Geographies of Children, Youth and Families

An International Perspective

Louise Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415563833
• eBook ISBN: 9781135191252
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection brings together international experts from the vibrant and growing field of geographies of children, youth and families.

Designed as an introduction to the topic, this book provides an overview of current conceptual and theoretical debates surrounding geographies of children, youth and families, and gives a wide range of examples of cutting-edge research from a variety of national contexts across the globe. The theme of 'disentangling the socio-spatial contexts of young people and/or their families' advances debates in the field by emphasising the context of young people's social agency.

Geographies of Children, Youth and Families is an invaluable course text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of geography and the social sciences, as well as being of interest to students and practitioners of education, youth work, social policy, and social work.

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Introduction

Geographies of children, youth and families: disentangling the socio-spatial contexts of young people across the globalizing world

Louise Holt

International perspectives

This edited collection brings together contributions from key established and emerging international scholars within the interdisciplinary field of geographies of children, youth and families. The inspiration for the book came from the First International Conference on Geographies of Children, Youth and Families, held at the University of Reading, UK, in September 2007. Many of the chapters were papers presented at this conference. The book represents a timely account of the field, coming ten years on from the highly influential text edited by Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine, Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. Holloway and Valentine (2000) has proved to be a defining text, marking a shift towards the development of a definable sub-/interdisciplinary of geographies of children, youth and families.

In the intervening decade since the publication of Children’s Geographies, the sub-/interdisciplinary field has burgeoned. A significant mass of emerging and established interdisciplinary scholars researching children and young people’s spatialities present and publish their work in a variety of arenas, including specialist publications (e.g. Children’s Geographies; Children, Youth and Environment) at bespoke conferences and conference sessions. For instance, there have been specialist sessions at every Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers and International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS/IBG) during the last decade. The re-establishment of the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Working Group of the RGS/IBG, and its recent promotion to the status of Research Group exemplifies the level of activity in the field in the UK. The activity within the UK is reflected in other international contexts.

Despite this vibrancy of scholarship about geographies of children, youth and families (and perhaps more specifically children as discussed below), there has not been in the last decade an attempt to bring together an edited collection providing a broad overview of the field of likely appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics.¹ This edited collection addresses this gap. The book includes chapters from both established and internationally recognized scholars and emerging researchers in the field. All of the chapters attempt to integrate children and young people more fully within their diverse socio-spatial contexts; including the relatively neglected familial sphere.

Geographies of children, youth and families: some critiques and ways forward

In the following chapter, Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson outline some achievements and current issues facing geographies of children, youth and families. In this section it is therefore necessary for me only briefly outline the perceived gaps within the field which inspired the conference and subsequently this book.

The development of children’s geographies has been underpinned by the adoption of the concept of the ‘sociological child’ (James et al., 1998), which has gone some way to destabilizing dominant, ‘common sense’ assumptions about children. Researchers investigating geographies of children now widely accept that young people have social agency, with children perceived as much more than adults-in-waiting, whose development proceeds along a series of pre-defined steps. A key emphasis of scholarship has been children’s agency to reflect upon and affect change in their worlds.

Despite the many achievements of critical understandings of childhood, it is becoming apparent that such an approach also constrains and frames conceptual and theoretical debates. The book as a whole attempts to simultaneously overcome key limitations of the focus on children’s relatively autonomous and reflexive agencies, and retain the advances of emphasizing the centrality of a reconfigured children’s agency.

Existing publications in the field of geographies of children and youth have tended to conceptualize children as ‘knowing’ actors. This focus upon young people’s agency has been pivotal to overcoming dominant societal perspectives of children and young people, which have been reproduced in many social science arenas. Such dominant accounts suggest that children are not competent actors who can engage meaningfully in political, cultural and academic forums. By contrast to earlier scholarship (and those which have not engaged with these critical studies), geographies and social studies of childhood have done much to incorporate the voices and experiences of young people; there has been an exceptional bourgeoning of research focusing upon the emplaced experiences of children and young people.

Despite the many contributions of emphasizing young people’s agency, there are three strands of critique which can be levelled at the existing field: (1) the relative neglect of certain socio-spatial contexts (notably the family); (2) the exclusions associated with adopting modernist perspectives of agency; and (3) the frequent under-emphasis of ‘structural’ constraints.

First, the centrality of young people’s agency has led to a tendency to neglect certain social and spatial contexts of childhood. Notably, critical social studies and geographies of children and youth have instigated a shift away from focusing upon children within their familial contexts (Punch, 2006). Attempts to address an early tendency to completely subsume children within the family underpin the current emphasis on children in non-familial contexts. Thus, until recently, there has been limited dialogue between researchers of the family and critical geographies of childhood, and the experiences of children and young people within family contexts has been relatively under-explored (although, see Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, Chapter 2, for a different perspective; see also Bushin, 2009; Christensen, 2000; Holloway and Valentine, 2001; McIntosh and Punch, 2009; Punch, 2007, 2008; Young and Ansell, 2003; Valentine, 1997, for exceptions). This edited collection consciously seeks to enhance the dialogue between critical research into families and children and youth, by incorporating more fully the family as one key social context of childhood. Importantly, however, children and young people are not associated exclusively with, or subsumed within, families; in line with the broader field, other social contexts are explored in the book (the body, public space and/or the city, institutional spaces). To focus exclusively on the family could reproduce the limitations of earlier research wherein children were viewed as merely familial ‘objects’ rather than active subjects (James et al., 1998).

Second, Ruddick (2007) suggests that the discourse of children’s rights has often inadvertently reproduced narrow, dominant, modernist concepts of agency, as self-cohesive and independent. Ultimately, such a view ‘others’ those who are unable to express such autonomous individuality. This notion of agency, which has been pivotal to the development of geographies of children and youth and the incorporation of children’s voices and experiences into academic discourses, is paradoxically integral to the marginalization within contemporary societies of children and young people (and others, such as disabled people) who cannot achieve this ideal of independence and autonomy. It is therefore inherently problematic that academic accounts of children have endeavoured to suggest that they can be autonomous ‘sovereign’ agents. In this context, it is unsurprising that the experiences of certain groups of children and young people, who are particularly marginalized by dominant accounts of agency, such as those with disabilities, have not been fully incorporated into geographies and social studies of children (Pyer et al., 2010).

Finally, the focus placed upon agency has often implicitly underplayed the role of ‘structures’ which constrain and facilitate young people’s experiences (Holt, 2006). In illuminating ‘children’s voices’, critical researchers have arguably accorded ‘epistemological privilege’ to young people (Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008). However, in common with all agents, young people are not able to consciously trace all of the ways in which their lives are constrained and enabled by broader ‘structural’ conditions, including normative values about identity positionings (see also Holt and Holloway, 2006). Therefore, the epistemological privilege accorded to young people is problematic.

The three key critiques that I am levelling at the field of geographies of children, youth and families are a reflection of the general tendencies of the sub-/interdisciplinary field. Examples can be found of exceptions to all of these limitations, and I have indicated some (although clearly not all) of these in the discussion. Nonetheless, overall, I would contend that the field of geographies of children, youth and families is in danger of implicitly reproducing these three tendencies: to neglect certain socio-spatial contexts; to draw upon relatively uncritical, modernist notions of agency, and; to over-emphasize agency over structure. This edited collection begins to go some way to address these critiques.

Beginning to address these critiques: children and young people in diverse socio-spatial contexts – the contributions of the chapters

This edited collection endeavours to overcome these three critiques, without losing the central insight that all young people have the capacity to contribute to society and academic research. Emphasis in many of the chapters is placed upon the structural conditions that constrain and enable young people’s expressions of agency within a variety of socio-spatial contexts, along with how children and young people negotiate, respond to, and can transform, these constraints. The family is one of the key socio-spatial contexts that is emphasized. As a whole, the book implicitly challenges the concept of the ‘sovereign child agent’, albeit placing a reconfigured children’s agency at the core of analysis.

The edited collection brings together research from a variety ofsocio-spatial contexts, from Ghana to the USA; from Spain to Singapore; from the UK to Mexico. The range of national contexts facilitates an exploration of the commonalities and differences of the socio-spatial contexts and experiences of children and young people across the globalized world (Holt and Holloway, 2006), facilitating further exploration of structures that constrain and enable young people’s practices.

The collection is divided into four interconnected themes which focus on differentsocio-spatial contexts of childhood at a variety of intersecting scales: (1) the body; (2) home, family and intergenerational relationships; (3) public space and/or the city; and (4) institutional spaces. In addition, there is a second overview chapter, in which Sarah Holloway and Helena Pimlott-Wilson explore more fully the achievements and challenges of children’s geographies to date. They question some of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the problems currently facing the sub-/interdiscipline and suggest ways forward.

The first section, ‘Bodies and identities’, begins with Chris Philo’s theoretical discussion of Foucault’s figuration of children. Philo unravels children as an important, if understated sub-theme in Foucault’s work; particularly within lecture series given at the Collège de France, only recently published in English; Abnormal and Psychiatric Power. Subsequently in this section, Peter Hemming discusses the role of both religious and secular embodied rituals and practices to the construction of ‘communities’ within and that extend without primary (elementary) schools in the UK. In Chapter 5, Ruth Lewis outlines the changing affective family boundaries of bodily modesty surrounding bathroom practices during the transition from child to teenager. Locking the bathroom door becomes a sign of a young person’s desire for privacy, and an expression of agency over their bodily boundaries, largely respected within the family.

Lewis’ chapter crosscuts with Theme II, ‘The home, family and intergenerational relationships’. Chapter 6, by Kate Hampshire, Gina Porter, Kate Kilpatrick, Peter Ohene Kyei, Michael Adjaloo and George Oppong documents how forced migration and resettlement in a Ghanian refugee...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Geographies of children, youth and families
• Theme I Bodies and identities
• Theme II The home, family and intergenerational relationships
• Theme III Cities and/or public spaces
• Theme IV Institutional spaces
• Index