Rethinking children’s spaces and places

Curiosity about the world and our place within it seems to come readily to human beings and at the heart of this lies a complementary curiosity about what sort of creatures we are. Current upheavals and concerns across the globe, however, point to quite profound differences in how human cultures have addressed and continue to answer questions about where we stand in the world, whether there is a world beyond this one, how we should live with other humans and other forms of life and how it is that we become conscious, social human beings. This suggests that what we are cannot be disentangled from culturally and historically constructed beliefs about what we think we are; Trigg underlines this distinction as the importance of ideas about ourselves: ‘just as important as the kind of beings we are is the kind
we think we are. The ideas we have of ourselves govern the way we live our lives. Ideas of human nature are the most potent ideas there are’ (Trigg, 1994, 169 in Mills, 2000, 28). Not the least amongst the questions we ask about ourselves is how we came to be as we are; for some religion offers answers, others turn to science and evolutionary theories and for many there is a fascinating combination of the two; however, in almost all cases understanding the period of biological immaturity that is widely identified as childhood and thereby the meanings attaching to children’s lives will be
implicated.
This book is concerned to explore the ways in which some these meanings are translated into the spaces and places that children are required to occupy in a world that increasingly seems to corral children into formal institutions. Furthermore, armed with powerful constructions (or ways of understanding children and childhood) these institutions serve as great engines designed to produce and reproduce certain sorts of human being through methods requiring a degree of subordination and passivity that would frequently be deemed unacceptable for most other people. The book is part of a series concerned to re-examine and rethink these powerful constructions in various ways and proposes that attention to space and place that is the spatiality of human life – not only shines fresh light on many things that otherwise pass as normal in our social worlds, but also on how children as agentic social actors live within and respond to these worlds.

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