Children’s geographies II: Adults

Abstract

In this second report on children’s geographies, I ask what geographical research on children and childhood can tell us about adults and adulthood. Discussing three figurative relationalities – childhood as a projection, project and provenance of adulthood – the report addresses the asymmetrical dynamics between adults and children as they manifest distinctively in spatial contexts ranging from family and education to climate politics and war. This relational framing offers a critical lens for examining adulthood not as an implicitly normative model of subjectivity but in relation to its contingent positioning vis-à-vis childhood.