladakh demonstrates the ways in which religious tensions, and their ties to borders and territories, become inscribed on youthful bodies. The intimate scale of the body might be affected by larger religious forces, but it can also act as a site of religious struggle: “It is not that the body is a microscale embedded within or shaped by geopolitical forces from above: The body is the site where the geopolitical is produced and known” (Smith 2012, p. 1518). Adult actors in Ladakh, whether parents, politicians, or religious leaders, attempt to regulate youthful bodies to secure the future success of their religions, economies, cultures, and territories (Smith 2012). From a geopolitical perspective, religious identity can function as a potent symbol of nationalism and provide a powerful signifier of new geopolitical order to be protected through new forms of citizenship and new violent technologies. Islamic youth are the most visible of symbolic religious signifiers in the early twenty-first century, with interventions intentioned to prevent today’s young Muslim men from becoming tomorrow’s terrorists. Nagel and Staeheli (2014) illustrate the ways that Western NGOs in Lebanon view young people as sites where democratic visions of citizenship might be cultivated. As part of a larger trend toward the funding of democracy promotion by Western aid agencies in Arab/Muslim countries after the 9/11 attacks in New York, NGOs in Lebanon devise programs and interventions to address sectarianism, which could otherwise be seen as promoting instability both within the country and the region. Nagel and Staeheli (2014, p. 14) emphasize the ways that NGOs demonstrate an “averseness to debate and the desire to cultivate dialogue, consensus, and common Lebanese identity among youth” as a reaction to both the history of a violent sectarian civil war but also because of a pervasive discourse shared with Western governmental agencies about the importance of youth citizenship, responsibility, and tolerance for Lebanon’s democratic future. Though the NGOs claim non-sectarian standpoints and practices, US geopolitical interests in the region mean that Hizbullah is rejected as a legitimate collaborator and instead viewed as a terrorist organization. And yet, despite these structures, youth in the Arab world also continue to make spaces for alternative conversations and even debates (Staeheli and Nagel 2011). These concluding images of the globally entangled religious youth is one in which their bodies and futures are invariably captured in processes that require compliance and demand adequate responses and responsibility, existing as constant

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potential threats to a tenuous global order. Globalized religious young people also resist these actions, either through equal forces of violence or through caring and creative work in the world. Both forms of resistance point toward the possibility of youth religiosity as not limited to an identity or an institutionalized practice but a spiritual experience or sacred relationship.

3.5

Spiritual

Fifth and lastly, the youthful religious figure is spiritual, an individual whose religiosity is considered through acts of believing or encounters of faith and the sacred. This youthful figure faces certain challenges in her incorporation to geographic scholarship due in part to the secular divisions of disciplinary research that are described above, which created certain barriers to the language, texts, and rationalities of theological works. Some of these barriers have been challenged through incorporation of theology or from feminist concepts of piety and politics (Gökariksel and Secor 2015) in order to challenge the image of the secular human. This figure can also create a context of greatest misunderstandings of spirituality, with its tendency to differentiate between believers and those with “no religion,” identify pathological beliefs (Nieuwenhuys 2013), or interpret youth spirituality as incomplete or inferior versions of adult spirituality (e.g., Smith and Denton 2005). Geographers have pushed against the idea of young people as simply practicing a substandard version of adult spirituality (e.g., Vincett et al. 2012), in part by seeking to engage young people as competent actors with their own experiences and also by looking at places where secularism is only one of many options for conceiving of the human subject. Gergan (2015; see also Gergan 2014) describes indigenous efforts globally to protect and maintain control over resources and land by mobilizing spiritual and sacred conceptions of the material landscape. Indigenous religiosity might offer more overt or obvious routes toward a post-secular conception of the human, but it also should raise questions about previously assumed secular spaces. Young people find spiritual communion in places such as their university science class (Olson et al. 2013b), or they may decide to cultivate spiritual spaces in response to a life-changing event (Hopkins et al. 2015). Unshackled by secular assumptions about the private place of faith, young people move their spirituality out into the world through embodiment of their faith, and adults work to integrate material and temporal opportunities for youth spiritual development. The kind of spirituality, and where it is being practiced, matters as well; the introduction of yoga and meditation, or the incorporation of Abrahamic deism into national pledges in US schools, for instance, contrasts starkly with restrictions on other spiritual practices in public spaces. The coupling of religion and youth in the reproduction of society remained an important component of contemporary research, but the shift of focus from a child “becoming” to a child “being,” which was so productive in childhood and youth studies, is also evident in some of the geographical examinations of religion and youth, particularly in the discussion of spirituality. This framing suggests that young people can also transform the spiritual landscapes where they live by creating new

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spaces for faith and belief but also by asserting new ways of being nonreligious. Though the majority of the post-secular debate in geography focuses on the presence of religion in the public realm (sometimes framed as a re-emergence), young people have also actively rejected religious-based spirituality. However, the encounters and experiences of secular humanism or the complexities of agnosticism have not drawn attention by geographers despite its growing prevalence and despite its importance in the lives of young people around the world. From this perspective, questions about spirituality would need to include not just positive affirmation of theism but also the broadening of anti-theist perspectives and the experiences of young people whose understanding of the profane is a positive embrace of an absence of the sacred. In attempting to understand dimensions of youth spirituality, there is also an evident effort in geographical literature to avoid conflating spirituality with religious affiliation or identity. Grace Davies proposed that British trends toward secularization were partly construed through academic failure to properly understand the changing dynamics of faith and spirituality, some of which have been explained through concepts such as lived religion, or the ways in which embodied practices reveal (see McGuire 2008). For some groups of young people, this distinction between believing and belonging is essential, since factors such as social class can still influence the opportunities to participate in collective practice that they find meaningful. In the case of young working class British youth, for instance, lived religiosity reveals a range of beliefs and practices that find alternative spaces and moments for thinking about God or otherworldly power, such as at the grave site of a friend. But spirituality was also considered by some young people to be for people who led better lives than themselves, and so even opportunities for spiritual exploration appear to be inflicted with, and possibly reproductive of, the broader moral economy (Vincett and Olson 2012). Yet for some religious youth, such as British Muslims, religious affiliation and practice do align closely with spirituality (Madge et al. 2014). As in the case of globalized religious youth, young people who profess strong positions on their own spirituality or that of others can be disconcerting figures, particularly when they begin to change or challenge the spatial configurations of religious practice or where and how religion occupies the public sphere. Young people who embody their spirituality may do so within existing religious frameworks, or they may create their own practices and places for spiritual engagement. This figure is perhaps the most distant from the genealogy of the religious youth of colonial geography, and though it may present the clearest openings for revolutionary understandings of young peoples’ religiosity – literally moving beyond this world – it is, for the time being, the one that geographers appear to have been most hesitant to explore.

4

Youth on Religion

This chapter has primarily focused on giving structure and names to the youthful religious figure that has emerged in geographical scholarship, and the resulting narrative reveals much more about geographic presumptions than it does about young peoples’ experiences of religion. As a consequence, young people’s

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experiences, which have been central to many of the studies referenced above, become objects of these classifications rather than subjects and authors of religion and faith. Given that many geographers have deployed ethnographic, participatory, and action-based methodologies with the aim of drawing out the voice of young people in a field of study that has frequently dismissed their experiences as emergent or as partial reflections of a journey toward religious adulthood (c.f. Hopkins et al. 2015), this final section amplifies the voice of one impressive young person in order to illustrate the intellectual potential of including youth in analyses of religion, and religion in analyses of youth. “Zara” was 15 years old when she participated in a study about youth religiosity and spirituality in areas of economic urban deprivation. A social worker had recommended Zara as a possible participant because of her frequent hostile statements toward Islam, hoping that if Zara were given the opportunity to think about religion more generally, it will make her feel differently about the role the religion and faith had played in her own life. As an important caregiver for her mother who had escaped abuse at the hands of her former husband, Zara had been raised Muslim by her parents who had immigrated to the UK, but she blamed her mother’s mental illness on the gendered characteristics of the faith that she described as putting her mother in harm’s way throughout her life. She did not see her mother as benefitting or even practicing her faith, for though she always wore a veil, Zara claimed that she “cursed every Muslim!” She acknowledged that not all Islam was the same and that her mother’s Iranian traditions were also benevolent ones when practiced in certain ways, though she did not offer a similar allowance for her father’s Islam, which she linked to his Iraqi ethnicity. Many of Zara’s everyday and exceptional experiences encouraged her to reflect on faith and spirituality, and she often thought about – though never acted upon – her desire to find a religious practice that would be interesting and peaceful and offer community. Zara’s older brother had begun the process of converting to Christianity, and Zara expressed interest in finding an organized religion or a spiritual practice that would fill some needs she recognized in her own life. She had a keen interest in the pre-Christian religions of ancient Greece and Rome that she studied in school and thought that it would be amazing if there were some way to participate in a faith that had gods like those but recognized that these did not offer true options in terms of contemporary religious practice. She had been thinking about Buddhism for several years, which she knew little about it but had watched some shows on television that made it seem “quite peaceful, just to worry about nothing and just walk about in a garden and be happy.” The role of Buddhism in Zara’s reimagining of herself and her own possibilities to lead a peaceful life is rooted in a larger-scale transformation of the spiritual landscape of Britain (Heelas et al. 2005). But it also reveals how some young people still see religious or spiritual practice as a positive potentiality, a space through which the self can be made whole, or different, or otherwise. When asked what she thinks an organized religion or well-formulated practice of faith might offer her, Zara replied: I don’t know. It would make me more peaceful, because I get angry a lot. Because of my life. . .I get angry a lot when things happen. Like when my Mum tried to commit suicide.

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Like I would. . .I’d close the door. I just cried for five days non-stop. I lost weight, which was good, but then I lost it in a bad way; I didn’t eat. And then I wouldn’t wash my hair. I was like, ‘I’m going pure mad. I’m not going to wash my hair. I don’t deserve this’. And then I went out of that and I went to a goth thing. And I was like maybe if I had something to believe in, I wouldn’t be like this—wouldn’t go through different phases of kind of. . .trying to fit into something, which I don’t fit into.

Zara’s experience clarifies that speaking with youth about religiosity reveals much more than information about religion or even just about young people’s religion. Even in the course of this very brief engagement, Zara’s story reveals important insights into such dynamics as first-generation Muslim immigrants to Britain, the characteristics of the global spread of Buddhism, an unexpected political consequence of domestic violence as represented by her hostility to the whole of Islam, and the imaginary of community and care that religion continues to represent, even (and perhaps especially) in secular societies. By asking young people to share their experiences of lived religiosity, they reveal important evidence about religion in the world, including the ways that various religions occupy social and political frames of reference, and about ethnicity, gender, and the contemporary dynamics and perceived limitations of both religious and secular life. They provide insights into new institutions giving way to emerging religious landscapes. Zara’s story of religious encounter – of living, engaging, considering, and feeling (a) part of something – is both personal and political, and it describes not only her world but the world.

5

Conclusion

This chapter has traced the emergence of the geographies of religious youth as a historical field, in which the purposes and means of study that marked colonial preoccupations with categorization and classification are still evident but now rendered through, and arguably transformed by, a diversity of theoretical and empirical engagements. The resulting youthful religious figure of contemporary geographical scholarship is an active religious agent, but one who is always also part of broader social practices, and increasingly important as a national hope, a geopolitical concern, or the embodiment of transgression. It is also a creative figure navigating and negotiating personal religiosity with the symbols and meanings that might be associated with it. Young people make their own religious spaces, sometimes by deliberately challenging traditional modes of practice and other times through their mobilization as a signifier of pathological youth. Elaborating a history of geography of religion also highlights the caution that should be taken when describing the religious or spiritual lives of others. Similar to being a gendered body, or a racialized subject, the study of “youth religion” can create religious categories that limit analysis of youth religiosity to being only about identity, or politics, or processes of the global. Geographical research on youth religiosity and spirituality has avoided some of these pitfalls by recognizing and emphasizing the

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cross-scalar ways in which actors like states, schools, parents, and religious organizations are also actively creating religious categories which young people must then negotiate and navigate. As Zara’s story illustrates, religious and spiritual experimentation can signal the sophisticated and creative ways that young people establish and challenge the politics and emotions of their own lives, and as they consider their own religiosity alongside the formal doctrines of religious scholars, or the accepted practices of their families. Geographers’ work on youth religiosity, as illustrated by the nuanced and challenging research discussed above, has been an essential factor in bringing feminist and postcolonial theory into geographic studies of religion. Yet for each of these studies that engage meaningfully with religiosity, there are many more that maintain the religious youth just beyond the scope of analysis. Two monographs by geographers help to illustrate this point. The first, Sacred Subdivisions by Justin Wilford (2012), is an insightful and expert study of Saddleback, a California evangelical Christian megachurch. The book provides us with new ways of thinking about religion, politics, and space, but despite deeply engaging the family and the individual, young people and children are seen only when they serve ceremonial purpose. The second is Stuart C. Aitken’s (2014) meditation on young people’s politics in The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation. Here, spirituality and religiosity sit just beyond the frame of analysis in the introduction, when we meet children who are homeless living in a shelter that is funded in part by a faith organization and is referred to as “Father Joe’s.” As with the other vivid and compelling conversations and contexts that we encounter in the book – Slovenian stateless children (Izbrisani), the death of a grandparent, and Spanish-speaking mothers of a neighborhood action group – the forms of religiosity that might be at work are left undefined. Whereas Wilford’s account leaves children just beyond the frame, Aitken’s analysis leaves religion in a similar position. In thinking about the future of studies of youth religiosity, then, it may be sufficient to suggest that much geographical knowledge about youth and religion also often sits just beyond the frame of current analyses. To draw attention to these absences is not a critique of absences – both Wilford’s and Aitken’s books are compelling contributions in their own right – but is instead a signal of the potential for new ideas and theories that might be generated by allowing young people’s religiosity into our research. In the introduction of her seminal work on children’s role in producing and reproducing capitalism through their work, Cindi Katz (2004, p. 21) comments upon the significance of the spiritual practices of Islam, so integral to life among the Howa, writing that children seemed to “absorb it by osmosis.” She then proceeds explaining her choice to focus on the material practices of young people’s work rather than on the material practices associated with Islam and offers this reflection: “Ironically, or perhaps not, the cultural practices associated with religion may have proven a more fruitful arena in the search for resistance than the ones I pursued. . .” (Katz 2004, p. 21). Some areas of youth religiosity are less studied than others, and it is important to acknowledge that these trends are influenced by many contemporary factors that only distantly relate to the colonial traces of the field. First, the current understanding

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of intersections between youth and religion remains circumscribed by geo-religious specificity (Mills and Gökariksel 2014), and the emphasis on UK-based research in this chapter reflects this. One explanation for this research bias has to do with research funding. In the UK, the ESRC-AHRC Religion and Society Programme, a large multiyear investment that dedicated one call for research on religion and youth, supported many of the geographical projects that are mentioned in this chapter. Second, how youth participate in or contest the formation of global religious institutions is comparatively understudied despite the formalization of youth governance in a range of so-called global religions. Third, the “new” virtual spaces and “old” spatial technologies – home churches, books, video, chat rooms, podcasts, and even faith-specific apps – have shifted the possibilities of globalized religion but remain also understudied. In light of the rise of social networking, and given the symbiotic relationship that some regions of the world’s youth maintain with their devices, as well as the data that they carry in them and the relationships that they make through them, the role of these technologies in youth religiosity and the making of new religious spaces more than justifies greater attention by geographers. In addition to those areas of study which might help us understand how religion itself is transforming in contemporary times, religion, spirituality, and belief also provide avenues for discussing topics that have also not been as prevalent in youth geographies. Research into religion and spirituality provides new ways for speaking with young people about death, the possibility of destiny and afterlife, the workings of unseen power, and the ethical needs for future survival. Questions about belief expose new understandings about young people’s moral geographies, such as what it means for religion to be embodied by a young person and how her everyday ethics can be understood. Geographers have been rightly cautious about centering terrorism in their research, choosing instead to focus on how young people have become perceived as security problems (see Hörschelmann 2008) or the negotiated citizenship and identity practices described above. But if terrorism is an expression of geopolitical relationships, the gaze that holds the politics and practices in relation to terrorism can be flipped; for example, the religiosity of young men and women in the US military is under-examined, despite nearly half of active duty members falling within the 18- to 25-year-old age group. As the field continues to revise its colonial attentions, these kinds of subjects, topics, and religiosities will receive greater attention. This is not to claim that religious identity, spirituality, and the secular-sacred compositions of social worlds will always be central to our examinations of young people’s lives or to the social, economic, and political worlds that they produce but is instead a suggestion that they could be. If we as scholars fail to ask questions about religious meaning and spiritual significance, we will continue to be surprised when religion asserts itself into the center of our frame of reference. Acknowledgments Some of the research referenced in this chapter was funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, through the joint Religion and Society Programme.

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References Aitken, S. (2014). The ethnopoetics of space and transformation: Young people’s engagement, activism and aesthetics. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Bailey, A. R., Harvey, D. C., & Brace, C. (2007). Disciplining youthful methodist bodies in nineteenth-century Cornwall. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(1), 142–157. Baillie-Smith, M., Laurie, N., Hopkins, P., & Olson, B. (2013). International volunteering, faith and subjectivity: Negotiating cosmopolitanism, citizenship and development. Geoforum, 45, 126–135. Barker, L. (1848). On Eastern Africa. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 18, 130–136. Brace, C., Bailey, A., & Harvey, D. (2011). Investigating the spatialities of youthful spirituality: Methodist mutual improvement in Cornwall (UK) c. 1970–1930. In C. Brace, A. Bailey, S. Carter, D. Harvey, & N. Thomas (Eds.), Emerging geographies of belief (pp. 74–90). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Brunn, S. D. (Ed.). (2015). Changing world religion map: Sacred places, identities, practices and politics. New York: Springer. Collins-Mayo, S., & Dandelion, P. (Eds.). (2010). Religion and youth. Farnham: Ashgate. Deaforges, L. (1998). ‘Checking Out the Planet’: Global representations/local identities and youth travel. In T. Skelton & G. Valentine (Eds.), Cool places. Geographies of youth cultures (pp. 175–193). London/New York: Routledge. Douzet, F., & Robine, J. (2015). “Les jeunes des banlieues”: Neighborhood effects on the immigrant youth experience in France. Journal of Cultural Geography, 32(1), 40–53. Dwyer, C. (1998). Contested identities: Challenging dominant representations of young British Muslim women. In T. Skelton & G. Valentine (Eds.), Cool places: Geographies of youth cultures (pp. 50–65). London: Routledge. Dwyer, C. (1999). Veiled meanings: Young British Muslim women and the negotiation of differences. Gender, Place and Culture, 6(1), 5–26. Dwyer, C. (2000). Negotiating diasporic identities: Young British South Asian Muslim women. Women's Studies International Forum, 23(4), 475–486. Dwyer, C., & Meyer, A. (1995). The institutionalisation of Islam in the Netherlands and the UK: The case of Islamic schools. New Community, 21(1), 37–54. Dwyer, C., & Parutis, V. (2013). ‘Faith in the system?’ State-funded faith schools in England and the contested parameters of community cohesion. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 267–284. Gergan, M. (2014). Precarity and possibility: On being young and indigenous in Sikkim, India. Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 34(2), 67–80. Gergan, M. (2015). Animating the sacred, sentient and spiritual in post-humanist and material geographies. Geography Compass, 9(5), 262–275. Gökariksel, B., & Secor, A. (2014). The veil, desire, and the gaze: Turning the inside out. Signs: Journal of men in Culture and Society, 40(1), 177–200. Gökariksel, B., & Secor, A. (2015). Post-secular geographies and the problem of pluralism: Religion and everyday life in Istanbul, Turkey. Political Geography, 46, 21–30. Gunnestad, A., & Thwala, S. (2011). Resilience and religion in children and youth in southern Africa. International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 16(2), 169–185. Halvorson, S. (2005). Growing up in Gilgit: An exploration of girls’ lifeworlds in northern Pakistan. In C. Nagel & G. W. Falah (Eds.), Geographies of Muslim women (pp. 19–44). New York: Guilford Press. Heelas, P., Woodhead, L., Seel, B., Tusting, K., & Szernzynski, B. (2005). The spiritual revolution: Why religion is giving way to spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Hemming, P. J. (2017). Childhood, youth and religious identity: Mapping the terrain. In N. Worth, C. Dwyer, & T. Skelton (Eds.) Geographies of children and young people volume 4: Geographies of identities and subjectivities. Singapore: Springer, 51–68. Hopkins, P. (2007). ‘Blue squares’, ‘proper’ Muslims and transnational networks. Narratives of national and religious identities amongst young Muslim men living in Scotland. Ethnicities, 7(1), 61–81. Hopkins, P. (2011). Towards critical geographies of the university campus: Understanding the contested experiences of Muslim students. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36, 157–169. Hopkins, P., Olson, E. A., Pain, R., & Vincett, G. (2011). Mapping intergenerationalities: The formation of youthful religiosities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36, 314–327. Hopkins, P., Olson, E., Baillie Smith, M., & Laurie, N. (2015). Transitions to religious adulthood: Relational geographies of youth, religion and international volunteering. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40(3), 387–398. Hörschelmann, K. (2008). Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics – Young people’s responses to the war in Iraq (2003). Political Geography, 27, 587–609. Jeffrey, C. (2013). Geographies of children and youth III: Alchemists of the revolution? Progress in Human Geography, 37(1), 145–152. Jones, R. D. (2014). University challenges: Negotiating secularism and religiosity in higher education institutions. Environment and Planning A, 46, 1983–1999. Judge, R. (2015). Emotion, volunteer-tourism and marginalised youth. In M. Blazek & P. Kraft (Eds.), Children’s emotions in policy in practice: Mapping and making spaces of childhood (pp. 157–173). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global. Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kong, L. (2010). Global shifts, theoretical shifts: Changing geographies of religion. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 755–776. Kong, L. (2013). Balancing spirituality and secularism, globalism and nationalism: The geographies of identity, integration and citizenship in schools. Journal of Cultural Geography, 30(3), 276–307. Madge, N., Hemming, P., & Stenson, K. (2014). Youth on religion: The development, negotiation and impact of faith and non-faith identity. London: Routledge. McGuire, M. (2008). Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, A., & Gökariksel, B. (2014). Provincializing geographies of religion: Muslim identities beyond the ‘West’. Geography Compass, 8(12), 902–914. Moinian, F. (2009). ‘I’m just me!’ Children talking beyond ethnic and religious identities. Childhood, 16(1), 31–48. Nagel, C., & Staeheli, L. (2014). International Donors, NGOs, and the Geopolitics of Youth Citizenship in Contemporary Lebanon. Geopolitics, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045 .2014.922958. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2013). Theorizing childhood(s): Why we need postcolonial perspectives. Childhood, 20(1), 3–8. Olson, E., Hopkins, P., & Kong, L. (2013a). Introduction. In P. Hopkins, L. Kong, & E. Olson (Eds.), Religion and place: Landscape, politics and piety (pp. 1–20). New York: Springer. Olson, E., Hopkins, P., Pain, R., & Vincett, G. (2013b). Retheorizing the postsecular present: Embodiment, spatial transcendence, and challenges to authenticity among young Christians in Glasgow, Scotland. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(6), 1421–1436. Park, C. (1994). Sacred worlds: Introduction to geography and religion. London: Routledge. Seemann, B. (1862). Remarks on a government mission to the Fiji islands. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 32, 51–62.

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Sharma, S., & Guest, M. (2013). Navigating religion between university and home: Christian students’ experiences in English universities. Social and Cultural Geography, 14(1), 59–79. Smith, S. (2012). Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(6), 1511–1528. Smith, C., & Denton, M. L. (2005). Soul searching: The religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, C., & Snell, P. (2009). Souls in transition: Religious & spiritual lives of emerging adults. New York: Oxford University Press. Staeheli, L. A., & Nagel, C. R. (2011). Whose awakening is it? Youth and the geopolitics of civic engagement in the ‘Arab Awakening’. European Urban and Regional Studies, 20(1), 115–119. Valentine, G. (2007). Theorising and researching intersectionality: A challenge for feminist geography. Professional Geographer, 59, 10–21. Vincett, G., & Olson, E. (2012). Case study 3: The religiosity of young people growing up in poverty. In L. Woodhead & R. Catto (Eds.), Religion and change in modern Britain (pp. 196–197). London: Routledge. Vincett, G., Olson, E., Hopkins, P., & Pain, R. (2012). Young people and performance: Christianity in Scotland. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 27(2), 275–290. Wallin, G. A. (1854). Narrative of a Journey from Cairo to Medina and Mecca, by Suez, Arabá, Tawilá, al-Jauf, Jubbé, Háil, and Nejd, in 1845. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 24, 115–207. Wilford, J. (2012). Sacred subdivisions. The postsuburban transformation of American evangelicism. New York: NYU Press. Woods, O. (2012). The geographies of religious conversion. Progress in Human Geography, 36(4), 440–456. Yip, A. K. T., & Page, S. (2014). Religious faith and heterosexuality: A Multi-faith exploration of young adults. Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion., 25, 78–108.

Finding a Place for Babies and Their Spatialities

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Gabriela Guarnieri de Campos Tebet and Anete Abramowicz

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Absence of Babies in Childhood Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Looking for a Place for Babies in Social Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Babies in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Babies in Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Babies in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Babies and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Following Babies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter has the goal of contributing to the establishment of a field we can call Baby Studies, a field that can find a place for babies in social science as well as Childhood Studies and Youth Studies did with Children and Youth. (Tebet’s 2013 publication, “Isto não é uma criança! Teorias e métodos para o estudo de bebês nas distintas abordagens da sociologia da inf^ancia de língua inglesa” (“That’s not a child! Theories and methods for the study of babies in different approaches of childhood sociology works in English language”) laid out the objectives to

G. G. d. C. Tebet (*) Department of Social Sciences in Education, Faculty of Education – State University of Campinas – UNICAMP, Campinas, SP, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] A. Abramowicz Department of Pedagogical Theory and Practice, Federal University of São Carlos – UFSCar, São Carlos, SP, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_23

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constitute this new field. From 2014 onwards, authors have been participating in events around world that communicate the results developed by Gabriela Tebet. Authors have been discussing “Babies and Sociology of Childhood” (Tebet and Abramowicz 2013, 2014), the “Geography of Babies” (Tebet and Abramowicz 2015), and “Studies of Babies” (Tebet 2015 – Symposium A29 at 25th EECERA). However, in this chapter we have adopted the term “Baby Studies,” considering it analytically a better name for this field, due to its similarity with the conceptual frameworks behind “Childhood Studies” and “Youth Studies.” We co-developed this term through communication with Tracey Skelton. Our proposed discussions derive from a theoretical study conducted by Tebet and Abramowicz (2014) and provide new evidence for the ensuing arguments, noting how geography can contribute to constituting and fortifying this emerging field. To this end, the authors confirm the absence of babies in childhood studies and highlight research from such fields as history, anthropology, geography, and philosophy that could be considered as a basis to establish a place for babies in social science focusing on themes that link babies to space and geography. Authors such as Deleuze, Simondon, and Deligny support the main ideas of the chapter. Scenes from research conducted in Brazil in the context of early childhood education and care are cited herein and reveal paths and experiences of infants in a variety of spaces. Finally, the subsection “Following babies” discusses methodological perspectives and elements that argue for including cartography as a promising approach in Baby Studies as it could enable researchers to follow more effectively the miniscule, even minimal, gestures and events that comprise the lives of babies, contributing to a better understanding of babies from their perspective and agency. Keywords

Baby Studies · Babies · Infancy · Geography of babies · Cartography · Individuation · Un-individuation · Spatialities · Mosaic approach

1

Introduction

This chapter has the goal of contributing to the establishment of a field we can call Baby Studies, a field that can find a place for babies in social science. Proposed discussions derive from a theoretical study conducted by Tebet and Abramowicz (2014), which examined the literature on Sociology of Childhood as a potential basis for Baby Studies. This evaluation did not find sufficient contributions to inform such an undertaking and argues that the principal reason for this is the fact that babies are not children. Accordingly, the principal concepts and methodologies underlying the Sociology of Childhood are not readily adaptable, or in the case of concepts, not necessarily suitable for research, conducted with babies as their subject. Starting from this background, this study defines some foundations for Baby Studies and provides new evidence for the ensuing discussion, noting how geography can contribute to constituting and fortifying this emerging field. To this end, the

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authors confirm the absence of babies in childhood studies and highlight research from such fields as history, anthropology, geography, and philosophy that could be considered as a basis to establish a place for babies in social science. This chapter describes the ways in which societies have understood and related to babies across time and how they have changed, focusing on themes that link babies to space and geography. The text adopts a poststructuralist view and propositions by Abramowicz (2007, 2011) and by Tebet and Abramowicz (2014) about understanding babies simultaneously as pre-individual beings, becomings, and singularities. In this regard, it brings the following ideas to the discussion: studies on the process of individuation (Simondon 2003), immanence and conceptual persona (Deleuze 2001a), and cartography (Deleuze and Guattari 2000; Deligny 2008). From this perspective, research conducted in Brazil in the context of early childhood education and care by Leite (2014), Oliveira (2015), Schmitt (2011), Silveira and Abramowicz (2002), and Spressola and Tebet (2013) reveals paths and experiences of infants in a variety of spaces. Finally, section 8 presents maps by Oliveira (2015) and Sumsion et al. (2014) and discusses methodological perspectives and elements that argue for including cartography as a promising approach in Baby Studies as it could enable researchers to follow more effectively the miniscule, even minimal, gestures and events that comprise the lives of babies, contributing to a better understanding of babies from their perspective and agency.

2

Absence of Babies in Childhood Studies Childhood Studies have not included babies. I do not think they have. And it is absolutely correct that they should be included. Perhaps it is more challenging. We cannot easily interview a baby, you have to observe them, you have to work in other ways. (Alison James – interviewed by Pires and Nascimento 2014, p. 942)

While the principal issue in studying babies is a methodological one, their social construction and perception by society are also critical. The challenges facing social scientists in conducting such research, noted by James and others (Gottlieb 2000), may well contribute to its dearth, but they are not the only factors. “Constituting the Child” (Jenks 1982) represents a theoretical initiative to constitute the child analytically to address approaches that abandon children “to ignorance and a secondary status, or a radical difference and a bipartite world” (Jenks 2002, p. 214). Conceptualized as non-adults, children comprise a category that includes babies without delineating their distinctions. Children, in this context, are not only social beings but also a construct to answer different models of social life, while childhood is a discursive construct to support the formation of a specific child. In this work, Jenks describes images of children used by social scientists in their studies. There’s the concept of the savage child, which derives from an adult-centric view, in which the child is seen as primitive and incomplete as related to adults, and the natural child, which supports premises of developmental psychology and

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assumes childhood as part of biological and cognitive development. Jenks, on the other hand, argues for the social child, which originates in social constructionism. In another work, the author, with colleagues, notes the existence of groups of images titled “Pre-sociology depictions of children” and “Sociological images of children,” respectively. The first group includes the evil child, from Hobbes’ thought; the innocent child, found in the pages of Rousseau; Locke’s immanent child, awaiting imprints on its tabula rasa; and the unconscious child of Freudian psychoanalysis. These concepts and others were detailed by James, Jenks and Prout with reference to transitional depictions of socially developing, socially constructed, tribal, minority and social structural children (James et al. 1998). Since the 1980s, theoretical constructs of childhood have informed and enriched childhood studies. The perspective has shifted from one focused on universal biological stages of human development to one that views children as social beings with diverse cultural, social, and historical contexts that constitute them and, in turn, are constituted by them. Accordingly, the discipline must take into account the agency of children and their views of the world in which they live.

3

Looking for a Place for Babies in Social Studies

Although social theories about children are advancing, babies remain largely invisible, subsumed under the broader categories of children and young children. While they are seen as individuals, there are few studies that address the process of subjectification and individuation that matures babies into children. This is a scientific question since babies differ significantly from children, and it is not beneficial to study them as though they were the same. A field of Baby Studies should be created within the social sciences to interact with Childhood Studies, while recognizing the specificities of babyhood and examining the relevance of discourses regarding childhood, i.e., do babies fall within the apparatus of childhood or not? There is a dearth of initiatives with the objective of bringing babies (newborns, infants, and toddlers) to the forefront of academic discussion. Gottlieb in his 2000 paper “Where Have All The Babies Gone?: Toward an Anthropology of Infants (and Their Caretakers)” discusses why babies are not pervasive in anthropological studies. In the field of geography, however, some papers address the experiences of babies and toddlers. Holt (2013) explores how infants are subjected. Hancock and Gillen (2007) describe 2-year-olds at play in their homes, citing cases from Italy, Peru, and the United States. Gallacher (2005) present ways in which space and time are negotiated in the course of daily life in a toddler room in a Scottish nursery. From a similar perspective, research by Harrison and Sumsion (2014) review studies on lived spaces in infant-toddler care and education in Australia. Considering space as a social and experiential construct that goes beyond physical dimensions, the authors highlight the active role played by infants and toddlers in creating and defining such spaces. Fontanel and d’Harcourt (2010) conducted an iconic study, tracing the history of babies from antiquity to the present day. Its inclusion of changes in the methods of their feeding, clothing, swaddling, learning to walk, etc. provides elements for

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constructing a history of beliefs and practices relating to the education and care of babies. Tebet and Abramowicz (2014) initiate a dialogue with the sociology of childhood to highlight the need for constituting the term baby as a theoretical concept and analytical category distinct from the child in social studies. Drawing on philosophy, the authors cite concepts of the pre-individual (Deleuze 2001a, Simondon 1964, 1969, 2003) and singularity and immanence (Deleuze 1995) to define babies. The cited studies are evidence that social studies have started to consider babies and that anthropology, geography, history, pedagogy, philosophy, and sociology, among others, are beginning to recognize the specificities of being a baby in society. Tracing parallels between feminist and childhood studies, Alanen (2010) notes that, in both cases, there was a period focused on expanding general concepts to include the specificity of the new field. This initial stage of development included a period of critiquing existing research and adopting what Alanen terms an “extension strategy,” which comprises the development of specific concepts by extending existing concepts and methodologies rather than creating new ones. Alanen deems studying childhood using methods, concepts, or theories different from those used to study general society lacks clear justification as children are part of society. Yet, as she notes, both feminist and childhood studies were marked by theoretical reconstruction needed to deconstruct certain concepts and truths. In the case of the Baby Studies, the conceptual extension phase is evident, and what is required is the assumption of new approaches in view of the utterly inadequate representation of babies in studies of children, including those on early childhood. In this sense, Tebet and Abramowicz (2014) argue that the unique specificities of babies must be examined, understood and appreciated by the social sciences. What is proposed, in fact, is recognition of the baby as an independent concept in social analysis, which could support the development of a new field of studies: Baby Studies, encompassing babies, infants, and toddlers. Studying babies as an independent field introduces critically needed innovations to traditional notions of childhood studies. Babies make us look at what is not so readily visible, such as nonverbal ways of communication and relationship, or what is commonly overlooked, such as care related to the body and its processes. To constitute a baby conceptually is to broaden the scope and depth of childhood research and to initiate and enable a constructive dialogue within the panoply of disciplines that is the social science family.

4

Babies in History

To think about babies in history is to consider how society has changed the way it thinks of, and acts towards, them. If we regard acts as social practices, then “social practices may engender domains of knowledge that not only bring new objects, new concepts, and new techniques to light, but also give rise to totally new forms of subjects and subjects of knowledge” (Foucault 1999, p. 8). That is to say, “truth itself

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has a history,” and the subject “is constituted within history itself, and that is again and again founded and refounded by history” (Foucault 1999). In this sense, the work of Aries (1962), Badinter (1985), Donzelot (2001), and Fontanel and d’Harcourt (2010) describe the social construction of ways in which societies have dealt with babies and children across history and how they have changed over time. To see how social practices may engender domains of knowledge and give rise to new topics in the case of babies, consider such practices as abandonment, breastfeeding, bandaging, and infant neglect. Badinter, in her 1985 work debunking what she regards as the myth of mother’s love, observes that until the eighteenth century, it was uncommon for mothers to breastfeed their babies. Economically privileged families commonly sent their infants to wet nurses despite the considerable danger of infant mortality. As reported by Fontanel and d’Harcourt (2010, p. 66) and Badinter (1985), only 1000 of each 21,000 babies born in Paris in 1780 were breastfeed by their mothers. Another thousand were breastfeed by wet nurses who came to the home, and the remaining some 19,000 babies were sent in open air wagons to the wet nurses living far from the city. Badinter states that the practice of sending babies to wet nurses was widespread among the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie. These women thought that there were more interesting things to do than breastfeeding. For the poorest couples in society, a baby represents a threat to its parents, leaving no choice but to leave it in an orphanage or with a wet nurse, with small chance of survival in either case. According to Donzelot (2001), two thirds of the babies sent to live with distant wet nurses died, and about one quarter of the babies whose wet nurses lived closer by perished as well. Historically, such practices were not restricted to Europe nor limited to the eighteenth century. According to Vinagre et al. (2001), wet nurses have existed since the ancient civilization of Babylon (2500 B.C.) and were present in Egypt (1500 B.C.). Wet nurses also played an important role in Brazilian history, until social and governmental institutions took action to increase the rates of Brazilian mothers breastfeeding. According to Badinter (1985), while present-day families generally grieve the loss of a baby or child, such disturbing death tolls did not evoke the same effect in an historical and cultural epoch in which the death of children was commonplace and largely regarded as an accident arising from demographic conditions. If we further consider that it was widely held until the eighteenth century that semen deposited in the female body could adulterate breast milk and place her infant’s life at risk, we may understand how babies were often seen as a hindrance and placed in the care of a wet nurse until they no longer required breastfeeding. Sperm, they said back then, spoils the mother’s milk and makes it sour, placing the baby’s life in danger. As a result of this disinformation, the father faced prolonged abstinence from marital relations. On the other hand, challenges to the taboo led to the discovery that women were less fertile during lactation. Thus the father faced two unattractive alternatives: intimacy that put the baby’s life at risk or forgoing the marriage bed to safeguard it. A third option, i.e., to seek his pleasures elsewhere, would strain family cohesion even further. Many thus saw placing the infant with a wet nurse until weaning as the best solution (Badinter 1985, p. 97).

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Aries (1962) affirms that in this era, what we now call childhood simply did not exist. Badinter (1985), alternatively, asserts that children, regardless of age, were often rejected as a group. A child was viewed as an impediment not only to conjugal life but to other mundane pleasures, she observes, and the care of one’s child was not regarded as either elegant or amusing. On the other hand, cultural and financial factors contributed to a desire for male offspring and for children’s contribution of labor among the working class. In regard to present-day sentiments in relation to babies, considerable forces, devices, and information were necessary to persuade mothers that breastfeeding was a desirable practice and to inculcate the modern family practices regarding children that produced the image of fathers, mothers, and babies we idealize today. Studies conducted by Philippe Ariès describe how the modern concept of childhood was only developed toward the end of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but not without provoking negative reactions. Peevish persons found insufferable the attention paid to children. Montaigne bristles: “I cannot abide that passion for caressing new-born children, which have neither mental activities nor recognizable body shape by which to make themselves loveable, and I have never really suffered them to be fed in my presence.” He cannot accept the idea of loving children “for our amusement like monkeys, or taking pleasure in their frolicking, games, and infantile nonsense.” (Aries 1962, p. 130)

According to Ariès, the development of a sense of family (cf. Badinter 1985; Donzelot 2001) enables the relationships we enjoy with our babies and children today. And there are many other works that affirm the significant role played by medical and juridical discourses in regulating adult relationships with babies and children. One can see how knowledge and technology related to the structure of the family, such as the role of women within it, and to health and nutrition, such as the invention of formula and the feeding bottle, enabled conceptualizations of a baby that differed from that of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. New infant educational practices could be developed in the conviction that knowledge creates relationships, which in turn, creates a new kind of baby. In addition to breastfeeding, babies’ use of space was also undergoing fundamental changes. Prior to the eighteenth century, the spatial experience of a baby tightly bound by swaddling, (a common practice in France and Germany in Goethe’s time) which left them unable to explore their bodies, was restricted unlike the unbound babies ensconced in a baby carriage or playing on the floor. For further analysis of the relationship between babies and baby carriage, see Cortes-Morales and Christensen (2015) (Fig. 1). Reforms in infant care and other practices originated in changes in knowledge and thought about babies, which determined a spatial organization in which each baby needed to be in a specific place without the possibility of movement or, later, one in which babies were freer to explore the space around them. Thus changes in society’s concept of what a baby is have affected spatial standards as can be seen when one visits a nursery or daycare center and finds ample play space but not a

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Fig. 1 (a, b) Babies in space in different historical ages and contexts (Sources: (a) http:// les8petites8mains.blogspot.com.br/2014/02/la-veture-des-enfants-trouves-4-la.html and (b) image from Tebet research collection)

single crib, as observed by Tebet in recent research conducted in a Brazilian nursery and as observed in a Scottish nursery as reported in Gallacher (2005). This is a significant change since a baby who only knows its crib has a different spatial experience from one who can explore other spaces inside and outside the home (Hancock and Gillen 2007). In a similar sense, a baby on a carpet moving about the relatively limited space of an apartment or daycare room will encounter different experiences from indigenous babies who explore rain, dirt, and water, next to their mothers, as reported by Noal (2013), who describes life in the village of Pirakuá, in Bela Vista (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil): Babies, broadly speaking, are with their mothers who invariably participate in the activities in the village while carrying them. This social interaction may happen at any time of the day: morning, afternoon, evening, night. They are breastfed when they want to be and they sit on their mothers’ laps, watching what is going on. When they are a bit older, they sit on the floor, but still close to their mothers. Exploration, recognition and mastery of physical space are fundamental components in the education of children from the time they are babies (. . .) Babies stay with their mothers but not in an exclusive and reclusive manner. (2013, p. 67)

What are these considerations telling us? They tell us that what babies are and what they experience, and what they will be and experience in the future, are conditioned by social constructs established by diverse adult interests. This knowledge is critical to appreciating that babies are not seen in a universal – much less timeless – manner, nor are the ways that adults relate to them necessarily natural.

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Babies in Anthropology

Studies conducted by Margaret Mead in the 1920s and 1930s constitute a major milestone in the anthropological study of children, even if not necessarily recognized as such at the time of their publication (James et al. 1998). Mead’s main focus

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involved matters related to child rearing, personality, and culture (Mead 1930, 1935). Her studies on childhood (Growing up in New Guinea) and about sex and temperament in Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli societies are deemed pioneering research that has contributed to establishing a basis for studying children in their own right. Moreover, Mead’s investigation of the daily lives of Samoan girls examined their transition from early childhood to adolescence. Other studies contributing to the anthropology of the child include Benedict’s study of the social position of childhood (1938), which stresses the contrasts in the point of view of a child or of an adult. In “Can there be an anthropology of children?” Hardman (1973) identifies the existence of children’s self-regulating, autonomous worlds and proposes that children be treated as agentic social actors, arguing for an anthropology of children. Although babies were not the focus of these first anthropological studies on children, they appear in some research (Morton 1996; Nunes 1999; Cohn 2009, 2015). In describing the relationship of the Xikrin, an indigenous tribe from the north of Brazil, with their babies, Cohn (2015) notes their understanding of the relationship between the physical body and the karon, something akin to what is commonly referenced as the “soul.” The cry of a baby is understood as an imminent risk, indeed a risk of death, as the Xikrin believe that when a baby cries, its karon separates from its body and thus becomes more susceptible to the effects of other bodiless karons. For this reason, the Xikrin often talk to and comfort babies so that they do not cry and remain safe from this danger. The research, however, that effectively brought babies to the forefront of anthropology was conducted by Alma Gottlieb who, after discussing the religion of babies (Gottlieb 1998), asserted an anthropology for babies and their caregivers distinct from that of older children (Gottlieb 2000). In an article titled “Do Infants Have Religion?” Gottlieb (1998) highlights a significant dimension of the spiritual lives of babies among Bengs, a society in Cote d’lvoire where infants are said to lead a profoundly spiritual existence. This study points out the implications of this comprehension for the daily experiences of Beng babies, as well as the implications of a full-blown treatment of infants for the practice of anthropology. A few years later, Gottlieb (2000) regards babies as relevant, beneficial anthropological subjects and lists the purported reasons offered by others to justify their exclusion. These rationalizations appear to lie largely outside anthropology, raising the question of the absence of babies noted by James in this work’s epigraph. For Gottlieb, the pretexts relate to babies’ dependence on others, their routines bound to their mothers, their perceived inability to communicate, their inconvenient propensity to leak out of various orifices, and their relatively primitive degree of reasoning. Gottlieb, however, cites studies she has conducted among the Beng in the Ivory Coast, as supporting her view and others’ that “[babies] can be considered decisive to the life of those around them.” Beng infants are far from helpless creatures with no opinions or impact on the world. For the Beng, as for many non-Western peoples, the supposedly complete dependence of infants, as it is widely if unconsciously assumed by Western-trained anthropologists, is a non-issue,

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thus challenging our implicit ideology of infant-as-passive creature, which has foreclosed the possibility of privileging babies as legitimate sites, let alone active producers, of culture. (Gottlieb 2000, p. 124)

The seeming inability of babies to communicate is claimed as another factor that precludes research beyond a psychological perspective. Gottlieb writes that babies have long been considered “impenetrable for cultural influence” and “defined as pre-cultural” since in anthropology, as in science generally, rational systems of thought are deemed superior to other means of experiencing life. Gottlieb retorts that even in studies with adult subjects, difficulties in establishing communication are common. Thus the situation cited as a defense for babies’ exclusion is hardly unique. As Gottlieb observes: To achieve rapport we may need to adjust our field methods. Students of language are now suggesting that the classic criterion for identifying a “text” – the presence of an alphabetic or ideographic system of writing may be too narrow. Other communication systems – clothing and adornment, games, table manners, and so on – may be productively analyzed as semiotic texts. I suggest that it likewise makes sense to consider infants’ lives as texts to be read, though possibly with a new set of glasses. (Gottlieb 2000, p. 125)

Babies communicate many things through their bodies (crying, smiling, and babbling) and through their impact on family, social, and cultural life. We need to develop tools to decode these messages, enabling their analysis as texts produced by babies. We need to construct research methodologies not limited to anthropology that are capable of studying babies and identifying elements that contribute to social theory. It might be tempting at a methodological level to allow others to speak for infants entirely – to allow an anthropology of infants to become an anthropology of infancy as seen by others. This would assume that infants are completely subject to structures imagined by adults, incapable of asserting any subjectivity. Yet this is precisely what we need to eschew if an anthropology of infancy is to include not only a consideration of others’ perspectives of infants but equally importantly, an anthropology of infants themselves – premised on a notion that infants may themselves be social actors (Morton 1996), albeit ones who may utilize exotic modes of communication. We have already hinted at some methodological shifts that a fully developed anthropology of infants might necessitate (Gottlieb 2000). Gottlieb concludes, “an anthropology of infants (and their caretakers) should contribute to enduring social and philosophical debates about the role of nurture in shaping human lives,” inasmuch as “a fieldwork-informed ethnography of infants may contribute significantly to this ongoing conversation” (Gottlieb 2000, p. 128). Developing a sort of “ethnography of babies,” one can observe that babies have yet to be captured by what Foucault and Deleuze term the “apparatuses of control.” One might think that babies are outside the apparatus of childhood and that this is the reason it is so difficult to work with them. They are life and, in this sense, are not captured by it. They have the power to create new ways of life, new spatial arrangements. Leclercq (2002) states that babies are deterritorialized. Experiencing an ethnography of babies can make one feel that deterritorialized babies have an

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immense capacity to deterritorialize. They take us out of our comfort zone and affect us in singular ways. Outside the childhood apparatus, they are not governed by the logic of the individual or subject, thus requiring us to construct unique forms of teaching and introducing a series of questions for daycare curriculum and praxis and also for research in human geography.

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Babies in Space

Informed by concepts in Deleuze (1997) and Tuan (2013) and by the geographical experience of babies, this chapter highlights the ways in which these experiences affect the processes of individuation and subjectification. As Holt observes: Attention to infants’ everyday geographies therefore has the potential to unravel how individuals are subjected; how power becomes an embodied part of individuals’ subjective identities, operating creatively to produce subjects with agency, and, at the same time, limiting and circumscribing appropriate subjectivities. (Holt 2013, p. 645)

To see how babies experience space is to examine a network of relationships that extends from architecture to the occupation of spaces which babies cross, the availability of objects and materials, and the potential movements and relations that are part of that space, a place with a value (Tuan 2013, p. 14). To this end, the debates proposed by Harrison and Sumsion (2014) are meaningful, as is Aitken’s (2001) work about geographies of young people, Drozdzewski and Robinson (2015) discussion about geography of care-work and Clark and Moss (2011) Mosaic approach, which recommends undertaking tours with children and making maps with them associated with other research methodologies as effective strategies for studying the experiences of children, not simply the care they received or the knowledge they acquired. Grounded in the competence of children as social actors to share multiple perspectives on their lives, the Mosaic approach exhibits the following characteristics: • Multi-method: recognizes the different “voices” or languages of children • Participatory: treats children as experts and agents in their own lives • Reflexive: includes children, practitioners, and parents in reflecting on meanings and addresses the question of interpretation • Adaptable: can be applied in a variety of early childhood institutions • Focused on children’s lived experiences: can be used for a variety of purposes including looking at lives lived rather than knowledge gained or care received • Embedded into practice: a framework for listening that has the potential to be both used as an evaluative tool and to become embedded into early years practice (Clark 2005, p. 30) Constituting a tool for studying children, the Mosaic approach is, in fact, a specific kind of ethnography that could also contribute to research with babies,

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due to its adaptability and recognition of social action and the different languages used by children and babies. This approach is not prevalent in Brazil but contributions to an ethnography of babies, via observation, pictures, recording, and dialogue, with key professionals can be found in studies centered on the experiences and social actions of babies. One study considers the relationship of babies with space, using data from a previous study of babies, age 4 months to 1 year, in a public daycare center in the south of Brazil. It begins with an understanding that spaces are never neutral and that “the presence or absence of objects and the way in which they are organized are always communicating something ‘about’ and ‘to’ the people who occupy it” (Schmitt 2011, p. 25). Its author notes that although such space is planned and organized by adults, a significant portion of the experiences occurring within it is neither accompanied by nor perceived by adults. Many times I observed a spontaneous approach between babies that could already crawl or walk in corners or heights of the room away from the immediate gaze of adults: under the diaper-changing area, under shelves, in gaps in the counter, between cribs, etc. In a way, these spaces where only the little ones could fit, despite being previously organized by adults, were often shown by the babies themselves, one to the other, by means of actions, gestures and looks. (Schmitt 2011, p. 28)

Other Brazilian studies describe how babies interact with space and intimate the role technology could play. Among them is the work of Leite (2014), whose findings were published in the video “O que pode a imagem” (“What image can do”); research by Lopes (2012), published in the text “Os bebês, as crianças pequenas e suas condições histórico geográficas: algumas notas para debate teóricometodológico” (“Babies, small children and their historical-geographical conditions: some notes for the theoretical-methodological debate”), and a study by Silveira and Abramowicz (2002) that involved providing cameras to infants in educational settings. All these works imply the need for researchers to be prepared to thrust themselves into the realm of the unanticipated and unusual to which babies and toddlers will introduce them and to find and develop methodologies suitable to their exploration. Following the paths of these quite young beings and sharing their points of view through photographic images and video recordings reflects, in this sense, some of the strategies identified by Leite, Lopes, Silveira, and Abramowicz in the works cited herein. In a similar vein, but involving much younger infants, in 2012, 2013, and 2016, Spressola and Tebet conducted a study using cameras given to toddlers, aged 9–16 months, in public daycare centers in the southeast of Brazil, to capture whatever they wished to. Some photos were taken by imitation, that is, repeating the action of a teacher. Others accidentally, as in the case of babies exploring cameras, for example. This innovative approach takes into account the fact that today’s babies are born into a generation immersed in technology from birth and not adverse to its use. Their images afford researchers data capable of informing new perspectives on babies’ spatial interactions, namely, their own.

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Both sets of pictures capture the daycare centers’ floors, a significant presence in the babies’ spatial experiences. They further reveal how adults offer babies a vast variety of colored plastic toys, the use of rubber floor mats designed for infants, and a dress code allowing diapers without further attire. The images also depict two distinct ways of organizing and using space. In the first set (Fig. 2), one can see cribs, whereas they are not found in the second. Rather they have been replaced by mattresses, which represent a new concept of what babies are and how they should sleep. In the first set, there are chairs; however, the teacher eschews their use for the floor, which she shares with the babies. In the second, chairs are absent, reflecting the spatial effects of evolving power relationships between adults and babies (Fig. 3).

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Babies and Philosophy

There is no way to talk of babies without understanding what being is, since we cannot take the individual as a given. Hence, the methodological retreat to understand the indeterminate material that engenders the individual. This state prior to individuation is rich in energy but poor in structure, full of potential, tensions, lots of quantum relations, and intensity thresholds. This condition, described by Simondon (1964, 1969, 2003) as

Fig. 2 (a–d) Images from research conducted by Spressola and Tebet at daycare center A in 2013

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Fig. 3 (a–d) Images from research conducted by Tebet, collected at daycare center B in 2016

neither stable nor unstable but metastable, is a singular unlimited field. From it, derive biological, physical, psychological, and collective individuations. We all carry a pre-individual cargo, which enables new experimentations of being and the individual. In the case of infants, these experiments occur more intensely in the pre-individual. It is worth noting that this way of thinking complements purported individuality to some degree. The moment of deindividuation is revolutionary. There is energy in this metastable field that opens new configurations. When one tries to think of the baby in its pre-individuality, it does not provide fixed contours, saturated structures, individuality, and does not value the life of identities. It is a way to allow the crumbling of the forms the baby does not have. According to Emilia Marty, being as Simondon understands, it is twofold. On the one hand, it consists of a reservation (the being or being lacking the phase, in the physical-chemical sense, in part, homogeneous with defined boundaries, which can be separated from other constituents of the heterogeneous system); on the other, it consists in an operation (individuation whereby being becomes a facade with shape, structure, and consistency). Between the reserve and the operation, the report and the formatted, there is a barrier but also a necessary continuity, namely, porosity. Either way, the result of individuation the individual façade neither reabsorbs nor abolishes the reservation. Rather, it coexists with it, as an available excess. Similarly, the resulting operation of the individual may not be complete per se, as by definition its constant individuation is continuously individuating (Marty 2004, p. 5). Accordingly, the author says it is pre-individual, because it is before the individual, but also present in it, and its future. In this sense, as seen by Simondon, the baby carries an excess of virtues, and the potential of the potential is also present in pre-individuality. There is therefore an indetermination present in every individual, a

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kind of an impersonal life, singular, neutral, and beyond good and evil, in the terms of Deleuze, who, without constituting babies as a category, describes them as having scarcely individuality but possessing singularities. According to Deleuze (1995), a singular life is a non-individualized one. It is the life of a newborn. When these singularities resonate, communicate, integrate with one another, and solidify, individuation begins, and, as the process intensifies, the baby becomes a child. Agamben (2005) recounts that, by singular coincidence, Foucault and Deleuze wrote their last texts on the concept of life. In “L’immanence: une vie. . .,” Deleuze says being as immanent is only to itself and in movement. This plan (immanence) is, according to Deleuze, entirely pre-individual and impersonal, a life without subject: immanence and life itself. What one wants most for a baby in all its developments is to become a person, a structure, with gender, race, to soon leave its yet impersonal condition as a baby, one present at birth, although every so often there are parents who do not want to reveal the gender of their baby – and wish to raise a child “gender free” such as Baby Pop in Sweden and Baby Storm in Canada. This idea of becoming, understood as a movement, process, path, intensive force serves us well in thinking about babies. This is not to identify the parties or reduction, still less the transformation of one another. Becoming, as defined by Deleuze, is a moment involving affectability, that is, the power to affect or be affected. Becoming, not turning-out-to-be, it has nothing to do with the future, with any sort of chronology, but rather with what we are capable of doing to create a possibility of life, a life with power to oppose the power over it. In some manner, the baby and the future maintain a relationship because they are multiplicities in the process’s intensities and trials. Indeed, becoming is a kind of resistance to external bodies that impose or would impose. Accordingly, the concept of baby may be understood in terms of singularity, difference, and immanence. To study babies from this perspective is to seek to draw the lines of singularity that accompany individuation. It is to study the lines of immanence that particularly define the lives of babies, a singular aspect that exists in a life. Children strive to become what they desire to be, creating what Deleuze terms a ‘line (or plane) of immanence.’ The creation of this line involves a dual activity. Children plot a trajectory that negotiates the more rigid, settled structures and expectations that surround them, what Deleuze calls ‘line (or plane) of organization.’ (Prout 2005, p. 113)

These lines of organization include institutions, such as family and school, which seek to shape children, fixing them within a pattern of normality that is generally binary and marked by dichotomies: nature/culture, masculine/feminine, adult/child, etc. Children, however, frequently escape these external boundaries, since “such lines of immanence tend to dissolve these segmentations and binary divisions, ignoring and hybridizing them and creating new entities” (Prout 2005, p. 113). To understand babies from the concepts of singular life and immanence is to understand them as pre-individual beings, given that, according to Deleuze, it is singularity that defines the being’s pre-individual condition.

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Singular without being individual, such is the state of pre-individual being. It is difference, disparity, ‘disparation.’ (. . .) A world of discrete singularities that overlap, that overlap all the more given that they do not yet communicate, in that they are not yet held within an individuality: such is the first moment of being. (Deleuze 2001a, pp. 44–46)

Babies are the becoming, examples of difference who carry the potential to generate new ways of being, relating, and living. They are natural because they have not yet assimilated the social rules and restrictions of the plane of organization, because they have not become individuals. They are immersed in a plane of immanence and possibilities. According to Deleuze: The singularities and the events that constitute a life coexist with the accidents of the life that corresponds to it, but they are neither grouped nor divided in the same way. They connect with one another in a manner entirely different from how individuals connect. It even seems that a singular life might do without any individuality, without any other concomitant that individualizes it. For example, very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face – not subjective qualities. Small children through all their sufferings and weaknesses are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss. (Deleuze 2001a, pp. 29–30)

In assuming that a baby is a pre-individual and singular being, one must reflect on the routes through which babies move along the planes of immanence and organization and through the relations by which they are gradually individuated. One must seek to trace the processes of becoming singular. Mapping these routes via cartography, schizoanalysis (Guattari 1985), and route and affection maps (Deleuze 1997) may unlock new possibilities for research with babies, as could the works of Fernand Deligny (L’Arachnéen et autres texts, éditions l’Arachnéen 2008). “To geographers, cartography – unlike maps which are representations of a static whole – is a drawing that accompanies and creates itself at the same time as the transformation movements of the landscape. Psychosocial landscapes can also have cartography. Cartography, in this case, accompanies and creates itself at the same time as the dismantlement of certain worlds – and the formation of others: worlds that create themselves to express contemporary affections, in relation to which the current universes become obsolete” (Rolnik 1989, p. 15).

8

Following Babies

To study babies from the perspective here proposed, is to study the networks that constitute their movements, and those of children, along the planes of immanence and organization, mapping the paths and the affections that constitute the movement of children and registering the singularities inherent to the baby’s pre-individual condition. This is the horizon for Baby Studies founded on the approaches proposed by the theorists cited herein, and it is the one the authors consider. Babies make tracings. They make territories and dismantle them, invent places, and singularly inflect the space they occupy, as noted in Hancock and Gillen 2007 and in the following examples. In what Oliveira (2015) dubs “os pés dos cadeirões

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ou tu´nel” (under the highchair or tunnel), when babies arrive at the care facility, they are placed on the floor to choose what to do. A set of toys is readily available at this level, but rather than avail himself of the toys placed at his disposal, one heads for the chairs and create a particular form of use. Exploring the spaces between the chair legs, he disrupts the teachers’ plans for use of the space to create a new space, new relations, and new amusements. In so doing, he inspires other babies to also explore newly discovered – or rather, recently created – space and conduct their own spatial experimentation. Sumsion et al. (2014) also contribute to creating a cartography of infants’ use of space and how they deterritorialize it, as depicted in the following maps (Figs. 4, 5, and 6). In this scenario, one can observe how babies trace lines and get an inkling of how a cartography of babies might work. The process is distinct from a developing cartography of older children. Gallacher (2005) charts the routine movements of toddlers in a nursery at different times, as depicted in the following drawing (Fig. 7). According to Tebet (2018), developing a cartography of childhood would identify the discourses, institutions, architectural organizations, regulatory decisions, laws, scientific statements, philosophical propositions, which have produced infants and older children. It would involve mapping the lines of visibility, enunciation, power, subjectivity, and rupture that comprise the apparatus of childhood. In contrast, creating cartographies of babies would involve mapping their movements, streams, desires, and creations, that is, mapping the uniqueness of a life as well as the singling and individuation that mark the development of babies. As a

Fig. 4 Under the highchair or tunnel (Oliveira 2015, p. 38)

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Fig. 5 Movements of infants in a private early childhood education (Sumsion et al. 2014, p. 58)

Fig. 6 Infants in highchairs (Sumsion et al. 2014, p. 49)

means of studying babies, cartography can trace their activities, movements, intensities, spatial density, streams, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, regardless of origin, but more needs to be done to attain effective tools for this challenge. In his research, Fernand Deligny (2008), aptly explained by Pelbart (2013, p. 261), drew on decades of collaboration with persons with autism, which provided acute insights into an anonymous way of living, a-subjective, not subjugated, and refractory to all symbolic domestication. He searched for a language without a

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Fig. 7 Mapping the use of space by toodlers in a Early Childhood Education in diferent moments of day. (Source: Gallacher (2005, pp. 246–250))

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subject or an existence without language, based on body, gestures, and tracks. This led to extensive reflection on a world before language or subject, not in a chronological sense, but that of a lifetime ruled by something other than what the language implies: will and purpose, performance and sense. In some manner, the babies construct trajectories from disinterested gestures and occasional unintended movements, enabling use of Deligny’s method to trace errant lines, map the movements of babies, as many of their gestures lack purpose. Babies make paths, but what they find on those paths is fortuitous, a stone, a piece of toy, a child, paths that make up random networks devoid of intentionality, which appear to wander and can be mapped as stray lines. The authors cited herein such as Simondon, Deligny, Guattari, and Deleuze help us understand that babies are not children but what Deleuze calls becoming: blurring the dichotomy between inside and out, abolishing constraints on actions, and obscuring the essential identity of subjects, a being out of sync, while, at the same time, acting successfully with full power. When Deligny traced the movements of autistic children, it was only after observing the maps derived from accompanying them that he discovered they all passed by a source of water, a predilection only observable after the fact. Babies have a unique language. They engage in micro-political experiments, tiny gestures, small variations characterized by sounds, silences, and movements, cartography is an effective means of tracing the trajectories babies make. According to Guattari and Rolnik (1986, p. 14), micropolitics relate to strategies of an economy of desire in the social field. But, at the same time, it can be described as relations on the molecular level, which make it possible to create new forms of subjectivities, shunning prescribed codes. In this context, micropolitical experimentation performed by babies is understood as experiments babies make in their relations that provide potential for constituting themselves as subjects without necessarily adopting dominant ways of subjection (Guattari and Rolnik 1986). Babies live a certain anonymous existence, a subjective experience still not subjected, life sustained by the body. Babies in their wanderings do not follow strict goals or meanings. The denomination of lines of wandering refers to a concept described by Deligny: What are, then, lines of wandering? They are the tracing, on sheets of transparent paper, made by a team of adults who accompanies children, based on the routes made by them over the course of a day. In general, under the transparent paper there is another sheet, a sort of physical map of the terrain they roam. Then, the routes of autistic children and adults are traced, in different colors or ways: the routes of autistics sometimes in ink, with all its subtle deviations, spins, escapades, recurrences. In other ways or colors, the so-called customary route, made by the adults that accompany them, and from which children often deviate. (in Pelbart 2013, p. 268)

As Deleuze and Guattari would say, there are straight lines for customary routes, flexible lines for erratic ones, and vanishing lines for detours and escapades. But, after all, why trace such lines; why make such maps? The map substitutes for speech. Instead of attempting to understand and, in due course, attribute meaning, one traces, follows the river’s course, so to speak, and does not fixate on purported intentions, always projected, ever presupposed. By following gestures, the miniscule, even

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minimal, events which comprise the lives of babies, one can understand them from their perspective, agency, and protagonism. Researchers are endeavoring to develop a cartography of babies. Among their ranks are Harrison, Sumsion, Abramowicz, Oliveira, and Tebet. Their work shows babies’ movements, the creative ways they interact with the space they live in, and the human and non-human actors, who share it. It represents initial, explorative attempts to construct cartography of babies that will constitute a critical piece of the methodological mosaic required to study babies.

9

Conclusion

For years, the authors have maintained that a baby is not a child and that, accordingly, concepts used to study children are, for the most part, ill-suited to the study of babies (for additional information, see Tebet 2013; Tebet and Abramowicz 2014). Babies are simply not part of the structure, discourse, and apparatus that is childhood. As an inhabitant of the plane of immanence, the baby does not belong to life; he/she is life. The baby was not captured by the apparatuses of control and power of life. He/She is life in power. But as soon as he/she is captured by life, he/she leaves the planes of virtuality and immanence and becomes a child. To think of the baby as virtuality, immanence, and pre-individuality is to reterritorialize the baby in the field of experience and the creation of new modes of existence. It is to escape from striated space and create unimagined spatial relations. It is to create deterritorialized spaces, as shown by Sumsion et al. (2014) and Oliveira (2015). There are many processes and lines of individuation and un-individuation that occur in the networks that babies build with humans and non-humans. As this chapter has highlighted, it is the responsibility of researchers to map these lines and draw these networks. It is argued that using the device of childhood imposes a cultural model for enjoying this time that is inadequate for babies, who should be subjected to its inflection only afterwards. Babies are unique beings, whom we call pre-individuals, not yet constituting individuals or subjects. The rules compel us to construct new linguistic terms, singularly related to them. They can, in fact, be deemed the “great deterritorializers,” as they exhibit immense capacity to deterritorialize our senses, language, and culture. To admit the study of babies as a new discipline is to admit the need for a field of knowledge that is both unique and unpredictable, one that demands knowledgeable guidance and theoretical tools to study the movements and processes by which babies become individuals, subjects in the realm of childhood, a social era built and subjectivized for them. Thus, the potential for babies to live their infancy liberated, in large measure, from the constraining models imposed on children as individuals and subjects arises if we regard them as a new conceptual figure, distinct from children and childhood, providing us the opportunity to value their unique inventive contributions as, so to speak, a work of art.

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Index

A Access educational, 339–342 socio-spatial, 157 Accumulation crisis and social reproduction, 130–132 Activism activities and, 243 political, 243 youth, 113–117 Affection and affect, 207, 212, 214 Affective geovisualization, 384–385, 389, 391–399 Ageism, 84 Agency, 230, 233, 234, 238, 239 Age segregation, 83, 84 Architecture, 5, 13–15, 429, 430, 437 children’s geographies and, 441–449 geographers of, 440 geographical scholarship on, 438 and nonrepresentational theory, 438 Aspiration educational transition opportunities, 339 and life transitions, 345–347 Autosphere, 179

B Babies, 5, 13–15, 16 in anthropology, 488–491 childhood studies, absence of babies in, 483–484 in history, 485–488 and philosophy, 493–496 in social studies, 484–485 in space, 491–493 Baby Studies, 482, 484, 485, 496

Benjamin, Walter, 8, 207, 215 Bergson, Henri, 173 Best interest of the child, 303 children and everyday life, 303–307 children’s place in society, 298–303 critical political feminist geography, 297–298 space and identity, 307–311 Bio Mapping, 392, 393 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 15, 148 capital, 150 children’s geographies, 152–158 Ergler’s study, Bourdieu’s conceptual triad, 158–161 field, 149–150 habitus, 150–151 middling tendency, 149 and social space, 151 Wood’s study, Bourdieu’s conceptual triad, 161–163 Bowlby, John, 179 Buildings, study of, 438 Bunge, Bill, 20, 26

C Cartography, 483, 496, 497, 501 Child/children, 6, 8, 274, 462, 468, 475 adult emotions towards, 364 agency, 58–61 and care workers, 363 caring responsibilities, 64 citizenship, 296, 297 consciousness, 176 construction of healthy future for society, 362 critiques of northern discourses of southern, 57–58

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4

505

506 Child/children (cont.) fear and anger, 361 generational relationships, 64 home ranges, 22 and materialities of learning and education, 368 methodologies for emotional geographies, 371 mind development, 175 movement with neighborhood, 369–370 object relations, 185 physical education, 361 play, 191, 192 political agency, 273 and politics, 272 potential spaces, 186, 189–192 psychoanalytic mapping, 184 relationship with teachers/adults, 367 school and education, 367 sexuality, 180 significance of global process, 62 social agency, 55–57 social construction, 53–55 social justice, 64–66 social reproduction, 63 sociology, 177 spatial and emotional autonomy, 365 transnational migrant families, 367 use of ICT, 361 as waste, 133–138 welfare legislation, 300 young people, 79 Childhood, 5, 9, 11, 15 Kallio and Häkli concepts, 238 political geographies of, 228 politics of care and, 236 politics of scale, Ansell on, 236 as spectacle, 132–133 Child-related policy-making, 364 Children’s Experience of Place: A Developmental Study, 21 Children’s geographies, 18, 383, 385–388 Children’s Geographies: Advancing Interdisciplinary Understanding of Younger People’s Lives, 18 Children’s Rights Committee (CRC), 33 Chomsky, Noam, 24 Citizenship, 227, 229, 230, 232 active, 261, 264 and critical interrogation, 236 education act, 368 formation, 318, 320

Index neoliberal, 257 youth participatory, 162–163 Cognitive mapping, 191 Coleman, James, 153 Collaboration, 105, 113 Countertopographies, 66, 143–144 Creative mapping practices, 399 Creativity, 138–143 Critical geographers, 297 Critical participatory action research, 97 Cultural capital, 150, 155–157 D Darwin, Charles, 5, 7, 8 eco logical theories, 183 emotions, 176 evolutionary hypothesis, 175 neo-Darwinism, 175 reproduction and revolutionary play, 193–197 sexual selection, 193–194 Deep maps, 388–390 Deleuze, Giles, 8 Department of Health and Statistic, 301 Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institution (DGEI), 26 Development, 4, 8, 12, 16 macro-economic, 298 mind, 175 natural child, 175 Developmental psychoanalytic theories, 179 Disposability, 138–143 Diversity ethnic and socioeconomic, 160 inclusivity and, 342 Dominant, 298 E Education Reform Act of 1988, 322 Egocentricism, 187 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 322 Elite-driven globalization processes, 303 Embodied social capital, 155 Embodiment, 205 Emotion/affect, 446 Emotional and affective geographies, 10–12 Emotional geographies adult towards children, 364 adult vs. child, 362 caring–investments, young people, 362

Index childhood, physical education, 361 of child peer relations, 362 child-related policy-making, 364–365 children and materialities of learning and education, 368 citizenship, 368 family spaces, children’s emotions, 366–367 maternal, 363 methodologies for children, 371–373 social media, children’s emotions in, 365 youth work and community, 369–370 English Language Learners, 330 Enlightenment thinkers, 8 Epistemological violence, 98 Ergler’s study active outdoor play, 159–161 aim, 158–159 Ethnographic research, 371 Ethnopoetics, 395–397 European Commission, 323, 324 F Familial intergenerationality, 77 Feminism, 8, 29–32, 235 Feminist geographers, 65, 235, 298, 299 Finland, 280, 283, 284, 286 Flax, Jane, 185, 187 Fluidity, 56 Foundations, 5, 15 Freud, Sigmund, 177–182, 185 G Genealogy, 5, 7, 9 Generation different ages people, 85 extrafamilial sense of, 79 intersecting notions, 81 life stages, 73–74, 79–80 Geographic information science, 389 Geographies of education, 10–12 aspiration and life transitions, 345 contemporary, 338 critical, 345 depth of, 338 opportunity, 339, 345 social class inequality, 341 social exclusion, 339 Geography, 461, 463, 474 of babies, 484, 491 intergenerational (see Intergenerational geographies)

507 Geopolitics, 235, 236, 240–242 Geovisualization, 5, 12, 16 Global neoliberalism, 62 Global positioning systems (GPS), 371 Grosz, Elizabeth, 193–194

H Habitus, 150, 157–158 Hart, Roger, 21 Heteronomous institutions, 302 Historical generation, 80–81 Holt, Louise, 155, 164 Hume, David, 183

I Imagination, 213–215 Immanence, 204, 205, 209, 219 Individuation, 483, 484, 491, 493, 495, 497, 501 Inequality challenges of, 352 race vs. educational, 349 social class, 341 Infancy, 490, 501 Intergenerational geographies, 73 age segregation, integration and differentiation, 82–85 familial generations, 77–78 growth, 72–77 historical generations, 80 intersecting notions, 81–82 life stages, 79 promoting space and encounter, 85–88 Intergenerationality, 6, 16 Intergenerational shared sites (IGSSs), 87 International Labor Organization (ILO), 35 International sexual trafficking, 305

K Klein, Melanie, 185–186

L Lacan, Jaques, 177 anti-biologism, 181 language acquisition, 181 mother-child relationships, 180 topology of subjectivity, 189

508 M Macro-economic development, 298 Macro-scale, 305 Marginalized, 298 Marxist-feminist interventions, 130 Materiality, 430 of built forms, 440 in children’s lives, 436 theories of, 432 Merrifield, Andy, 27 Middling tendency, 149 Migration extralegal, 342 forced, 344 post-migration settlement, 345 and refugee mobility, 353 Mimetic faculty, 139, 140 Mood Meter, 392–393 Moral undertones, 309 Morrow, Virginia, 153 Mosaic approach, 491 Mother-child interactions, 179 Multiculturalism, 320, 321 Multisensory qualitative research method, 398

N National Defense Education Act of 1958, 322 Natural child development, 175 Neo-Darwinism, 175 Neo-Lamarkianism, 175 Neoliberal context, youth participation in, 99–101 Neo-liberal ideologies, 299 Non-representational theory (NRT), 10, 385, 430 Normative rationality, 257 Nuisance, 310

O Opportunity, to school access, 341

P Parens patriae, 299 Participation, 4, 7, 9, 14, 16, 430, 435, 437 vs. articulation, 229 for children, 227, 229 and decision-making, 232 in grassroots activism, 446

Index in processes of school design, 442 in urban sports, 445 of younger people, 227, 232 Participatory action research (PAR), 104–117, 371 Pedagogy active citizenship, 261 autonomy and rationality, 257 citizenship, 259, 260 cosmopolitanism, 260 education, 256 formal and informal education programs, 260 neoliberal citizenship, 257 political subjectivity, 259 young people, 260 Philanthropy Anschutz Family Foundation, 330 Education Reform Advocacy Organizations, 329 foundations, 328 human capacity building, 329 market-based, 329 parent groups, 330 practices, 328 privatization of education, 328 public education, 328 socio-economic systems, 331 Photo-walk, 397 Piaget, Jean, 22 cognitive abstraction, 177 empirical foundations of psychology, 177 environmental knowledge, 176 imagination of child, 177 Pimlott-Wilson, Helena, 157 Play, 5, 8, 11, 13–15, 15 in children’s geographies, 412–413 definition, 408 in history, 411–412 in non-Western cultures, 419 in psychology, 409, 410 school grounds, 418 in sociology, 410–411 Playground(s), 13, 16, 415 geographies, 416–417 materials and design of school, 418 movement, 413–416 Polis, 274 becoming and being political in, 279–282 idea of, 274 importance in, 274 subjects in, 274 Political agency, 273, 278 contextuality for, 280 forms of, 274

Index geographies of, 279 in human geography, 272 interest in, 272 social and spatial settings of, 275 in terms of polis, 287 understanding of, 279 with political events, 273 youthful, 288 Political agents, 253 Political geographies, 8–10, 226, 228, 230 best interest of the child (see Best interest of the child) of children and young people, 231–236 Political paradoxes, young people, see Political participation, young people Political participation, young people active citizenship, 264 acts, 264 agency, 266 ambiguous subjects, 261–263 differently equal members, 266 dutiful citizens, 265 legitimacy, 264 neocommunitarianism, 260 pedagogy, self-governance and agency, 256–259 political order, 252 political subjectivity, 259, 266 politics, 263, 264 rooted cosmopolitanism, 260 Political subjects citizenship, 259 pedagogy, 259 Political violence, 240 Post-child moment, 39–42 Post-human, 8, 9 Post-structural, 8, 15 Power contestations, 297 Protest peaceful, 241 against regime and institutions, 243 Proto-mapping skills, 24 Psychoanalytic mapping practices, 184–186 Putnam, Robert, 153 R Race, 339 in discriminatory patterns, 106 vs. educational, 349–352 and Latinx critical theory, 104 Racialized backgrounds, 303 Rancière, Jaques, 192 Recapitulationism, 175 Religion, 460–463, 472–474

509 Religiosity, 14 Resistance political agency through, 242 sites of, 234 Rights children, 230 legal, 242 political, 242 Rival theories, 321 Rogoff, Barbara, 29 S Schaefer-McDaniel, Nicole, 158 School architectures, 441, 443 Self-governance, 256 Sensorimotor learning, 24 Sexual exploitation, 305 Smiley sticker project, 394 Social capital, 150, 153–155 Social construction, children, 53 Social identity, 309 Social space, 151–152 Socio-economic systems, 331 Spatialities, 5, 12–15 babies (see Babies) polis, 279, 281 Spinoza, Baruch, 8 metaphysics, 215–218 and spider, 205–207 Spirituality, 14, 16, 471–472 Straight world, 311 Strauss-Howe generational theory, 81 Street children, 55 Subjectivity and identity, 275 irreplaceable, 276 political, 274, 279 as relative autonomy, 278–279 restored Meadian conception of, 279 social identity and, 278 struggle over, 282–286 Systematic institutional processes, 65 T Tindal, Margaret, 22 Topography, 280 Topology, 280, 281, 286 Transnational feminists, 298 U Un-individuation, 501 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 20, 33, 101, 229, 296

510 Universal rights, post-development and postcolonial critiques, 36–39 Urban architectures, 445, 448 Urban environments, 428, 430 V Visual methodology, 382 Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich, 29 W Waste management, 7, 138–143 Waters, Johanna, 156 Weller, Susie, 154 White parents, 303 William James-Carl Lange theory, 176 Winnicott, Donald, 184, 186–189 Wood’s research aim, 161–162 youth participatory citizenship, 162–163 Y Young people, 4, 16, 226, 228 emotional geographies (see Emotional geographies) ethnopoetics, 395 political participation (see Political participation, young people) Youth, 272, 274 contemporary religious, 463–464 globalized religious, 469–471 institutionalized religious, 465–467 as political subjects, 277 on religion, 472–474 spirituality, 471–472 Youth education Anschutz Family Foundation, 330 citizenship formation, 318, 320 democratic community, 320 Education Reform Act of 1988, 322 Education Reform Advocacy Organizations, 329 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 322

Index English Language Learners, 330 European Commission, 323 externalization process, 325 formative processes, 318 grammatization, 326 human capacity building, 329 human development, 326 hyper technologies, 327 intergenerational relationships, 327 Islamic immigrants, 325 liberal governance, 319 multiculturalism, 320, 321 National Defense Education Act of 1958, 322 neoliberalism, 327 philanthropy, 327, 328, 330 practices in England, 322 rival theories, 321 shifting approach, 323 skill, 324 socio-economic systems, 331 subjectivity formation, 319, 325 theories of subjectivity formation, 327 Treaty of Amsterdam, 324 Youthful political geography boundaries, 227 citizenship and critical interrogation, 236 genealogy of, 226 kinds of, 243 limitation, 227 political participants, 231 protest, 241 recognition of, 231 veritable explosion, 231 Youth participation critical, 96 multidisciplinary support, 97 neoliberal context, 98, 99 overview of, 101–104

Z Zero tolerance for child labor, 56 Žižek, Slavoj, S, 190–191