The body as research tool: embodied practice and children's geographies

Abstract

Recently, attempts have been made to advance our ways of thinking and doing Children's Geographies. This paper contributes to that endeavour in two respects. Firstly it considers how the concept of heterogeneous (or hybrid) geographies may offer a new framework for the study of childhood. Secondly, and more substantively, it explores how 'non-representational' ideas and approaches -concerned with the noncognitive and the profoundly practical -may be employed to inform our empirical engagements within this new theoretical framework.

Exploring the Emergence of the Subject in Power: Infant Geographies

“…Woodyer (2008), whilst retrieving this hidden history, suggests a shift from a sense of engagement with an already existing world towards 'performance' where ethnographers are co-present and transformative within the world, which only comes into being within specific events. There is a move towards engaging more fully with a processual sense of the relational, embodied and material becomingness of specific ethnographic encounters, rather than a static representation of things 'as they are' (Woodyer, 2008). Perhaps this epistemological break is overstated (for instance, similar concerns can be unpicked within feminist approaches to ethnography -see in particular Katz's (2004) work on mimesis).…”

“…There is a bourgeoning ethnographic tradition within geographical concerns which seek to engage with the experiences of non-verbal actors and/or studies which attempt to unravel emotion, affect and other aspects of life which are difficult to express with recourse to cognitive knowledges and verbal or written expression (Harker, 2005;Loughenbury, 2009;Morton, 2005;Nosworthy, 2009Nosworthy, , 2010Parr, 1998;Revill, 2004;Woodyer, 2008). Ethnographic approaches are particularly open to challenging the liberal subject/agent, by facilitating a focus upon interconnections between things and people in specific spatial contexts and within the present moment.…”

Food, feeding and the material everyday geographies of infants: possibilities and potentials

“…Blazek, 2013;Gallacher & M. Gallagher, 2008;Horton & Kraftl, 2006;Kraftl, 2013;Vanderbeck, 2008) and substantive approaches to researching with children and young people within more critical frameworks have been explored (e.g. Bartos, 2013;Rautio, 2013;Woodyer, 2008). However, pragmatically, in our endeavours to 'listen to the voices' of children, and emphasise the independent capacities and capabilities of children and young people, by contrast to common-sense approaches of young people as having limited agency, geographers of children and youth have often tended to uncritically adopt liberal notions of the agent, which emphasise agency as independent and autonomous, and also somewhat disembodied (see Ruddick, 2007).…”

Critical psychologies of disability: boundaries, borders and bodies in the lives of disabled children

“…Third, these revolutions are Culture is no longer conceived as an assemblage of texts to be interpreted, but is understood as performed. This requires us to address the embodied performances of the various actors involved in the encounter (Woodyer, 2008: 351-352).…”

“…At least in the field of critical disability studies, disabled childhoods have been firmly replanted: from a psycho-medical ground in which disability is viewed as synonymous with impairment into the fields of politics, sociology, critical psychology, educational studies and social policy which emphasise the socio-political conditions of disablism. Similarly, in the field of childhood studies, Woodyer (2008) observes that early conceptions of children and childhood were traditionally biologically deterministic and reductive (see Prout 2005 for an overview). In contrast, contemporary theories have emphasised childhood as a historical, social and cultural phenomenon.…”