Are There Politics in Childhood?

Abstract

Abstract:This paper sets out to explore children's worlds as potential fields of political action. Children are approached as competent political agents whose mundane lives are permeated by politics in which they have their own positions and roles. The paper discusses how children can be found to act politically in their everyday lives and, to some extent, also practice their own political geographies. The main objective is to propose a theoretical basis for recognizing the political aspects of children's agency and studying political geographies embedded in children's lived worlds.Keywords: children, politics, politicization, the political, political geography, childhood studies Are there politics in childhood?In the past twenty years interest towards children and young people's geographies has grown steadily in cultural studies and social sciences. Spaces and sites such as the home, the school, urban neighborhoods and virtual communities have been explored as significant contexts of children's everyday agency with and alongside other people. As part of this scholarship also power relations embedded in children's lived worlds have been acknowledged. Dynamics and power struggles maintained and produced by the children themselves, the imbalances and hierarchies concerning child-adult relations, and the society's pressures bearing upon childhood have been explored in various contexts (e.g. Morris-Roberts, 2004;Gallacher, 2005;Forsberg & Strandell, 2007;Gallagher, 2008;Thomas, 2009).However, the political geographies consequential in children's everyday lives are rarely positioned at the centre of these explorations. Children's worlds are typically approached as social and cultural environments, but not as political arenas -i.e. spaces where the presence of human relations is organized by power (Brown 2002:.569). Even studies that explicitly focus on power or empowerment tend to overlook the political dynamisms that direct and transform the power relations embedded in children's lived worlds. The scholarship foregrounding children's involvement or participation in political processes usually deals with issues readily known as belonging to the sphere of 'the political', be that civic activism, urban planning or policy making in schools. Hence, what politics means in each case is not derived from children's experiences and lived worlds but determined on the basis of policies and politics pertinent to adult communities and societies. This sustains the perception of children's mundane lives as not determined by webs of power relations forming around matters of importance to children themselves. Yet, if we accept that children are active members of their communities and societies (beings), and not merely objects of top-down socialization processes (becomings), we should reverse our thinking concerning children's political lives (see Arneil, 2002;Skelton, 2007;Kallio & Häkli, 2010).In this paper we propose that power relations acknowledged and constituted by children themselves form the basis of their political lives. T...

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