For the love of cuddly toys

Abstract

This essay reflects upon a particular moment at the end of Chris Philo's Children's Geographies lecture (see Philo 2016), when discussion turned to cuddly toys. I recall a particular mood constituted in and by this moment: of apparent bashfulness, hesitancy, things-left-unsaid, and disinclination to discuss cuddly toys within the space of an academic conference. I suggest that this incident might be understood as indicative of three sets of silences which, still, characterise a great deal of work within the fantastically vibrant subdisciplines of Children's Geographies and Cultural Geographies. This argument is accompanied by photographic portraits of three particular toys: Angus, Arnold and the B.B.D. I hope that the presence of these portraits helps bring to the surface something of the often-silenced geographies-of memories, affects, intimacies and vulnerabilities, of play, fun and care, and of material and popular cultures-upon which my argument is focused.

Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

“…Geographers should take greater inspiration from Berlant's stylistic irreverence and verve, and the formal experiments in this forum contribute to a long but still‐marginalised tradition of efforts to shake up more turgid, self‐serious geographical prose (Blomley, 2008). And Berlant's attention to the political cunning of the frivolous and the sentimental should likewise enliven a field that can remain a bit precious about the moral gravity of many of its objects of analysis (Horton, 2018). But I also wonder in what ways the political‐economic‐affective ‘impasse’ so keenly diagnosed in Cruel optimism (2011a) might require reformulation to describe a still‐stuck, but differently stuck, historical‐geographical present.…”

‘You're stuffed, bear!’: Geography's colonial legacies in the ‘Paddington Empire’

“…I also seek to follow McKittrick's (2021) call to formulate concepts, language, and style in ethical dialogue with one's live objects of analysis, rather than simply apply generic theory to dead(ened) objects. Doing so requires me to take Paddington's whimsy seriously, “to cultivate an ethic of playfulness, somewhat beyond the normative, habitual, careworn, containing behaviours that so often characterise academic labour” (Horton, 2018, p. 451; see also Blomley, 2008; Mann, 2015), precisely because children's entertainment is not unlike “the mirrors in a house of fun – distorting scale and playing with its own reflections of the world” (Bavidge, 2006, p. 328). I understand that this stylistic choice may irritate some readers as precious, particularly coming from a white gay male scholar who is not even English but North American.…”

Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children's Storytelling

“…In this research, I use terms such as margins, in-between, mapping, and "making space" to describe children's human and more-than relations in the places and spaces of their lives. I draw upon these concepts, which I derived primarily from the field of children's geographies (Blazek, 2018;Horton, 2018;Kraftl, 2019;Rautio, 2014;Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017), because they have material and ethico-political implications for children on micro and macro levels--both in their everyday lived experiences and in how they are positioned within a larger social context. Urban (2019) described the ongoing significance of socio-spatial considerations in power relations in saying, Whether geographically or conceptually, Empire is about the assumed (and enforced) supremacy of the centre over the periphery, the province.…”