Elsevier

Emotion, Space and Society

Volume 9, November 2013, Pages 13-23
Emotion, Space and Society

Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children's emotional geographies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.01.004Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper I argue that a significant proportion of research on children's emotional geographies has been deployed to reinforce the importance of children's ‘voices’, their (independent) ‘agency’, and the various ways in which voice/agency maybe deemed ‘political’. Without wishing to dismiss or dispense with such approaches, I explore potential ways to go ‘beyond’ concerns with voice/agency/politics. Initially, I review studies of children's participation (and participatory methods), activism and everyday lives that mobilise emotion and affect in productive ways. I contrast such studies with important questions raised by a reinvigoration of interest in the need for children to be able to represent themselves. I then explore the possibilities raised by so-called ‘hybrid’ conceptions of childhood – which go beyond biosocial dualisms – to enable further strides beyond voice/agency. Drawing on examples from alternative education and contemporary attachment theories, I explore some potential implications for children's emotional geographies and relational geographies of age of what I term ‘more-than-social’ emotional relations. Yet I do not offer an unequivocal endorsement of these hybrid emotions. Thus, I end the paper by issuing some words of caution – both in terms of the critical questions raised by more-than-social emotional relations, specifically, and in terms of engendering broader debate about how and why scholars do (children's) emotional geographies.

Introduction

Reflecting a broader ‘turn’ to emotions and affect, children's geographers have sought to understand how emotions work in children's everyday lives. Children's and emotional geographies may be entangled in multiple ways: from children's own expressions of anxiety (Nayak, 2003) or hope (Pain et al., 2010), to the powerful feelings that undergird contemporary constructions of childhood (Valentine, 1996) or adult memories thereof (Philo, 2003). Undoubtedly, children's emotional geographies have represented a rich vein of research. However, whilst there may be broad agreement that researching children's emotional geographies is a positive, worthwhile endeavour, there remain important, critical disjunctures in terms of how emotions and affects might be understood to matter, both within and beyond the academy (e.g. Vanderbeck, 2008). Most notably, some recent critical debates have centred around the possible ways in which children's experiences maybe framed as ‘political’ (Kallio and Häkli, 2010; Skelton and Valentine, 2003).

Whilst this paper does seek to intervene in these debates, it does so in a particular way. It seeks to set out some additional (perhaps alternative, perhaps complementary) frames through which children's emotional geographies might proceed. It is not intended as an agenda for how children's geographers could ‘do emotion’ differently. Rather more modestly, it aims to initiate consideration of a series of additional approaches and critiques that might offer different starting points for deliberations about how children's emotional geographies matter. As I point out in the paper's conclusion, these approaches and critiques may have important ramifications for all scholars – not just ‘children's geographers’ – in terms of thinking how and, especially, why they study (children's) emotions. To do so, I begin in Section 2 by revisiting two (virtually) foundational principles in contemporary research on children's geographies and, indeed, broader social studies of childhood: notions of ‘voice’ and (independent) ‘agency’. Several contemporary critics have attacked both principles. I draw upon their critiques to observe a general tendency in work on children's emotional geographies that has engaged somehow with questions of politics. That is, a tendency to deploy children's emotions somewhat instrumentally in support of voice and/or agency. In the second half of Section 2, and in order to frame what follows, I explore two of several possible responses to these critiques: first, I note some important exceptions to this instrumentalist tendency, focussing on studies of emotion, affect and children's politics that have moved ‘beyond’ voice and/or agency; second, I note calls to consolidate notions of voice and/or agency in the face of emotional and, especially, nonrepresentational children's geographies (Mitchell and Elwood, 2012).

I want to clarify that I am not assuming that going ‘beyond’ means dispensing with questions of voice/agency, nor that children's emotional geographies should (now) seek to move ‘beyond’ those notions, nor that the two possible responses cited above are incommensurate. Rather, the remaining sections of the paper offer some additional ways of thinking and doing children's emotional geographies that may, in some contexts, be viewed as alternative, in others complementary, and, in others, as unnecessary or undesirable. Indeed, Section 4 offers one set of broader reflections on why thinking and doing children's emotional geographies at all may require further critical reflection. I focus in Section 3 upon one set of ways to ‘go beyond’ voice/agency, inspired by a recent impulse outside geographical scholarship to exceed biosocial dualisms that have characterised much childhood research (Ryan, 2012). I frame my discussion in what Ryan (2012: 2) terms a “new wave” of childhood studies that aim to understand entanglements of biology and society – so-called ‘hybrid childhoods’ (Prout, 2005). I then provide two extended examples, taken from my own research into alternative education spaces, and from recent cross-disciplinary studies of attachment theory. I cite these two examples with the principal aim of stretching how children's geographers might conceive of the relationality of children with adults and, indeed, the relationality of children's emotions. I am not necessarily advocating that children's geographers (or others interested in emotion) should focus primarily upon alternative learning spaces, or work with or adopt approaches from attachment theory. Rather, building on my critique of Mitchell and Elwood (2012) in Section 2, I attend to the potential implications (both substantive and conceptual) of attending to hybrid childhoods, in what I understand to be significant ways that both map onto but go beyond concerns with voice, agency and/or politics.

In Section 4 – an extended discussion and conclusion – I question what might be the role of children's geographers – and children's emotional geographies – in interrogating hybrid childhoods. Specifically, and despite my enthusiasm for children's emotional geographies of all kinds, I offer some words of caution. I sketch out a series of critical questions with which children's emotional geographers may wish to engage: initially, if theorisations of hybrid childhoods are to supplement other approaches to children's emotional geographies; and, more broadly, if children's geographers are to critically engage with the multiple, potential uses to which emotions may be put in relation to children's lives.

Section snippets

Going beyond ‘voice’ and/or (independent) ‘agency’?

The so-called ‘new social studies of childhood’ represented a profound shift in scholarly research with children, evincing a series of core principles through which ‘biological’ concerns with children's development were virtually replaced with the ‘social’ constructions and processes through which childhoods were constituted. Two foundational principles – which were rapidly adopted by geographers – were that children be afforded greater ‘voice’ (in academic research and elsewhere) and that they

Emotions, social relations and more-than-social (biosocial) childhoods

Psychotherapeutic approaches suggest that, wherever interpersonal contact exists, the quality of care relationships is not dependent solely or even primarily upon the ability of the carer to deploy expert knowledge about care needs: the relationship itself is also vital [as] needs and feedback about care are communicated. This communication is multi-faceted: it may be verbal, visual, tactile, intuitive, tacit, unconscious and so on. […] It is also invariably emotionally laden. (Bondi, 2008:

Discussion: thinking critically about children's emotional geographies ‘beyond’ voice and agency

In his recent discussion of emotion and affect, Pile (2010: 17) warned that

[one of] the greatest threat[s] to emotional geography is that is should tie itself ever more closely to […], an ever-expanding shopping list of expressed emotions […] without ever reflecting on why emotional geographies should be conducted in the first place.

Whilst this is a slightly dismissive critique of some recent work in emotional geographies, a central aim of this paper has been to initiate further reflection of

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to John Horton and Sarah Mills for their generous and constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (grant no. RES-062-23-1549), which afforded both time and the opportunity for critical reflection and discussion on the issues broached in this paper (especially with the rest of the team, Pia Christensen, John Horton and Sophie Hadfield-Hill). Particular thanks to two anonymous referees for

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