Peter Kraftl

What else? some more ways of thinking and doing ‘Children's Geographies’

Abstract ‘Childrens Geographies’ could do more. In this paper we present a succession of key ideas currently arising in and of new and emergent theoretical, philosophical and conceptual work in the Social Sciences. We invite reflection upon each of these ideas in turn, with a mind, specifically, to ‘Childrens Geographies’. In so doing, we make two broad claims. First, that greater engagement with some or all of these ideas might prove useful, enabling, thought-provoking, profound, constructive, challenging, telling, or interesting to ‘Childrens Geographers’. Second, that—particularly given the nature of its extant concerns and efforts— ‘Childrens Geographies’ could do much more to speak back to (these) wider contemporary lines of thought.

Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings

Architectural design operates beyond symbolic and representational interpretation. Drawing on recent “nonrepresentational” geographies, we demonstrate how architectural space can be rethought through the concept of affect. We explore how individual buildings and their architects preconfigure, limit, and engender particular affects to accomplish very particular goals. Our analysis is based on two buildings in the United Kingdom: an ecological school and an airport. We demonstrate how affects both enable and constrain practices such as teaching, playing, and relaxing that render different buildings as uniquely meaningful places. The affects designated to and by these buildings are indispensable to the specification of particular styles of inhabitation, in ways not previously considered by architectural geographers.

Not just growing up, but going on: Materials, Spacings, Bodies, Situations

Abstract This paper argues that non-representational theories, relating to materialities, spacings, embodiments and events, are important to childrens geographies. In so doing, it suggests in particular that we might engage with the becoming-ness of childrens geographies in a number of new ways. This point is made via four (ostensibly banal, everyday) examples: wearing glasses; visiting the local park; being clumsy; and ones first day in school. Through this juxtaposition, the paper insists that childrens geographies are and can be complex, mundane, unsettling and thoroughly material-spatial-embodied-evental. In other words, there is more to childrens geographies than purely representational or symbolic notions of Growing Up. Rather, it is argued that there is always-already-all-sorts-going-on-…

The Road Less Travelled – New Directions in Children's and Young People's Mobility

This collection emerges from the intersection of two vibrant, dynamic and expanding academic endeavours. The papers are situated within ‘new’ social-scientific studies of childhood and youth and also draw upon a burgeoning interest in mobility (for which this journal is clearly a cornerstone). This editorial essay provides an introduction to extant and prospective work at the intersection of these lines of enquiry, and has a twofold structure. First, we provide a sketch-map of recent social-scientific studies – especially those which have emerged from the academic sub-discipline that has come to be termed ‘Children’s Geographies’ – which have interrogated some of the manifold mobilities fundamental to younger people’s lives. We argue, though, that much of this extant research concerning children’s and young people’s mobilities remains limited – both theoretically and empirically. So, second, we elaborate a number of ways in which intersections of mobilities and (young) age ought to pose significant questions for future research and enquiry regarding ‘mobility’, ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, and perhaps those very terms themselves. In so doing, we provide an introduction to the papers in this collection which – though dealing with diverse mobilities and locales, and though showcasing various conceptual and methodological inclinations and new directions – share a concern to take the road less travelled by attending to, and beginning to open out, such challenging, and potentially fruitful, questions.

For more-than-usefulness: Six overlapping points about children's geographies

A number of recent Children’s Geographies articles (Catan, 2003; Cunningham, 2003; Karsten, 2003; Cahill, 2004; Pain, 2004; Smith, 2004; Vanderbeck and Morse Dunkley, 2004) might be caricatured as call for a more useful ‘Children’s Geographies’. These contributions articulate, forcefully and convincingly, a sense that ‘Children’s Geographers’ could and should be more actively engaged in policy-making around weighty contemporary issues: they argue that ‘Children’s Geographies’ needs to be (more) policy-relevant, (more) purposeful and (more) applied, with (more of) a point; that ‘Children’s Geographers’ need to focus their efforts, to do more about [insert big contemporary issue] or [insert big contemporary issue]. This is a very, very good thing: there is, no doubt, a need (and perhaps an ethical obligation) for us to be (more) ‘useful’, individually and collectively; ‘to apply our ideas in the pursuit of the betterment of society’ (Martin, 2001, p. 190) . . .

Young People, Hope, and Childhood-Hope

This article outlines a number of steps toward a more sensitive and affirmative conception of childhood and hope (“childhood-hope”). Throughout the article, the author explores how our understandings of hope might be extended via an examination of childhood-hope. First, it considers childhood as a universalizing, affective condition, which can be characterized by very simplistic, and problematic, notions of hope, logic, and futurity. The author connects this line of thought explicitly with what the author identifies as impulses of hopefulness and of “doing good” for children, exemplified by a selection of “high-profile” quotations about children. Second, the author extends the discussion to explore everyday articulations of hope by young people involved in a project concerning their interpretations and experiences of self-esteem. The author concludes by outlining how universal representations of childhood-hope may be extended and critiqued though young peoples own articulations of hope, and draw attention to some of the positive political interventions that young peoples modest forms of hoping might have.

The challenges of 'children's geographies': A reaffirmation

The majority of papers published in this edition of Children’s Geographies were first presented at the New Directions in Children’s Geographies conference held at The University of Northampton, UK, on 7–8 September 2006. At this event, more than 40 research papers were presented by authors from a dozen different countries, and from diverse backgrounds and career stages. Their work addressed manifold aspects of children and young people’s everyday geographies in diverse socio-historical contexts. The aim of this edition of Children’s Geographies is to provide a snapshot of this diversity. We have sought to compile a selection of papers which – ranging across multiple methodological approaches, conceptual preferences, inherent politics and subject matters – gesture towards the assorted vitality of work represented at the conference and, as such, of the contemporary subdiscipline of ‘Children’s Geographies’ at large. By way of an introduction to the following collection of papers, we present three kinds of reflection. First, we consider a handful of critical contemporary responses to the New Directions in Children’s Geographies conference. Figuring the conference as a microcosm of, and/or metaphor for, the subdiscipline of ‘Children’s Geographies’ itself, we propound these critiques as challenging to (our) subdisciplinary habits, concerns and ways of working more broadly. In particular, we suggest that they require ‘Children’s Geographers’ to articulate the challenge of ‘Children’s Geographies’; that is, they should prompt us to ask, in what ways should extant work by ‘Children’s Geographers’ be conceived as fundamentally challenging to broader contemporary currents and domains of research and enquiry, such as Human Geography and the New Social Studies of Childhood? Second, we develop one set of answers to this latter question, refracting the diverse themes aired at the New Directions in Children’s Geographies conference. We list a succession of ways in which the work of ‘Children’s Geographers’ ought to ‘talk back’, more frequently and forcefully, to broader domains of theory and practice, and specifically mainstream academic Geography. Third, turning to the edition of the journal in hand, we introduce Children’s Geographies Vol. 6, No. 4, November 2008, 335–348

‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young peoples everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young peoples friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on childrens independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.

Holding the Future Together: Towards a Theorisation of the Spaces and Times of Transition:

Social scientists often use the notion of ‘transition’ to denote diverse trajectories of change in different types of bodies: from individuals, to communities, to nation-states. Yet little work has theorised how transition might occur across, between, or beyond these bodies. The aim of this paper is to sketch out a multiple, synthetic, and generative (but by no means universal) theory of transition. Primarily drawing on the British context, we explore and exemplify two contentions. Firstly, that the notion of transition is increasingly being deployed to frame and combine discourses in terms of community development, responses to environmental change, and the individual lifecourse. Specifically framed as ‘transition’, such discourses are gaining increasing purchase in imagining futures that reconfigure, but do not transform, assumed neoliberal futures. Our second contention is that these discourses and policies must try to ‘hold the future together’ in one or more senses. They must wrestle with a tension between imminent threats (climate change, economic nonproductivity) which weigh heavily on the present and its possible futures, and the precarious act of redirecting those futures in ways that might better hold together diverse social groups, communities, and places.

What (else) matters? Policy contexts, emotional geographies

In this paper we reflect upon a particular, policy-oriented evaluation of a Sure Start Centre: a small element of a UK government programme addressing childrens well-being in ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods. Specifically, and contra some chief social-scientific accounts, we seek to acknowledge how ‘policy’ and ‘emotion’ were inseparable in this project. We suggest that policy and media discourses, and much extant research, regarding Sure Start have been characterised by a particular apprehension of what matters, which constitutes a particular assumption about how policy interventions, in ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods and elsewhere, should be evaluated. In marked contrast we propound qualitative data wherein users of the Sure Start Centre articulated how this facility mattered to them. Our aim is not simply to reiterate a twofold truism: policy is always emotional; emotions are latently political. Rather, we consider how, in the wake of this truism, more combinative, open-minded encounters between bodies of social-scientific endeavours conventionally labelled ‘policy relevant’ vis-à-vis ‘theoretical’ might yield more careful apprehensions of the emotion and affect in policy, and the politics of emotions and affects.