Abstract
This book, edited by Abigail Hackett, Lisa Procter and Julie Seymour, is a collection of conceptual and empirical articles. Building on theories of space and place drawn from geography, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and architecture, this volume offers new insights into researching children’s everyday worlds. The authors draw attention to the role of space and children’s role of social actors constructing space. The editors provide a brief introduction to this volume in which they cover three themes – embodiment, emotion and agency – all of which are discussed in 3 parts with 10 chapters in different theoretical frameworks and methodologies. Embodiment, emotion and agency are useful to examine and explain children’s experience across different settings including home, schools, museums and other outdoor contexts. Theoretical frameworks, methodologies and detailed analyses described in each chapter lead the reader to a deeper discussion of children’s experience in spaces throughout the book. The discussion of children’s spatialities around the three themes opens up the possibilities of alternative narratives about children and their everyday life experiences. Thus, this book will be particularly useful for researchers in early childhood literacy who wish to unpack the complexity of children’s literacy practices. Although the book is not overly concerned with pedagogical issues, it could also be useful for teachers as it encourages the reader to think critically about the classroom’s affordances and constraints as a given space for young students.
Part 1, comprised of four chapters, attends to children’s sense-making and experience in place to examine children’s spatiality through their embodied experience of place. In Chapter 1, Leder-Mackley, Pink and Morosanu’s study investigates how children’s embodied knowledge and use of technology in bathrooms reflects how children feel about and construct the configuration of the home. Drawing upon phenomenological accounts of experience and a sensory- and visual-ethnography approach to children’s everyday life experience in the home, this study argues for expanding the notion of place as not just localities but as ‘zones of entanglement’ (p. 25). The concept of entanglement focuses on social relationships and technologies. Mediational means for children’s embodiment and experience, such as bathroom technologies like showers and baths, are constitutive of domestic activities. Both Chapter 2 by Curtis and Chapter 4 by Hackett explore children’s embodied experience of space. Building on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Ingold’s concept of dwelling perspectives, Curtis brings in temporality to discuss children’s understanding of being in historical places and their interpretation of time and space. She unfolds the complexity of children’s experience by situating their practice as temporal–spatial embodied knowledge with the concepts of habitus and dwelling perspectives, but does not illustrate how the concepts informed the study methodologically, which would have provided a better understanding of what affordances and constraints the concepts offer in addressing the complexity of children’s experience in time and space intersection. Hackett, in Chapter 4, introduces how children exercise their agency by producing their space at a museum, attending to two children’s patterned movements in a play. With a detailed description of the children’s play, Hackett illustrates how different concepts were employed in her study and how meaning-making of the space was constructed. For example, Hackett shows how the children became entangled with the museum in physical and non-material ways by providing a thick description of their actions. Chapter 3, by Kucirkova and Sakr, focuses on a child’s art-making movements as their bodily practice in the process of taking photographs in the home. Drawing upon Deleuzian concepts of the sense-making and rhizomatic structure of experience as a theoretical framework, the authors capture a child’s active constructing of here and now. The authors critique the adults’ linear perspective of children’s learning that justifies the asymmetrical relationship between adults and children in photo-making and often situates children as agents actively participating in creating their world by art-making. Building on Deleuze’s approach to photographs, the authors use multimodality to illustrate the child’s and her father’s moment-to-moment meaning-making process. It is important to note how space can be differently constructed and understood through the inter-relation of bodies, materials and environment. In this study, Kucirkova and Sakr provide a detailed description of theoretical framing and methodology, which will be useful for researchers to see how theoretical and methodological constructs inform data collection and analysis.
Part 2 is divided into three chapters, and it discusses the roles that emotions play in children’s social construction of space and their experience in that space. Chapter 5, written by Matej Blazek, builds on emotional geographies to show the relationship between emotions and geographical place. Blazek discusses how to understand children and childhood by considering adults’ perspectives. Through a critical lens, Blazek situates children as social actors who exercise their agency in the production of their geographical knowledge. Focusing on different positionalities of children and adults in a particular time and space, Blazek examines how emotions shape and are shaped by policies. In Chapter 6, drawing upon Lefebvre and Heidegger, Karoff defines play as practice constructed through rhythms and discusses the relationship between emotional moods and play spaces as a social product. In the analysis of how rhythm is enacted through emotions in the playground at school, the author identifies four types of play practices – sliding, shifting, displaying and exceeding – and shows how each type shapes and shaped by different emotional moods: devotion, intensity, tension and euphoria. A detailed analysis of children’s play practices and rhythms yields a greater understanding of emotions not as something that children have, but as moods socially constructed and shared in a space. In Chapter 7, Procter moves the discussion of the relationship between emotion and place forward by emphasizing emplacement beyond embodiment, the relationship between bodies, minds and the materiality and sensoriality of space. The author asks us to pay particular attention to what children do with their bodies. This chapter also reveals how gender and identities intersect in institutions, discussing how children’s identities are constructed with regard to their actions in place-making practices.
In Part 3, based on the discussion of embodiment and emotions, the authors of three chapters draw attention to children’s agency in the social construction of space. It is important to note that the authors emphasize the role of children as social actors and agents who actively construct their space on different scales. Place is conceptualized as a material with which children view their worlds and create the complexity of everyday practice through play. These three chapters open up new possibilities to see how complex children’s spaces are. Chapter 8, by Julie Seymour, critically reviews the distinctions between children as social actors and children as agents and between space for children and children’s space and investigates children’s spatial agency within families on multiple scales – domestic, local, international and global – by situating family practices with in different boundaries. While family members use locations to do family practices, children are differently situated in various locations and actively play a role as social actors or agents. Before outlining these distinctions, Seymour attends to children’s marginalization by adults. Children’s resistance to marginalization illustrates how children exercise their agency to shift their positionality. Through children’s resistance, Seymour reveals the complex meaning-making in the construction of space. The continued discussion of relationships between space and children’s agency takes us to outdoor open spaces in which children and young people play active roles in the production of space but are viewed as passive and static. Seymour argues that this spatial lens enables us to attend to children’s active participation in family practices and to capture the complexity of meaning-making processes by children’s agency in those practices. In Chapter 9, building on the development of playground and skateparks as constructed spaces for children and young people, Wooley seeks children’s found spaces in urban areas and draws attention to play as a means to create their own space in a given area. Woolley illustrates how skateboarders exercised their agency to adopt and adapt a given space. For example, the skateboarders change their moves in play to use the space for their purpose or find other elements in the given space that could meet their needs. As the last chapter (10), Caterina Satta talks about relations between children’s spatial agency and spatial justice. Her attention to ‘spatial structures of privilege and advantage’ (p. 180) leads us to question what enables children to exercise their agency in institutionalized spaces. Satta argues that the play centre designed for children allows adults to control children. The description of play-assistants’ role not as a player but as a play designer also reveals what purposes the designed space in the play centre achieves. Satta also critically reviews the role of ideologies behind the concept of play in the social construction of space. The link to ideologies allows us to question the frameworks designers of the play centre draw upon. Based on such critical review, she leads us back to the discussion of children’s spatiality and the reconstruction of children’s space and asks us to consider how we can create new perspectives for viewing children’s everyday experience and space.
This book successfully provides many insights into children’s everyday experience by combining theories drawn from diverse disciplines and methodological considerations when studying children. The concept of space is taken up and expanded differently in relation to the three themes in this volume and offers new perspectives that researchers and educators can use to review their theoretical and ethical approaches to understanding children. Some chapters could provide a more detailed analysis of data, to provide a better understanding of the theoretical concepts discussed by the authors. Nevertheless, this book successfully draws our attention to children’s spatialities and their experience with alternative perspectives that open up new ways to conceptualize children and their space.