Much of the recent literature on social research with children advocates the use of participatory techniques. This article attempts to rethink such techniques in several ways. The authors argue that participatory approaches, in their insistence that children should take part in research, may in fact involve children in processes that aim to regulate them. Using examples drawn from their own work, the authors question whether participatory methods are necessary for children to exercise agency in research encounters. They conclude by suggesting that researchers working with children might benefit from an attitude of methodological immaturity.This article arose out of a shared concern about the increasing dominance of 'participatory' approaches to research involving children, and the uncritical ways in which they are often deployed in such research. This concern has at times made us both feel somewhat 'out of place' as (ostensibly) 'children's geographers' working within the broader field of childhood studies. In this field, participatory research methods are almost universally lauded -and it is easy to see why. Against the backdrop of the objectification of children by traditional and psychological social research, participatory approaches appear emancipatory and democratic, respecting children's agency as individuals in their own right. Furthermore, participatory approaches seem to have an epistemological advantage over more traditional approaches; they promise to access the perspectives of the children being researched, rather than the perspectives of the adult researchers. On the surface at least, these features are very attractive. However, we want to argue that this attractiveness may obscure the problems of these approaches. In the interests of increasing our understanding of such approaches, we want to examine some of these problems.In so doing, we hope to build on critiques of participatory methods within development studies (such as Cooke and Kothari, 2001) and human geography (e.g. Kesby, 2000; Pain, 2004).After considering what participatory methods are, and how they have come to be employed in childhood research, we can begin to question whether 'participatory methods' can deliver all that they promise. We do so by examining the ontological and epistemological assumptions on which they are premised. We use the notion of 'active participation' to unpick concepts of 'empowerment', 'intentionality' and 'agency' that are embedded in the broadly Cartesian subjectivity that underpins 'participatory methods'. Following from this, we start to think beyond 'participation', using some brief empirical examples from our own research to problematize the power relationships in research encounters. This allows us to set out what we believe to be a more useful model of emergent subjectivity, from which we can advocate a position of methodological immaturity in research, which admits to vulnerability and fallibility. In doing so, we are not offering any advice on technique. Rather we seek to offer a broad metho...

'The terrible twos' are often described as a time of 'gaining control', usually thought of as adults asserting control over children, who learn to control themselves. However, toddlerhood is as much about children learning to take control for themselves. This paper is an attempt to detail something of the social geography in the toddler room of a Scottish nursery, considering both styles of adult control and the ways in which toddlers attempt to appropriate and reconfigure space and time for themselves. That is, the ways in which space and time are negotiated in the course of day-to-day nursery life.

While videogames have been a popular form of entertainment practice for a number of decades, it is only recently that they have been paid much attention by academics. Although there is a burgeoning body of scholarship that deals with videogames in new media and games studies, human geography is only just beginning to offer its own take on the medium and the practices associated with it. This essay outlines ways in which scholars (both within geography and beyond) have traced out the geographies in videogames (in terms of the representations and politics within videogames), the geographies of videogames (in terms of the production and consumption of videogames) and videogames as a cultural geographical practice (in terms of the technocultural practices through which videogames and videogamers are produced). We argue that approaching videogaming as a (techno)cultural practice can enrich the cultural geographies in and of videogames.

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Shonen manga (Japanese comics aimed at an audience of teenage boys) are often teeming with monsters, but the texts themselves are more monstrous still. The monstrous combinations of words and picture dispersed across the manga page seem to expose and challenge a fissure within representation itself—but productively so. Through reading a short section of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist, this paper explores the ways in which words and pictures can be combined to produce monstrous composite texts, which remain open-ended even after they have been recognized and ‘domesticated’ through the practices of reading.