Young ghosts: ethical and methodological issues of historical research in children's geographies

Voice: sonic geographies of childhood

“…I do not mean an engagement with (Gagen 2001;Mills 2012;Gleason 2016). Rather, I am describing an equally valid (yet fraught) engagement with the actual recorded voices (and sounds, noises and silences) of children from the past captured on file.…”

“…Horton andKraftl 2006, 2012;Kraftl 2016 (Mills 2013). I argue that just as it is impossible for those working in contemporary contexts to ascertain the 'absolute truth' in interviews with children and young people (or importantly any human participant regardless of age), accounts in historical material by 'young ghosts' are also partial (Mills 2012). …”

“…Sharon was a 'young ghost' (Mills 2012). The listening I was engaged with though -whilst detached from a research participant in the flesh -was still an "active, sensuous and embodied approach to listening" (Bennett et al 2015: 9) that involved "ears, eyes, beating hearts, feelings, skin, pores, tingly, hair raising moments and more besides" (2015: 9).…”

“…Due to the relatively recent time period under discussion, pseudonyms have been used for the children quoted in this article (Mills 2012) and audio material is not presented in a digital format due to copyright permissions.…”

The spatiality of geography teaching and cultures of alternative education: the ‘intuitive geographies’ of the anarchist school in Cempuis (1880–1894)

“…For this task, I draw on the Sarah Mills' discussion on the use of archives for historical research in children's geographies, namely where the author argues that 'thinking about historical research can challenge children's geographies to consider other types of encounter from that of the (embodied) encounter between a researcher and a child'. 16 Even if the corpus which I address is a rather traditional one, essentially constituted by correspondences, bulletins and reports where children were anonymised, I engage with the ethical questions discussed by Mills about the 'politics of archive', 17 by considering that a great part of the materials which I analyse were conceived for propaganda aims. This furnishes an interpretation key on the militant and public dimension of the Cempuis School, namely if we recognize, "The spatiality of geography teaching and cultures of alternative education: the 'intuitive geographies' of the anarchist school in Cempuis (1880-1894)", cultural geographies, Vol.…”