Children's Geographies: Tracing The Evolution and Involution of a Concept

Abstract

This essay traces the evolution of children's geographies as a concept through three phases. First, in the early 1970s as a beginning impression influenced heavily by developmental and environmental psychology. Second, beginning around 1990, children's geographies cohered politically as geographers focused on young people's identity through feminism and Marxism, and global policy initiatives on children's rights. The third phase, covering the last couple of decades, coming from issues of political identity, challenges what we think we know about young people and their geographies, and also advocates a set of loose theories about the ways young people create and re‐create spaces and themselves. Cognate disciplines coming to geography for insights about children and their worlds characterize this current phase. To offset this seeming linear progression the essay also notes an involution of the concept that defies clear categories and sequences, but suggests the fluidity of tensions and accommodations that comprises children's geographies.

Key words:

• children's geographies
• discipline
• evolution
• involution

Notes

1. Although U.S. geographers at the time were unsurprisingly silent about the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, he offered an antidote to Piaget's instrumentality and abstractions with theories of child learning that accounted for socially and culturally constructed knowledge (1987).

2. The specific “Children's Geographies” referred to in Hart's paper are “Physical Geography,” “Human Geography,” “Cognitive Mapping,” and “Geographic Cognition Beyond the Local Environment,” each of which he used to elaborate the developmental work of Jean Piaget and his students.

3. Thanks to Cindi Katz for pointing out that the woman in this quote is Gwendolyn Warren.

4. The focus on difference and globalization perhaps found its height in two edited collections of work. Aitken and others (2008) brought together a collection of essays that pondered the theoretical and conceptual implications of global childhoods, while a volume by Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson (2008) brought together the stories of young people from around the globe.

5. Roger Hart was active in both the convention and its aftermath, including its twenty‐year rethinking in 2009. His UNICEF book, Children's Participation is well respected by both academics and policy makers (1992).

6. Deleuze and Guattari famously evoke the breast‐mouth assemblage of a feeding baby and a mother as a “desiring machine,” which is not part of other wholes, but a working body (the breast and the mouth) with its own purpose at a particular moment (1983).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stuart C. Aitken

Stuart C. Aitken Department of Geography, San Diego State University; [[email protected]].