Children's geographies

Children's geographies is an area of study within human geography and Childhood studies which involves researching the places and spaces of children's lives.

Children's geographies is the branch of human geography which deals with the study of places and spaces of children's lives, characterised experientially, politically and ethically.

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 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 also shares many of the underpinning principles of Childhood Studies (and the so-called New Social Studies of Childhood) and Sociology of the family - namely, that childhood is a social construction and that scholars should pay greater attention to children's voices and agency, although recent 'new wave' scholarship has challenged these principles (Kraftl, 2013)

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