Children's geographies

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 a 'frame of reference' in the complexities of 'geographies'.

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.

In an early article, Holloway and Valentine termed these 'spatial discourses' [2] Children's geographies can be observed through the various lenses provided by foci, thus the plurality inspired by post-modern and post-structural social geographers (Panelli, 2009).

There is now a journal dedicated to work in the subdiscipline: Children's Geographies[5] which will give readers a good idea of the growing range of issues, theories and methodologies of this developing and vibrant sub-discipline.

A major, influential trend has been the development of Non-representational theory by children's geographers, and especially scholars such as Peter Kraftl,[9] John Horton,[10] Matej Blazek, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Affrica Taylor,[11] Pauliina Rautio[12] and Kim Kullman.

[17] Their vibrant 'common worlds' research collective [3] brings together a range of scholars who seek to explore how children's lives are entangled with those of nonhumans in ways that challenge oppressive, colonial and/or neoliberal views of the human as an individuated subject somehow distanced from 'nature'.

Some scholars argue that nonrepresentational theories encourage a focus upon the banal, everyday, ephemeral and small-scale at the expense of understanding and critically interrogating wider-scaled and longer-standing processes of marginalisation.

For instance, Louise Holt (2013)[20] uses the work of Judith Butler to critically examine the emergence of the infant as a 'subject' through power relations that are often gendered, as well as infanthood is a stage in the lifecourse that is subject to particular kinds of social construction.

Central to this scholarship (especially in the work of Tracey Skelton,[21] Kirsi Pauliina Kallio[22] and Jouni Hakli) has been a move beyond a traditional concern with children's participation in decision-making processes to highlight the range of ways in which they may be 'political' - from 'micropolitical' engagements with ethnic or social in the school or the street to critical considerations of major policy documents such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Notably, such approaches informed seminal texts that were important to the early development of children's geographies, particularly in Sarah Holloway's work on parenting and local childcare cultures.

The array of spaces and places experienced by children includes, but are not restricted to, homes, schools, playgrounds, neighbourhoods, streets, cities, countries, landscapes of consumption, and cyberspace.

[31] Collins and Coleman also note the centrality of schools in everyday life as they are “found in almost every urban and suburban neighbourhood” and most children experience a considerable time within this environment in their day-to-day lives.

The role of this environment in a child's life is pivotal to their development, especially in respects to the inclusionary and exclusionary processes of society experienced firsthand in schools (MacCrae, Maguire and Milbourne, 2002).

[32] The manifestation of social exclusion as bullying is an inter-personal socio-spatial aspect whose implications have been extensively researched both within school boundaries and how it is enabled by technology (Olweus and Limber, 2010; Black, Washington, Trent, Harner and Pollock, 2009).

The implications of home schooling have largely been a field of assumptions, taking after common myths (Romanowki, 2010),[40] although later work by geographers has examined in considerable detail the significance of space, place, emotion and materiality to the experiences of homeschoolers.