Young People, Children, Politics and Space: A Decade of Youthful Political Geography Scholarship 2003–13

Abstract

This review essay covers a decade of scholarship developed by geographers who engage with children, young people and politics. It first outlines the boundaries within which the review was conducted. It then sets the scene of the starting points in 2003 of the when and where of the scholarship of children's and young people's political geographies. Section 3 provides focus on a wide range of contributions made in order to stake a claim within the wider discipline of Geography and explores the connections made with, and conceptions drawn from, feminist geography. Section 4 examines the ways in which the field has been expanded through conceptualisation and deconstruction of taken-for-granted approaches. Here, the intellectual value of reconsiderations or innovations of the concepts of scale, child and childhood, politics, agency, articulation, geopolitics and critical geopolitics are excavated and explicated. The paper ends with concluding thoughts and pointers towards the next decade of youthful political geographies and provides an extensive reference list covering a wide range of work on the subject.

Notes

I use this term specifically to establish a mining metaphor that I continue through the essay. Mining is about exploring, discovering and making visible. If the discipline of Geography is the wider landscape, then sub-disciplines that emerge have to stake their claims and within those sub-disciplines scholars seek further evidence, clarity and extraction. Here, children's and young people's geographies is the sub-discipline within which is embedded the lode of political geographies of children and young people. Nevertheless, this branch of excavation also connects with the sub-discipline of political geography, which has long ago successfully staked its claim but should be open to new finds that enrich and enliven its theoretical and conceptual identity. The mining metaphor is in memory of my paternal grandfather, a coal miner, who first gave me insight as a child to the notions of politics, resistance and rights.

Notably, the thematic debates about children's and young people's mobilities have been subsequently explored in a Special Issue published in Mobilities, co-edited by John Barker, Peter Kraftl, John Horton and Faith Tucker (2009). Mobilities of young people in urban contexts are explored in a Special Issue of Urban Studies (2013) co-edited by Tracey Skelton and Katherine Gough.

These themes have been further explored in Transnational Migration and Childhood, edited by Tyrell (née Bushin) et al. (2012). Through an international focus, the book challenges the ways in which migration research and policy have consistently overlooked children's and young people's experiences of migration.

Compare Skelton and Gough (2013) for a similar connection between their call for urban studies to accept the presence of young people in the urban context and those made earlier by feminist geographers in relation to the recognition of women in the city.

In a linked paper (Mitchell and Elwood, 2012) on “mapping children's politics” the authors extend their critique to expose the ways in which non-representational theory as a method of empirical research is depoliticising in its practice and through its lack of attention to geographical and historical contexts. They offer the concept of articulation as a theory, a method and a politics through its process of creating connections.

Note Harker's work (2011) that considers how geopolitics tends to cohere around particular imaginative geographies of place as violent and political and hence constructs stereotyped understanding and interpretations of places, in this case of Palestine. Through using the notion of families and familial spaces, which include children, he works to use a socio-cultural analytical register to work towards a more complex set of Palestinian geographies that go beyond geopolitics.