Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning
Holloway, Sarah and Valentine, Gill (eds.) (2000).
London and New York: Routledge; 271 pages. ISBN 0415207304.
Two recent books from Routledge, Children’s Geographies and Geographies of Young People trace a knife edge between an excited engagement with the spatiality of children’s lives and a sober awareness of the limitations of these spaces and the opportunities children and young people have for engaging them. It is in many ways an exciting and anxiety-provoking moment to be studying and doing research with young people. These two volumes in Routledge’s “Critical Geographies” series are evidence of both an expanded interest in children and young people in geography and a deepening of the sorts of inquiry taking place in the field. Reading them- one a monograph by Stuart Aitken and the other a collection edited by Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine- is to bear witness to reflective and trenchant conversations among contemporary researchers focused on children’s relationships to place. They are accomplished, engaging books that are sure to bring broad attention to concerns at the core of a growing field concerned with the geographies of young people. Yet the burgeoning interest in childhood is partnered with dramatic social and spatial shifts that have serious consequences for young people and the compass of their experiences. Both volumes speak to the tensions in children’s everyday lives provoked by the social, economic, and political transformations associated with globalization, technological development, privatization, migration, and “security,” among other things. The authors are attentive to the geographic implications of these concerns and make clear the subtle and manifest ways that spatiality matters in understanding contemporary childhood and young people’s everyday experiences. In their scope, both volumes are welcome additions to the geographic literature on children; the Holloway and Valentine for its international and historic perspective and the Aitken for the broad sweep of theories it addresses.
Children’s Geographies, edited by Holloway and Valentine, is an important resource for the growing interdisciplinary social science audience concerned with the shifting contexts of young people’s lives. While most of the authors work in the field of geography, this book is a fine example of the strength of interdisciplinary research and theory concerning issues at the interface between children and their everyday environments, including cyberspace, playgrounds, “nature,” commercial spaces, public spaces, and the home. While geographers may take for granted that space, place, and nature matter in understanding young people’s (or anyone’s) experience, each chapter in Children’s Geographies makes the nature of that importance vibrantly clear and will be appreciated by researchers in such fields as sociology, psychology, and anthropology who are now paying more attention to context.
Holloway and Valentine are well-known and strong voices in critical geography whose work has been influential in advancing both more substantial conversations about contemporary young people and opening up the grounds for what these conversations encompass. Theirs is an important project, and in this volume they bring together a broad range of serious, empirically grounded and theoretically informed work on which to build it. While the purview of their concerns is broad and the book is international in scope (drawing on empirical work from Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia), it exhibits a problematic tendency toward insularity in British geography. With few exceptions, the authors in this collection work in the UK and are inadequately attentive to the breadth of scholarly work on children’s geographies taking place in other places, notably in the Nordic countries, North America, and Australia.
This publication follows the widely read Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (1998), a volume edited by Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine that provided geographers and others with a range of geographically sensitive and critical analyses of the experiences and everyday practices of contemporary youth in relation to issues of culture, representation and resistance. Children’s Geographies builds upon this earlier work by focusing on young people of all ages as active agents negotiating the socio-spatial relations and structures that comprise their everyday lives and the horizons of their futures.
The editors’ introduction develops a theoretical framework that sets the stage for the subsequent chapters exploring constructions of childhood in different times and places as well as children’s many engagements with space, place, and nature. Holloway and Valentine offer a critical and historical review of issues relevant to what they call the “new social studies of childhood,” a burgeoning body of interdisciplinary research that focuses on the social construction of childhood and calls attention to children’s agency. The introduction makes clear the singular contribution of a geographical approach to the new social studies of childhood through its emphasis upon place, the everyday spaces of young people, and spatial discourses. In a brief review of the literature, Holloway and Valentine demonstrate how “geography matters” in children’s lives (18), showing at once how places are “simultaneously global and local, places where children both experience and rework global processes in creating their own worlds of meaning” (18); and how young people’s identity work is site-specific, made and re-made in the different locations of their everyday life– school, home, playground, and the like, as much as responses to or reflections of those places.
Holloway and Valentine have organized the contributions within the dynamic- but not easily separable- categories of playing, living, and learning. Each of these headings emphasize children in action, and suggest not only the fluidity and active construction of young people’s identities, but the ways each of these acts take place figuratively and quite literally. Such broad conceptualizations of playing, living and learning juxtapose different interpretations of what these words mean and how they play out in children’s lives and geographies. If this structure makes vivid how childhood is defined, made, and remade in different places and at different times, it paradoxically reveals the artifice and awkwardness of the categorical distinctions provided by the editors. How can play be separated from learning, or “living” parsed from any activities? In working across practices, spaces, places, and times, chapter authors make clear that they cannot be separated, and it is not clear what is gained by making these editorial distinctions. Given the non-obvious but rich cross-fertilizations among chapters, it would have been great if the editors had found a more productive means to organize their text.
This criticism notwithstanding, there is something for everyone in this book. In the “playing” section, for example, we find young children and teenagers who negotiate time and space for themselves between home, school or work in very different contexts, and in several chapters the findings work against common presumptions about children’s leisure time. For instance, adolescent girls spend time with friends at a local community project after school in South Wales (Skelton) or on the street and in other public spaces in England (Matthews, Limb and Taylor); as young children in Bolivia take their time and create opportunities to play while working (Punch); at the same time, and in some ways quite similarly, young “children as opportunists” play under and out of surveillance in the “striations” of adult space in rural England (Jones); or in commercial play spaces (McKendrick, Bradford and Fielder). Each of the chapters in this section illuminate ways that the times and spaces of contemporary children may afford more play opportunities than some handwringers such as ourselves might imagine. This important insight notwithstanding, the authors do little to disturb the notion that the autonomous time and space of contemporary children—at least in the global north—have diminished in recent years and face continued challenge. To this end, it is illuminating to consider—as one of us (Cindi) has- how children in the global south may have more autonomy as they combine and recombine their activities of work and play. Samantha Punch makes precisely this point in her chapter on children’s negotiations of their autonomous play in Bolivia.
While perhaps a bit too broad, the “living” category offers a glance at what the editors call the changing experience of children at the end of the twentieth century. In this section we get a sense of how recent social developments inform children’s geographies. A thoughtful examination of the commodification of children’s play and care through places like “Discovery Zone” in the U.S. (Aitken), is followed by a discussion of the changing nature of “quality time” for children and parents in the home (Christensen, James and Jenks). The relationship of children’s domestic use of the Internet and their broader social engagements are explored in the following chapter, countering pervasive presumptions that children’s lives in cyberspace necessarily foreclose other relationships and limit their experience of the outdoor environment (Valentine, Holloway and Bingham). The final chapters in this section are among the only ones with a non-first world focus. The first addresses young carers in Zimbabwe and the ways they take responsibility for elders and others in a country where many have HIV or AIDS (Robson and Ansell); the second, based on a long-term study of street children in Indonesia, considers both how the growing number of children living and working on the streets construct their identities and how their experiences reconfigure understandings of the meaning and mythology of home (Beazley).
The “learning” section addresses different places in children’s everyday lives where they can find out about themselves and/or are socialized in particular ways. Chapters highlight the tensions surrounding the social and spatial reproduction of children and childhood, and children’s roles in these material social practices. In playgrounds, children learn about and perform their gendered identities and citizenship while socializing (Gagen), while in schools students learn about morality and their place in the world through their classroom and school geographies (Fielding). Another chapter addresses the institutionalization and contested spaces of out-of-school clubs (Smith and Baker), and the book concludes with a chapter on what children are learning and missing as urban nature becomes a scarce commodity in the urban environment of Singapore (Kong).
The selection of work included in Children’s Geographies is for the most part well- grounded in contemporary theoretical perspectives including queer and feminist theories of identity, psychoanalytic theory, and post-structuralism. Noteworthy is Owain Jones’s sophisticated handling of Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation between smooth and striated space, which he develops in a discussion of how young children exploit the spatial opportunities presented by particular social constructions of idyllic rural childhood. Matthews, Limb and Taylor explore the meaning of streets for teenagers as they interweave their findings with Homi Bhabha’s theories of identity and Edward Soja’s conceptualization of “thirdspace.” Aitken’s chapter is framed in relation to object relations theory, and addresses the work of Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and Nancy Chodorow. And finally, Gagen’s elegant historical piece on children’s use of playgrounds draws effectively on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity.
If anything, this book is a tease. Reading it makes us want to know more about each of the research projects reported and more about the authors’ approaches and methodologies. Through the peephole we get glimpses of rich textured data that refresh and excite us even as they make us want more. The book offers much inspiration for those whose work concerns children and/or geography. As we write from New York City, we found ourselves reflecting on our own experiences and research, and discussing the cultural, political, and economic differences between them and those reported in Children’s Geographies. A similar collection in the U.S. would have a different emphasis that would put issues of race, multiculturalism, and economic restructuring more to the fore. Also, in the chill that has followed September 11, our discussions of public (and private) space would necessarily emphasize questions of surveillance and “security.” We raise these issues as a way of signaling the specificity of place and time. Young people’s geographies are embedded locally and must be understood as part of a broader historical geography. Children’s Geographies makes clear the rewards and revelations made possible by such an approach not only for understanding children’s lives in context, but for grasping the broader social, political, economic and cultural processes that sustain and make them sensible.
Stuart Aitken’s monograph has a different but sympathetic intent to Holloway’s and Valentine’s project. Aitken unpacks and critically assess the wide-ranging theoretical and historical contexts that inform current research on the subject of childhood and the relationship between children and place. Aitken’s Geographies of Young People complements and supplements Children’s Geographies, with conceptual rigor and theoretical muscle. In fact, Aitken, who contributed a chapter to Holloway and Valentine’s Children’s Geographies, is in conversation with many of the authors in their book and cites them extensively in his, which builds upon and contextualizes their work within a broader literature. Without doubt, this book will be a widely used resource for all those interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the geographies of young people and a reference for anyone writing about the socio-spatial experiences of identity formation.
A self-described “thought piece,” Geographies of Young People builds upon Aitken’s extensive empirical work in the field but does not report on this work per se. Rather, he weaves this body of research with a sustained critical engagement with a broad interdisciplinary literature. Aitken deliberately omits the voices of children from this work. Amid concerns about tokenism, he does not want to muddy what is really a different project. Concerned simultaneously with the spaces of identity formation and the social constructions of children and childhood from a wealth of positions, Aitken’s discussion turns on a series of moral imperatives questioning the multiple, differentiated geographies of exclusion that structure young people’s lives.
Geographies of Young People was intended to update and build upon Aitken’s earlier volume, Putting Children in Their Place, published by the Association of American Geographers. Its ambition and accomplishment quickly exceeded that intent, moving in new directions that reflect recent developments in the field of geography informed by post-structural, psychoanalytic and feminist theories along with a firm commitment to a social constructivist perspective. In Geographies of Young People, Aitken takes difference as a starting point and emphasizes the shifting, fluid, and embodied character of young people’s identities; the fractured and unstable relationships between adults and children; and the temporal and spatial dimensions of young people’s everyday experiences. Focusing on what he calls the critical and contested moral geographies of young people’s lives, Aitken addresses the tensions between the local embeddedness and global disembodiment of young people’s experiences.
In a wide-ranging tour of the literature, Aitken addresses how young people are “placed,” “scaled,” and “fixed” in order to raise questions about the nature of childhood and the construction of identities (bodies, ethnicities, and sexualities) in their articulation with material, global, and local transformations. Most impressive (and perhaps most useful about this book for many readers) is the bridge Aitken provides between geography and contemporary theoretical work in other fields.
Stopping at critical junctures to re-work the ways in which childhood has been constructed historically, Aitken reviews the debates in scientific, developmental, and psychoanalytic discourses concerning child development, children’s bodies, and children’s rights and justice. His intent is not just to update and enliven theories related to children and childhood, but to work through how they impinge upon and reflect larger material social transformations. Among the scholars whose work Aitken considers are Darwin, Piaget, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Klein, Butler, Bourdieu, Lefebvre, and Winnicott. While scrutinizing the moral assumptions underpinning received understandings of children and childhood, Aitken demonstrates how social constructions of children have been problematic for and even done violence to young people. He raises these questions throughout the book as a means toward developing a theoretical and practical platform for children’s rights, justice, and play.
The book is densely written and at times slow-moving as Aitken works through a broad spectrum of contemporary theory. Given the breadth, depth, and abstraction of Aitken’s theoretical engagements, the reader may sometimes lose track of his key arguments. A smattering of examples would have helped to illuminate and ground his theoretical project as would a bit more clarification of some of his central terms. The lack of clarity was sometimes the result of the fluidity of the terms themselves or perhaps Aitken’s long engagement with them. For example, it was not always clear what Aitken meant by play, and this problem was compounded by the term’s many entailments, such as in the last chapter’s discussion of how play meets justice.
Aitken’s concluding discussion of fieldwork and his relationship to children does not follow clearly from the critical and constructivist tenor of the rest of the book. Speaking to “the immediacy of the fieldwork” and the “basic humanity of the encounter” while raising last-minute questions about how to situate himself, Aitken does not engage the self-conscious and reflexive perspective of contemporary feminist and post-structural theories. He thus misses an opportunity to fully reflect upon the issues of situatedness, to interrogate some of the power dynamics between researchers and participants, to consider the often contradictory motivations and purposes of doing research, and to address the moral questions behind doing research that lacks a consideration for young people’s humanity. While in his own work Aitken embraces these concerns, in places here, his engagement with them feels more romantic than weighty, sidestepping some of their messiness and ramifications in work with young people.
These questions entangle us, even if, as Aitken avers, this book is about the adult world, about our judgments and concerns and how they shape young people’s everyday lives. These concerns make it all the more important to raise the question of how researchers—adults—can reconsider our projects to find new ways of relating to and writing about young people, so that when their voices appear in research they are not simply a relay of tokenism as Aitken fears. The goal is to develop more responsible and reflexive ways to research and write so that we can express the fluidity and fragmented character of children’s identities and everyday experiences. Both of the books we have considered here point not only to the need for a critical examination of the theory and practice of doing research about and with young people, but also illuminate ways to achieve this goal.
Both books amply demonstrate that the study of young people is a means to understand larger social processes and concerns. But they also show just how much the study of young people itself is circumscribed in larger political or theoretical projects. Just as many of the authors included in these works ask how our research agendas and questions are connected to larger social, economic, and political transformations, so does their work address the implications of these broader social processes for children’s everyday lives, spaces, and identity formation. While some of these authors involve young people as participants in the development and carrying out of their research, we wonder how the conversation about young people would change if they were involved more consistently and fully in the process or considered as an audience for the work. Consistent with the theoretical objectives and political ambition of both books, which problematize exclusionary social and spatial practices, a more inclusive research agenda that more fully embraced and critically engaged youth perspectives and questions would pry open a bigger space for young people’s agency. As scholars increasingly concern themselves with the lives, spaces, and practices of young people and consider both how these issues reflect and are enabled by contemporary processes of social, political, economic and environmental change, it becomes all the more important to reexamine our research practices and ways of working with young people. In different ways each of these books takes that challenge seriously, but there is much more work to be done.
Reviewer Information
Environmental Psychology Program Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Caitlin Cahill is a Ph.D. candidate in the Environmental Psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Currently Caitlin is finishing her dissertation on the everyday lives of young women in the city which is based on a participatory action research project Caitlin developed with six young women. Their project “Makes Me Mad: Stereotypes of Young Urban Womyn of Color” is featured on the website www.fed-up-honeys.org. Caitlin’s research addresses intersecting areas between young people’s experiences of the urban environment, the production of public spaces, critical race and feminist theory, collaborative and participatory research methodologies, and urban nature. She has taught in many different capacities including museums, high schools, and universities; curated contemporary art exhibitions with young people; and developed urban environmental design programs for teenagers (featured on PBS).
Environmental Psychology Program Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography in Environmental Psychology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; and the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge in edited collections and in journals such as Society and Space, Social Text, Signs, Feminist Studies, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Antipode. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (Routledge 1993) and of Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction, with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell (Blackwell 2003). She recently completed Disintegrating Developments: Global Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives, forthcoming in 2004 from University of Minnesota Press. Katz currently holds a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where she is working on a project concerning the shifting geographies of late twentieth century American childhood.