Children's geographies
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Children's geographies is an area of study in human geography, studying the places and spaces of children's lives.
Ever since the cultural turn in geography, there has been recognition that society is not homogenous but heterogeneous. It is characterized by diversity, differences and subjectivities. While feminist geographers had been able to strengthen the need for examination of gender, class and race as issues affecting women, ‘children’ as an umbrella term encompassing children, teenagers, youths and young people, which are still relatively missing as ‘a frame’ of reference in the complexities of ‘geographies'. In the act of theorizing children and their geographies, The ways of doing research and the assumed ontological realities often “frame ‘children’ and ‘adults’ in ways that impose a bi-polar, hierarchical, and developmental model’’. This reproduces and enforces the hegemony of adult-centered discourses of children within knowledge production. Children's geographies has developed in academic human geography since the beginning of the 1990s, although there were notable studies in the area before that date. The earliest work done on children's geographies largely can be traced to William Bunge's work on spatial oppression of children in Detroit and Toronto where children are deemed as the ones who suffer the most under an oppressing adult framework of social, cultural and political forces controlling the urban built environment.
This development emerged from the realisation that previously human geography had largely ignored the everyday lives of children, who (obviously) form a significant section of society, and who have specific needs and capacities, and who may experience the world in very different ways. Thus children's geographies can in part be seen in parallel to an interest in gender in geography and feminist geography in so much as their starting points were the gender blindness of mainstream academic geography.
Children's geographies rests on the idea that children as a social group share certain characteristics which are experientially, politically and ethically significant and which are worthy of study. The pluralisation in the title is intended to imply that children's lives will be markedly different in differing times and places and in differing circumstances such as gender, family, and class.The current developments in children's geographies are attempting to link the frame of analysing children's geographies to one that requires multiple perspectives and the willingness to acknowledge the 'multiplicity' of their geographies.
Children's geographies is sometimes coupled with, and yet distinguished from the geographies of childhood. The former has an interest in the everyday lives of children; the latter has an interest in how (adult) society conceives of the very idea of childhood and how this impinges on children's lives in many ways. This includes imaginations about the nature of children and the related (spatial) implications.
There are a whole range of focii with children's geographies including children and the city, children and the countryside, children and technology, children and nature, children and globalisation, methodologies of researching children's worlds and the ethics of doing so; see the otherness of childhood.
There is now a journal of Children's Geographies[1] which will give readers a good idea of the growing range of issues, theories and methodologies of this developing and vibrant sub-discipline.
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