Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli
University of Tampere, Finland
Children’s absence from the concerns of the subfield of political geography has drawn some attention during the past decade or so, and several authors have sought to account for this relative invisibility. Some point at children’s marginal position and limited capacities to gain visibility in Western societies, which place them in a special position of exclusion (Matthews, Limb, & Taylor 1999). Others have emphasized children and young people’s liminal position “in between” competence and incompetence, liability and unaccountability, responsibility and irresponsibility, which tends to obscure children’s roles as actors in political analysis (Skelton 2010). Yet another explanation puts the blame on the conventional wisdom according to which children’s lives should be safe from adult concerns, placing them rather categorically outside the political (Brocklehurst 2006; Kallio and Häkli 2010).
While children’s matters have certainly been overlooked by political geographers, there are ways in which children and youth have figured in the subfield. In a Political Geography Quarterly editorial comment titled “Children and politics,” Peter Taylor (1989) notes, maybe a bit tongue in cheek, that the title evokes images of politicians campaigning and garnering votes by “kissing babies” in order to appear caring and attentive to the most vulnerable of human beings. Yet, he goes on to state that “in recent years children have been entering politics in a completely different manner to appear at the heart of our most important debates” (Taylor 1989: 5). What Taylor refers to is the political geography approach that finds children as victims of war, oppressive societal orders, unfavorable socio-economic circumstances, and natural disasters, or as foci of social policies such as schooling, health care, or participatory practices (cf. Katz 1993; Gruffudd 1996; Wood 1996; Kalipeni & Oppong 1998; Cheney 2005; Mitchell 2006; Barker 2012; Yea 2013). Anticipating what would become a growing area of scholarly interest, Taylor (1989) also envisions a political geography concern with children as active participants in political events and processes, mentioning the uprisings of school children in the West Bank and apartheid South Africa as two examples.
Since Taylor’s early observations, a growing political geography literature has emerged focused on children insofar as they are exposed to ideological goals, abuse, armed conflicts, or other grave circumstances. Children have long been seen as an important segment of the population for ideological or biopolitical interventions, with aims that range from spatial socialization into national and/or state subjectivities, to manipulating family and gender structures, building geopolitical and cultural dispositions, or cultivating healthy neoliberal citizens (Bar-Gal 1993; Maddrell 1996; Newman & Paasi 1998; Mitchell 2001; Conlon 2010; Biesta 2012; Martin 2012; Jackson 2013; Mills 2013). The studies of children as implicated in major processes of (geo)political regulation and direction have made it abundantly clear that they are anything but safe from adult concerns. On the contrary, the possibility of influencing children’s growth and development toward adulthood makes them prime targets for the manipulation of the shape of future societies, subjecting them to some very powerful political passions (Gruffudd 1996; Gagen 2000; Wainwright & Marandet 2011).
Another important strand of scholarship approaches children’s political geographies from the point of view of socio-economic vulnerability and abuse (e.g., Ennew & Swart-Kruger 2003; Young 2004). There are several countries where it is commonplace for children to participate in the labor force, but the conditions in which this occurs vary dramatically from responsible and rewarded contribution to household sustenance to downright slavery in plantations, factories, or sweatshops (Robson 2004; Aitken et al. 2006; Swanson 2009; Jeffrey 2010; Evans 2011). In extreme situations, children are oppressed through practices of human trafficking and sexual abuse (Cream 1993; Kesby, Gwanzura-Ottemoller, & Chizororo 2006). While the latter is certainly always injurious to children, the consequences of trafficking are more dependent on contextual factors, such as age, gender, place, poverty, and traditions that shape the conditions in which children are lured or forced to work away from their parents (Manzo 2005; Van Blerk 2008; Yea 2013).
Yet another literature that has relevance to political geography focuses on the ways in which children are victimized by armed conflicts (e.g., Grundy-Warr & Wong Siew Yin 2002). Children’s involvement in war is typically approached as experienced directly in conflict societies or indirectly through forced displacement (Kalipeni & Oppong 1998; Lang & Knudsen 2009). Expanding on the social consequences of violent conflicts, studies have also charted the ways in which war distress is recalled in later life or transmitted intergenerationally from parents to children (McDowell 2004; Kuusisto-Arponen 2009). Some work has also been done on the direct involvement of child soldiers in conflicts, but there are surprisingly few detailed studies targeting the issue (Cheney 2005; Hyndman 2010).
As this discussion indicates, it is possible to pinpoint several examples of scholarship attentive to children’s political geographies. Yet, it would be an exaggeration to say that even this literature in itself signals extensive interest. We can only agree with Tracey Skelton (2010), who notes, on the basis of a survey on the contents of the subdiscipline’s flagship journal Political Geography, that the scholarship could focus some more attention on children and young people. To illustrate just how rare it is to find children as key subjects in political geography analysis, we use the remaining part of this section to discuss the treatment of the 2004 North Ossetian Beslan school hostage crisis in an article by Gearoid Ó Tuathail, published in the first issue of the 2009 volume of Political Geography. The article is based on the Political Geography Plenary Lecture at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, and sets out to develop “a critical geopolitical account of the ways in which key actors involved in the terrorist incident at School Number 1 in Beslan North Ossetia constructed its meaning and justified their actions” (Ó Tuathail 2009a: 4). In the issue the article is followed by three commentaries and Ó Tuathail’s response.
Since the hostage crisis took place in a school, it is not surprising that children figure strongly in the tragedy. The crisis demanded the life of 334 hostages, more than half of whom were children who were attending a ceremony with their parents to mark the beginning of the school year. Ó Tuathail (2009a: 4) examines the event from three perspectives: “the terrorists’ Beslan,” “the Kremlin’s Beslan,” and “Beslan among Ossetians and others in the North Caucasus.” Echoing Taylor’s (1989) concerns about “children’s deaths [as] an unfortunate side effect” of the ways in which our system works, the paper aptly introduces children as victims of the tragedy: as members of the community under siege by terrorists, as hostages whose release was negotiated by the President of Ingushetia, and as human beings who suffered injuries or died in the incident. Children are also portrayed as people protected by the Russian Special Forces, as the subject of concern by the Russian and North Ossetian presidents, and as targets of resurrection mobilized by the Mothers of Beslan (Tuathail 2009a: 4, 8, 12–13).
Despite their focal role in both the public media reporting the events and Ó Tuathail’s (2009a ) assessment of the incident, children remain surprisingly invisible in the subsequent discussions on the paper. In their commentaries, Bakke (2009) and Nicley (2009) refrain from any child-related terminology, whereas Gorenburg (2009) refers to the terrorists as “child killers” (citing Vladimir Putin) and recalls that the attack targeted “innocent schoolchildren.” Ó Tuathail’s (2009b ) response, instead, notes (in passing) that “the life conditions of every Chechen child is constrained by the fact that every Russian child learns Lermontov’s poem about a ‘wicked Chechen’ sharpening his kinzhal (dagger).” He makes the point in reference to Åsne Seierstad’s (2008) book that places children at the heart of the inquiry into the Chechnyan conflict, thus offering a potential starting point for “bringing children in” also as political subjects, not merely passive victims. Nevertheless, he does not follow this line of thought and, as yet, the dialogue has not prompted further discussion on the Beslan case in the journal or elsewhere within the subdiscipline.
Ó Tuathail’s (2009a ) analysis of the events that drew hundreds of children violently into the core of a troubled geopolitics is an adept treatment of a complex and multilayered conflict. It is also an apt example of just how remote the idea of children’s agency has been and largely still is to political geographical research, including its critical dimensions. Despite Taylor’s (1989) early optimism about children participating in politics in new and remarkable ways, it seems that in political geography scholarship this change has been a slow train coming. Unlike other people, children have typically not been appreciated as agents actively present in political events, operating in particular ways, and developing as political subjects, let alone creating political settings, dynamics, and practices in their everyday lives, and involving other people in these geographies. The traditional political geography approach has afforded children predominantly passive, or at the least non-initiative-taking, roles as members of the political world. Consider again the pages of Political Geography. The term “children’s agency” appears for the first time in 2010 in Aspasia Theodosiou’s review introducing a book co-authored by Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz (none of whom is a political geography scholar). Similarly, vocabulary highlighting children’s subjectivity and active political roles can only be found in some recent articles discussing the matter explicitly (Kallio & Häkli 2010, 2011a; Bartos 2012; Wood 2012).
The sea change concerning children’s political roles that we are now witnessing has found a foothold somewhat earlier in areas of research with a less explicit political geographical focus (see the next sections). In particular, scholarship inspired by feminist and postcolonial theorization has been influential for the study of youthful political agency that has explicitly sought to include in the realm of mundane political agency the hitherto excluded “half of the world’s population” (Brocklehurst 2006: 1). In what follows we provide an overview of this development and seek to assess its significance for political geography more broadly.
The development of political geography research toward acknowledging children and young people as important subjects, agents, and actors was prefaced by more general work in the emerging subfields of children’s geographies and geographies of young people since the early 1990s. These interconnected but distinguishable fields have built strong linkages to feminist social and cultural geographies, and many of the key concepts, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches of the early scholarship were drawn from literatures concerning the family, the school, welfare institutions, and urban space. Early publications include a discussion series in Area with contributions from Sarah James (1990, 1991), David Sibley (1991), and Hilary Winchester (1991); articles in geography journals and books by Cindi Katz (1991, 1993), Stuart Aitken, Joan Wingate, and Thomas Herman (Aitken & Wingate 1993; Aitken & Herman 1997), Teresa Ploszajska (1994), Hugh Matthews (1995a, b ), Hilary Winchester and Lauren Costello (1995), David Sibley (1995a, b ), and Gill Valentine (1996a, b ); as well as monographs by Hugh Matthews (1992) and Stuart Aitken (1994), among others.
This discussion set out to bring to the fore childhood issues and children’s matters in geography at large, introducing children and youth as active agents in their lived worlds. The discussion involved perspectives and vocabularies familiar to political geographical research. For instance, ideas from the work of William Bungé (1973), Colin Ward (1977), and Robin Moore (1986) were introduced to draw attention to some fundamental issues largely ignored in the scholarship of the time. Hilary Winchester’s comment in Area captures the spirit well:
The socio-spatial relationships of children, their dependence on adults, and the power relationships which circumscribe their lives are certainly the most underdeveloped and potentially fruitful area of geographical research.
(Winchester 1991: 359)
The positive thrust did not, however, push the emerging field of children’s geographies toward explicitly political inquiry. Since the mid-1990s, discussions on childhood and youth expanded in both size and scope, but politics remained a rather marginal issue. Youthful agency was randomly noticed in the context of policy and children’s rights, with Hugh Matthews and Melanie Limb (1999) as the most influential scholars, but any broader assessment of children’s place in politics and the place of politics in different kinds of childhoods remained absent. At the same time, feminist geography was establishing its position within political geography, exploring various kinds of political processes, dynamics, and practices, and expanding the notion of “the political” to include individual and collective, official and mundane, rational and affective ways of acting and having an impact politically (for an overview, see Brown & Staeheli 2003). The relative stagnation within children’s geographies can partly be explained by the influence of the new childhood studies paradigm that started to direct the scholarly debate from the early 1990s.
Conceptions of childhood have undergone a radical change in the past 20 years. The 1980s was a decade of discursive change in the interlinked yet separate fields of children’s rights advocacy and social studies of childhood. During that time, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was going through an extremely prolonged compilation that resulted in a new agenda of children’s human rights (Häkli & Kallio 2014a). In its final form in 1989, the treaty introduced the idea of voice as a fundamental right of the child, comparable to provision and protection that form the traditional twosome of children’s rights. Simultaneously, a forceful social theoretical critique was launched against adult-centered notions of children’s lived worlds that stressed behavior and development over agency and “being” (e.g., Jenks 1982; Henriques et al. 1984; Adler & Adler 1986; Alanen 1988; Chisholm et al. 1990). This critique led to a paradigmatic change, producing an interdisciplinary discussion generally known as the “new” social studies of childhood. The book Constructing and Re-Constructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout (1990) and published in concert with the Convention, came to manifest the new research agenda.
During the 1990s, the altered human rights frame and the new disciplinary approach were tightly knit together. The emphasis given to the child’s right to be heard, combined with the approach stressing children as agents “here and now,” generated a concept that has thereafter dominated both research and policy agendas: children’s participation. Scholars working in multiple disciplinary fields, children’s rights advocates and benefit organizations, professionals working with children and youth, policymakers and administrative actors seeking “the best of the child,” as well as the media, quickly embraced the concept. Human geographers, too, took a new course, moving from “top-down socialization” toward interest in child-centered participation and children as active agents in the worlds where they are situated in particular ways (e.g., Holloway & Valentine 2000). This work took notice of children’s agency in both mundane everyday environments and more official arenas, thus covering children’s everyday “political” and formal “Political” geographies (e.g., Owens 1997; Valentine 1997; Jones 1999). Yet, the political aspects of children’s agency were not explicitly emphasized, largely because the new childhood studies paradigm affiliated politics chiefly with the adult-led world and thus skirted the theme as contradicting child-centered perspectives.
A new course emerged by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Two publications with long-standing influence in the politically oriented study of children’s geographies appeared in 2003. First, Space and Polity published a special issue on the “Political Geographies of Children and Young People,” edited by Chris Philo and Fiona M. Smith (2003), based on a conference session, “Politicising Child Life,” held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2001. Second, the Children’s Geographies journal was launched as a specific forum for children and young people’s geographies. Little by little, discussions concerning youthful political presence in different geographical settings evolved, first in the context of young adults and late teenagers (e.g., Freeman, Nairn, & Sligo 2003; O’Toole 2003; Wridt 2004; Cahill 2007; Skelton 2007; Hörschelmann 2008; Thomas 2008; Staeheli & Hammett 2010; Kallio & Häkli 2011b; Azmi, Brun, & Lund 2013), but increasingly focusing on younger children as well (e.g., Kelley 2006; Kallio 2007; Lund 2007; Cope 2008; Bosco 2010; Kallio & Häkli 2011a; Bartos 2012; Bordonaro 2012; Mitchell & Elwood 2012; Wood 2012; Marshall 2013).
A productive coupling between the research streams on children and young people has recently resulted in joint conference sessions, edited collections, and collaborative research projects. For example, papers from a session on children and young people’s everyday politics at the AAG meeting in 2012 were published as an edited collection (Kallio & Häkli 2013), and a conference session on children, young people, and critical geopolitics at the RGS-IBG meeting in 2013, organized by Peter Hopkins and Matthew Benwell, is leading to another edited volume. A 12-volume major reference work is also being prepared by Tracey Skelton. With these and many other contributions, the discussion on children’s politics is moving toward themes and theoretical orientations generally employed in political geography. The concomitant appreciation of children as complete human beings in the political worlds in which they live alongside other people helps to locate “politics” in children’s geographies and “children” in political geographies. This opens up further avenues for an inquiry into the “geography” in children’s politics.
Explicit theorization of the spatialities of children’s politics may have been overshadowed by the need to justify the idea of youthful realities as political, but the consolidation and further expansion of the research area are likely to change the situation, as some recent works indicate (e.g., Vanderbeck 2008; Ansell 2009; Kallio & Häkli 2013). However, in empirical terms, certain geographies have received more attention than others during the past three decades, providing fruitful starting points for further theorization and methodological work.
Given that economic geography is one of the last terrains in which children’s agency is still to gain a foothold, it is interesting that one of the first research streams in children’s political geographies has a strong political economic emphasis. Cindi Katz’s (1986, 1991, 1993, 2004) long-standing work in rural Sudan and urban New York has paid attention to children’s positions, roles, and agencies in the world of economic restructuration. Binding together the mundane spheres of work, play, and education with reference to “knowing” and livelihood as they appear in the multiscalar world, she has shown how the global time–space compression unfolds in children’s lived worlds as time–space expansions. Katz’s approach has inspired many people; in particular, scholarship concerning child labor and children’s work in underdeveloped and developing regions has taken a political geographical tone (e.g., Robson 2004; Abebe 2007; Dyson 2008; Ansell 2009; Evans 2011). In parallel, Stuart Aitken (1994, 2001) has studied children’s livelihoods from a social geographical perspective at the US–Mexico border, contributing to feminist and postcolonial geographies. This work has been extended to various dimensions in the San Diego research group (e.g., Aitken et al. 2006; Bosco 2010; Bosco, Aitken, & Herman 2011) and elsewhere (e.g., Aitken, Kjørholt, & Lund 2007; Forsberg & Pösö 2011).
Another strong research stream targets children’s place in public/private space, in both urban and rural contexts, and in the minority and the majority world. Spanning from homes, streets, and neighborhoods to various natural and built environments, as well as demonstrations and other semi-formal participation venues, these studies have come to ask what are the “right places” for children and youth and why they seem “out of place” in other locations and events. Sarah Holloway, Gill Valentine, and Tracey Skelton have been active in this field at an early stage, emphasizing feminist theoretical perspectives (Valentine 1996b; Skelton & Valentine 1997; Holloway & Valentine 2000, 2001; Valentine & Holloway 2001). Other studies have worked to broaden the approach further (e.g., Punch 2001; Tucker & Matthews 2001; Nairn, Panelli, & McCormack 2003; Christensen & O’Brien 2004; Young 2004). The work that links to the “right to the city” idea is one of the recent openings pertinent to children’s political geographies (e.g., Bosco et al. 2011; Elwood & Mitchell 2012; Cele 2013).
Perhaps the most explicit political landscape that childhood scholars have explored is policymaking, especially in relation to democratic practice, political participation, and citizenship. This strongly adult-led arena has been unsettled by the idea of children as full human beings who should have a place in a democratic society alongside others. Here, childhood and youth geographers have largely joined forces, making space for the idea that membership in a political community – be it of any scalar extent – is not a question of age. Tracey Skelton (2010) has written extensively on the matter, with a serious attempt to spatialize children’s participation between the mundane and official political realities (also Skelton & Valentine 2003). Hugh Matthews and Melanie Limb (1999), Suzie Weller (2003), Barry Percy-Smith (2006), Janet Habashi and Jody Worley (2008, 2014), and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli (2011a ) have sought to unpack various aspects of children’s societal agency and belonging, and this work has been further developed by scholars such as Ann Bartos (2012, 2013), Bronwyn Wood (2012), and David Marshall (2013).
Research on children’s participation is closely linked to the question of the rights of the child, which has received considerable attention among geographers (e.g., Lund 2007; Ruddick 2007a, b; Skelton 2007; Kallio 2012; Häkli & Kallio 2014a ), not to mention more explicit discussions concerning citizenship (e.g., Cope 2008; Driskell, Fox, & Kudva 2008; Pykett 2009; Staeheli & Hammett 2010; Kallio & Häkli 2011a). Many of these studies resonate with political geography research that approaches the school as an institution reinforcing particular kinds of citizenship, and as a space of interactive citizenship formation where children’s agency also plays a part. In a similar vein, the rights-based research often links with previous work in areas such as development studies, peace and conflict research, and postcolonial and migration studies. Thus, the research themes introduced here are both interconnected and intertwined with more conventional political geography analysis in many ways, showing how developing new insights often draws on the tradition of the subdiscipline.
This chapter has sought to provide an overview of children’s political geographies as a heterogeneous but consolidating area of scholarly activity. While it is feasible to discuss the emerging field in terms of specific research streams, there are, of course, many studies that do not easily fall under those introduced here. There is interesting work, for example, on the politics of mobility (Barker 2003, 2012; Kearns & Collins 2003; Benwell 2009; Kullman 2010; Evans 2011); on identity politics related to race, gender, and class in everyday communities (Hyams 2000; Morris-Roberts 2004; Van Ingen & Halas 2006; Thomas 2008, 2011; Mitchell & Elwood 2012); and on power relations and political subjectivity (e.g., Cahill 2007; Gallagher 2008; Pike 2008; Häkli & Kallio 2014b).
That said, there are some common denominators informing the many differently angled research streams and projects. One broadly accepted view is that, regardless of the empirical focus or the theoretical framework, it is nearly impossible to assess children’s lived worlds as neatly structured according to one (or another) scalar logic. The everyday realities of children’s lives and the mundane and more formal modes of their politics often appear micro-scalar at first sight, but contemporary scholarship has shown this to be an oversimplification. Chris Philo and Fiona Smith (2003) were among the first to discuss the issue explicitly, and it has since become somewhat common knowledge (e.g., Vanderbeck & Dunkley 2004; Wridt 2004; Kallio 2007; Ansell 2009). To understand the variable meanings of the everyday, it is necessary to retain theoretical open-mindedness toward the many forms, arenas, starting points, and foci of children’s political agencies.
We are convinced that the expanding scholarly interest in children’s politics will contribute to an enlivened political geography that is able to recognize and discover politics in extraordinary and unexpected places and situations. Rather than contradicting other existing understandings of politics, this approach helps to identify and study events, acts, and contexts that in political analysis are easily bypassed as apolitical. Approaching childhood and children in this way, not as exotic issues marginal to political geography but as considerations at the heart of its debates, will yield conceptual tools that facilitate theoretical work on the limits and borders of politics more generally.