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 children's geographies. In so doing, it suggests in particular that we might engage with the becoming-ness of children's 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 one's first day in school. Through this juxtaposition, the paper insists that children's geographies are and can be complex, mundane, unsettling and thoroughly material-spatial-embodied-evental. In other words, there is more to children's geographies than purely representational or symbolic notions of Growing Up. Rather, it is argued that there is always-already-all-sorts-going-on-…

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to our fellow travellers: Juliet Kraftl, Martin Kraftl, and Faith Tucker. We would also like to thank the audience at the New and Emerging Issues in Children's Geographies conference at Brunel University, in July 2005, for their supportive and thoughtful engagements with the spoken version of this paper. Thanks also go to Nicola Ansell, Fiona Smith, and two anonymous referees for their constructive criticisms on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. On each of the four themes, the first ‘recollection’ is always that of author one. The second is that of author one.

2. The use of ‘asides’ in this paper recalls Elizabeth A. St. Pierre's use of textual ‘stopovers’ and ‘asides’ in two papers (1997a,b) about her journeys to perform ethnographic research in and around her childhood hometown in Virginia. For St. Pierre, an aside affords ‘a pause in textual space’: a possibly self-reflexive ‘pleat in the text’; an interruption of form, for meaning's sake; ‘an enabling disruption’; ‘an accessory to confusion’ (1997a, p. 376); a place to present ‘those unassimilable fragments of experience that refuse to be woven into a neat tale’ (Linden 1993, p. 17). Like St. Pierre, we have found that doing justice to the act of revisiting our own childhood places and practices seems to prompt, or require, messy, provisional, incomplete, reflective modes of writing and recounting.

3. Although we are less clear where this realisation leaves us, and how we should to respond, as researchers and writers. Author Two, for example, would like to state that we are not at all apologetic that our childhoods were ostensibly good and happy, to make a similar point to the broadcaster and writer Andrew Collins' (2004) tongue-in-cheek and nostalgic autobiography entitled ‘Where did it all go right? Growing up normal in the 70s’. Author One, on the other hand, probably is more apologetic here, and can feel himself withdrawing to a self-defeating position of reverse snobbery when people talk about their comfort and happiness of their lives. He thought the book ‘Where did it all go right? Growing up normal in the 70s’, by the broadcaster and writer Andrew Collins (2004), was a ghastly, smug read, for example (even though it described a childhood and a set of cultural references very similar to his own).

4. The following paragraph is an extract from video footage of our day at the park. The quotations are transcribed verbatim, the ‘action’ is presented as a relatively bare commentary.

5. The General Certificate of Secondary Education is a UK national examination taken by 15 or 16 year olds.