The geography of childhood as a new research area

Abstract

The article reveals the historical and methodological foundations for the development of the geography of childhood abroad. This research area, formed at the intersection of humanitarian geography and new social research of childhood, was born in the early 1970s within the framework of geographical sciences in the United States of America under the influence of developmental psychology and environmental psychology. The next phase of the scientific area’s development is associated with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the recognition of the subject matter of the child and the politicisation of the topic of children’s rights. The modern stage of the geography of childhood is characterised by the development of interdisciplinary research areas with the focus on understanding children’s modern lives through exploring space, place and scale.

The geography of childhood is closely connected with the geography of young people, although the latter has more access to the macro level, while the geography of childhood is often criticised for its excessive attention to the micro level.

Promising areas of research in the geography of childhood are:

• memory, emotions, affects, proximity and vulnerability which imply autoethnographic and creative approach;
• games, entertainment and care (methodologically expressed by introducing game methods of research);
• material and popular culture — significant objects of children’s everyday lives.

The methodology of the geography of childhood is characterised by the children’s involvement in the research process as co-researchers. Here, qualitative methods (interviews, children’s drawings, focus groups, included observation, and ethnographic study), and the mapping method are used along with quantitative methods (questionnaires and achievement tests). The researcher needs emotional reflexivity, which enables him to adjust to the child respondent, capture his mood, and subsequently understand how children perceive researchers in their worlds and why they share information with them as well as interpret the obtained data and design meanings.

The spatial view of childhood encourages the application of new research optics as well as an interdisciplinary convergence of researchers, primarily geographers, sociologists and educators.