‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells, before the dark of reason grows’: children’s geographies at 12

Abstract

This Keynote essay argues for a supplement to existing studies in children's geographies, one that explores the potential of a non-child-centric children's geography alert to the work done by the figure of 'the child' in all manner of worldly situations. Taking a cue from the poetry of John Betjeman, notably his 1960 Summoned by Bells, the essay considers both the intimate spaces of childhood -ones gauged by the immediacies of 'sounds and sights and smells' -and the challenges posed by a wider world raddled by adult preoccupations and abuses, those characterised by Betjeman as stemming from 'the dark of reason'. The essay builds from this foundation to address the 'darkness' in two sets of Nazi children's wartime geographies, as well as engaging with the complexities of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's claims, in the horizon of WWII, about the 'dialectic of enlightenment'. Within the latter -and also, notably, in Adorno's later writing -the figure of 'the child' surfaces as one miniscule crumb of hope, of experiencing and knowing the world otherwise, set against the face of adult Enlightenment's seemingly inevitable decay. At the close, Adorno's own brief dalliance with imagining a small slice of children's geographies allows the essay to arc back towards its original claims, and to a renewed sense of why childhood 'sounds and sights and smells' continue to matter far beyond just the domain of geographers researching children.

For the love of cuddly toys

“…These are by no means the only things that Children's Geographers could and should be doing, but I do suggest that they ought to have a somewhat greater presence and visibility within the subdiscipline. To this end I would challenge readers to develop affecting modes of thinking-writing-researching, to cultivate an ethic of playfulness, and to directly address the presence and performativity of popular and material cultures in whatever contexts you work; to proceed, after Philo [2016] as if these things matter 'big-time' for our work.…”

A geography of preposition: book review essay inspired by Christian Abrahamsson (2018) Topoi/Graphein

“…the overall variables 'child' or 'adult'). It might be objected that precisely how the 'child' is understood, identified and measured is itself extremely variable historically and geographically, an underlying theme of scholarship in 'children's geographies' (Philo 2016). Nonetheless, the foundational sense of there being a group in a human population who are 'children' (however exactly known and specified)in some ways distinguishable from, maybe prepositioned as 'lower' than, a group of people who are 'adults'is likely one with near-universality.…”

When Teddy met Teddie

“…An inspiration for my 2014 Children's Geographies lecture (Philo 2016) was the work done by the figure of 'the child' in the theorising of Theodor Adorno, the German critical theorist associated with the so-called 'Frankfurt School'. Adorno -often called 'Teddie' by family, friends and colleagues -is commonly regarded as a forbidding scholar, known for a curmudgeonly stance towards most facets of modern culture.…”