The geographies of children's and young people's bodies

how do bodies matter in the Children's Geographies which matter to you?

(Horton and Kraftl 2006a, p. 79)

This special issue emerges out of presentations and conversations1 that took place at an international, interdisciplinary conference held at the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK, in July 2006. The conference, entitled ‘Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth’ was held over two days and brought together a range of academics, researchers, and practitioners all of whom had an interest in ‘the body’, embodiment and specifically the bodies of children and young people. The two main aims of the conference were firstly, to showcase the breadth of interdisciplinary work that is being done across the social sciences and arts and humanities on the bodies of children and young people; set within a wider theoretical and empirical ‘turn’ to ‘the body’, as experienced in Geography over the past 15 years (see Longhurst 2000). The second aim was to bring to light particular contestations that exist in relation to dominant ways that the bodies of children and young people have been positioned, constructed and deployed across a range of policy and popular contexts (see Prout 2000a); contexts which include that of ‘health and illness’, ‘education’, ‘mobility’, ‘consumption’, ‘the (ab)use of public space’ and ‘crime’. These contexts commonly position children's bodies as unruly, in need of control and/or intervention, or conversely as absent whereby their voices and (embodied) experiences are rarely explored or taken seriously. Therefore, the conference provided an opportunity for critical engagement with these dominant positionings as well as the space to present work which provided new empirical and theoretical contexts with which to make sense of the bodies of children and young people.

The conference also provided a space to showcase contemporary and cutting edge geographical research on the bodies of children and young people. Recent commentaries on current work in and future possibilities for Children's Geographies by Horton and Kraftl (2005, 2006a, 2006b) and Horton et al. (2008) have suggested that we consider the difference that an attention to the body would make. They state that:

a closer apprehension of the bodily details of children's lives – as well as wider conceptualisations of bodies and embodiments – might give more fresh and rich insights into the Children's Geographies that concern us. Moreover, we suggest that ‘Children’s Geographers' are well-placed to think about the importance and complexities of bodies per se. As such, they could talk (back) to the various contemporary lines of thought around bodies more actively than has hitherto been the case. (Horton and Kraftl 2006a, p. 79)

They go on to discuss a number of issues that children's geographers might consider in relation to what research could2 be undertaken and how research could be conducted on ‘the body’. This includes taking seriously the small and sometimes banal bodily matters and everyday ‘goings-on’ of bodies, the relations bodies have with the non-human (e.g., objects, things, ‘nature’, commodities and technologies; see Prout 2000b), the multi sensuousness and messy materiality of bodies (with a nod here to recent work in non-representational geographies that is informed by post-structuralist theories of ‘the body’; see Lorimer 2005, 2008 for reviews of this body of work), feminist work on materiality (see Longhurst 2000, Colls 2007) and work on affect and emotion (see Thrift 2004). Horton and Kraftl (2006a) also suggest using an understanding of the body as in-flux to question the stability of the categorizations that we use such as ‘childhood’, ‘children’ and ‘youth’ and consequently the distinctions that are often made between an ‘adult body’ and a ‘child body’. For example, it is at this juncture that work on the body could aid recent discussions in geography concerning the ‘relationality’ of age (see Hopkins and Pain 2007) by highlighting the ways that a body is never temporally fixed, is multiple and always produced in relation to other real, remembered and imagined bodies (see Gail Weiss' (1999) work on body image and intercorporeality). As Place (2000) observes in his account of children and their relationahips with the heterogenous materialities of a pediatric intensive care unit, ‘the corporeal elements of a child's body are open to negotiation’ (Place 2000, p. 172). Finally, Horton and Kraftl (2006a) indicate that an attention to the body can help to question the certainty with which we make observations and analyses in our research. This calls for a consideration of the place of our own body/ies in the research process and the multiple contingencies that co-produce bodies ‘through’ the research process rather than simply engaging with a body/bodies as ‘a research object’ (see Woodyer 2008 for an account of using the body as a ‘research tool’ when working with children and toys).

The conference and the publication of this special issue, therefore, have happened at a particularly poignant moment for Children's Geographies. It is a moment when children's geographers have been asked to do two things. Firstly, take ‘the body’ seriously in their work and secondly, consider what they can bring to already established bodies of work on ‘the body’. The first of these suggestions implies a need for a new brand of research that places the body at the centre of our research order to multiply empirical and theoretical engagements with the lives of children and young people. This suggestion should not be taken to mean simply ‘adding in’ more localized qualitative accounts of the experiences of children and young people; a tendency in children's geographical research that has already been critiqued (see Vanderbeck 2007). Instead, we would argue with Woodyer (2008) that ‘the body’ has been an ‘absent presence’ in much of ‘Children's Geographies’. Therefore, the intent should not only be to consider new geographical studies of the body but also to reflect on how the body might matter to the work that we do or have done in the past. Some of the papers in this special issue consider topics that are already familiar to those interested in children's geographies such as young people's occupation of public space, disability and the spaces of the school; others are not, such as the paper (Janssen) on boyhood and initiation rites. In each of the papers, however, ‘the body’ has become the empirical and theoretical medium through which particular spatialities of the bodies of children and young people are made sense of. For example, this includes considering the movement of bodies across, within and outside of spaces, the space of the body itself, its skin colour, clothing and comportment, and the spaces through which bodies come to be presented to the world through story books, archives, research diaries and interview transcripts. Indeed it is intended that this special issue go some way to evoking what an embodied children's geographies might look, feel and sound like.

It is also important to note that there has already been some important work done on ‘the body’ which could loosely be positioned under the sub-disciplinary heading of ‘Children's Geographies’. This work goes some way to realizing the promise of children's geographies of ‘the body’ and builds upon the second suggestion asked of children's geographers to contribute to already established work on ‘the body. In Horton et al.'s (2008, p. 337) words this involves conceiving of our work ‘as challenging and mattering, beyond its own terms and beyond the immediate, familiar subdisciplinary prerogatives of “Children's Geographies”‘. For example, one of the major criticisms made of Children's Geographies is that it is atheoretical or at best reliant on a particular theoretical background that goes unsaid and uninterrogated (see Horton and Kraftl 2005). However, there are a number of papers that have already made useful theoretical interventions, that have resonance beyond the sub-discipline, through the empirical medium of children and young people's bodies. For example, Louise Holt (2007) explores the performativity of disability through an engagement with Judith Butler's (1990, 1993) work on performance as experienced in her research with children who have ‘difficult mind-body-emotional experiences’. In addition, Chris Allen (2004) utilizes Bourdieu's (1984) work on the ‘habitus’ to explore the ways that social class matters to the extent to which young people with visual impairments and their families can ‘resist’ the disablement of disability. Moreover, geographers who work ‘with’ children and young people across a range of sub-disciplinary contexts are also making important theoretical contributions to the discipline as a whole. For example, Elisabeth Gagen's (2004) work on the physicality of children's bodies, nationalism and the early twentieth-century US playground movement is grounded in an ambitious theoretical project which considers the tensions between utilizing a symbolic (discursive) and non-symbolic (non-representational) analysis of her empirical data. She cautions against the ‘liberating’ ethos that a non-representational engagement produces and describes the ways that ‘similar philosophies have been used to shape, embed and regiment bodies in ways that run counter to current uses of the theory’ (p. 438). Indeed, whilst the interventions by Horton and Kraftl (2005, 2006a, 2006b) have made refreshing and innovative suggestions for current and future children's geographies this does somewhat overlook work that has been done or is being done. Perhaps then the poignancy of this moment for Children's Geographies should also include revisiting already existing work as well as producing that which is responsive to the numerous calls for ‘newness’ and innovation.

Structure of the special issue

The work presented in the special issue is not meant to be indicative of what an embodied children's geography ‘should’ look like. Instead our intention is to present six papers all of which take the bodies of children and/or young people to be their analytical focus. Each paper provides a specific account of the bodies of children and young people within a specific theoretical, empirical and locational (both physical and disciplinary) context and all, we would argue, go some way to presenting geographies of children's and young people's bodies.

The first paper by Mary Thomas is concerned with the ways that the bodies of teen girls become ‘raced’ through practices of spatial segregation and bodily othering in an American multi-racial high school in Los Angeles, USA. In coupling the work of Judith Butler on the capacities of bodies to ‘exceed’ processes of normalization and Sara Ahmed's (2002) work on the legacy of pain in the constitution of bodies, she explores, through qualitative fieldwork with teen girls, how racially differentiated subjectivities are produced and re-produced through their often uncomfortable encounters with each ‘other's’ bodies in particular spatial contexts.

The second paper by Nicola Ansell is also set within a formal educational context; specifically that of AIDS and HIV education in Lesotho, Southern Africa. The paper draws on interviews with a range of policy-makers, practitioners and a critical analysis of documentary sources in order to explore how the bodies of children and young people, are produced through AIDS education curriculum. It is suggested that a distinction exists in the curriculum between those initiatives that address children's perceived bodily vulnerability (prevention strategies) and those that focus on the bodies of those children already affected (mitigation strategies). Theoretically, the paper is interested in the ways that the curriculum reproduces a particular relationship between the mind and the body. Despite an explicit move in policy to educate through the body by developing a ‘life skills’ approach which takes account of interpersonal and psychosocial elements of subjectivity, the curriculum actually reproduces a normative learning body amenable to control and protection and to learning through cognitive rather than embodied means.

The third paper by Nicole Matthews is also concerned with the ‘placing’ of ‘the body’ within a particular discursive context. In this instance the context is a project, ‘In the Picture’ (funded by a British charity Scope), which sought to make disabled children more visible in children's books by working with young people with disabilities, parents and a group of graphic arts and multimedia university students. The paper utilizes this empirical context in order to explore recent critiques of the social model of disability for focusing too much on the political, social and economic environments of disablement to the detriment of considering the embodied materiality of bodies with disabilities. The paper, therefore, outlines the unsettling role that children's bodies had in the planning and design of the story books. For example, this involved tensions surrounding whether to make disabled children visible through the use of ‘enabling technologies’ and whether to include the experience of incontinence, deemed by some as ‘a private issue’ and not one for public consumption.

The fourth paper by Yuki Kato turns its attention to the use of suburban public space by middle class teenagers in Southern California, USA. Drawing on ideas of ‘performance’ (Goffman 1959, 1983, Butler 1990) and ‘street literacy’ (Cahill 2000), the paper examines, through in-depth qualitative research, how young people locate and perform their bodies in particular ways in commercial spaces, such as shopping centres, retail stores, and fast food restaurants in ways that conform to and resist adult-centred norms of behaviour. The paper focuses on two particular practices, ‘doing consumption’ and ‘sitting cars’. The body ‘matters’ to these practices in interesting ways that draw our attention to the spatial constraints and opportunities offered to young people in public space. This includes the ways that young bodies are read in indeterminate ways by themselves and (adult) others, how it feels to ‘be watched’ and how they develop specific consumption practices through ‘the body’ by ‘browsing’ and ‘hanging out’.

The fifth paper by Elsa Herrera, Gareth Jones and Sarah Thomas de Benítez is also orientated around young people's use of public space. It is based upon detailed qualitative fieldwork with street youth in the Mexican city of Puebla which is used to highlight the ways in which the bodies of street youth are both objects of control and yet simultaneously central to the means through which young people express and experience their life and identities on ‘the streets’. Again, informed by Judith Butler's (1990) work on performativity, the authors exemplify the embodied practices that street youth engage in such as substance abuse, street entertainment and tattooing as set within the precarious context of authoritative control, detention and mortality. The body here acts as a means for street youth to express their identities and life stories in ways that highlight their capacities for survival and reflexivity and for their bodies to resist the categories and mechanism of control that attempt to define and manage them.

Finally, the sixth paper by Diederik Janssen explores the spatialities of boys' bodies by reviewing a range of historical research drawn from the field of boy's studies. The paper firstly, considers the relationships between the two analytical categories of body/space and gender/maturity as a means of highlighting the difficulties of capturing with any certainty the category of ‘boy’ through examples of ‘male transition’ and initiation. Secondly, the paper uses Western (American) and non-Western historical examples to illustrate how ‘space’ has been encoded and embodied as ‘boyish’ and masculine in order to illustrate distinct embodied cultural histories of boyhood. Thirdly, the paper warns against the easy deployment of classificatory tropes i.e., ‘boyhood’, by considering the reciprocity between boyhood and space through examples drawn from Ancient Greece and Victorian domesticity and empire. The paper concludes, therefore, by highlighting the need to take seriously the historical and spatial contingency of boyhood and to centre the interplay between becoming, belonging and embodiment when considering the (historical) spatialities of children and young people.

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to all of the attendees at the ‘Contested Bodies of Children and Youth Conference’ for their presentations and conversations, to the authors for their commitment and hard work, to the 12 referees for their helpful comments and suggestions and to Hugh Matthews for supporting the idea of the special issue and keeping us on schedule.

Notes

The papers presented in the special issue include those that were given at the conference (Ansell, Janssen, Kato and Matthews) and papers written by authors who were approached after the conference in order to develop some of the themes emerging from the conference (Thomas and Jones, Herrera and Thomas de Benítez Jones).

Horton and Kraftl (2006a) emphasize the world ‘could’ in their paper in order to clarify that ‘Children's Geographers’ do not have to subscribe to any of the bodies of work or suggestions that they proffer. They state that ‘this paper is meant as one attempt to present and think through some contemporary ideas which seem to us to be potentially key and valuable to ‘Children's Geographies’ (p. 70).