Rats, assorted shit and ‘racist groundwater’: Towards extra-sectional understandings of childhoods and social-material processes

Abstract

Reflecting on a study of children's outdoor play in a 'white, working class estate' in east London, this paper argues that social-material processes that are characteristically massy, indivisible, unseen, fluid and noxious have, problematically, remained hidden-in-plain-sight within multidisciplinary research with children and young people. For example, juxtaposing qualitative and autoethnographic data, we highlight children's vivid, troubling narratives of swarming rats, smearing excrement, and percolating subsurface flows of water, toxins and racialised affects. In so doing, we develop a wider argument that key theorisations of matter, nature and nonhuman co-presences have often struggled to articulate the indivisibility of socialmaterial processes from contemporary social-political-economic geographies. Over the course of the paper, as children's raced, classed, exclusionary, disenfranchised narratives accumulate, we recognise the urgency of reconciling microgeographical accounts of play and materiality with readings of geographies of social-economic inequalities, exclusions, ethnicities, religions, memorialisations and mortalities. To this end, we initiate an argument for a move from intersectional to extra-sectional analyses that might retain intersectionality's critical and political purchase, whilst simultaneously folding social-material complexities and vitalities into its theorisation.

(Re)thinking (re)connection: Young people, “natures” and the water–energy–food nexus in São Paulo State, Brazil

“…Simultaneously, geographers have been at the forefront of attempts to unpick normative discourses of childhoods–natures – whether through critiques of rural or wilderness imaginaries associated with children (Jones, ), of the biopoliticisation of children's “natures” through the psy‐disciplines (Kraftl, ), or through new‐materialist scholarship that has, increasingly, sought to witness the multiple, dynamic ways in which childhoods and non‐human natures are co‐constituted, co‐mingling, intra‐active (Kraftl, ; Taylor et al., ). Resonating with wider work on natures in Geography (e.g., Hinchliffe, ), these accounts critique the particular, circumscribed, value‐laden – and predominantly Eurocentric – constructs of nature which are often uncritically reified in normative discourses of childhoods–natures (Horton & Kraftl, , ).…”

Hyper-diversity in/and geographies of childhood and youth

“…On the other hand, recent workalbeit not necessarily under the banner of super-or hyper-diversity, or intersectionalityhas examined some of the ways in which diverse, perhaps banal, everyday performances, materialities, emotions and affects articulate with and produce social difference (see Horton & Kraftl, 2017, for a critical review). For instance, Nayak's (2010) work on everyday racisms in a peripheral, predominantly white suburban community in the UK examines how the apparently ordinary spaces of suburbiabus stops, shop fronts, lamppostsbecome a medium for expressions of racial hatred.…”

“…Lobo (2016, p. 68) argues that these are forms of geo-power: a non-human form of power that precedes and exceeds human social relations, [providing] the possibility to reconfigure anti-racist agendas" by instituting new or surprising encounters with difference that can challenge or transcend extant racial hierarchies through their eminently materialised, performative and affecting qualities. Quite differently, in their analyses of the socio-material entanglements of watercourses, rats and smeared waste materials with questions of class-and race-based tensions, Horton and Kraftl (2017) argue for a conception of 'extra-sectionality' that retains the political purchase of 'inter-sectionality' yet acknowledges the often elusive, unglamorous, hidden-in-plain-sight and unbounded material processes that produce social difference.…”

“…In other words, if hyper-diversity is to be a useful term, it must (continue to) enable understandings of both potentially progressive and potentially deleterious sociospatial formations (as Butcher's paper also demonstrates so neatly). Thus, working with children, Witten et al (re)engage with the material details of urban spaceswith trees and slidesto examine how children's encounters with social injustices are manifest in Auckland (also Horton & Kraftl, 2017;Lobo, 2016).…”

Playing with mud- becoming stuck, becoming free? … The negotiation of gendered/class identities when learning outdoors

“…Yet, often in previous studies of more-than-humans by children's geographers, the more-thanhuman becomes an entity whose affects are wholly positive upon children with more negative aspects of child and more-than-human relations, such as harm, exclusion and restriction, paid little attention. Horton and Kraftl (2017) have already raised concerns that theorisations of and explorations with social-materialities often overlook politics, harms, violence and exclusions that are co-produced in/through social material processes. This study makes an important contribution to theories of materiality and children's geographies by showing how more-thanhumans and discourses combine stimulating the performance of gendered and class based identities.…”