Children's Spatialities ― Embodiment, Emotion and Agency

This volume highlights the role of space in enhancing understandings of children's ordinary, everyday experiences, bringing together spatial theory and the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. Contributors to Children's Spatialities argue that spatial perspectives are central to understanding how children's practices and trajectories are situated within more-than-social contexts. This lens opens up ways of understanding children's lives that moves beyond the notion of the individual agent to recognise that agency exists within and between the spaces where children's lives happen. As such, this is a book about the intersectionality between space and cross-disciplinary approaches to childhood studies. In examining this intersection, its contributors ask: What new insights or interpretations does a critical spatial perspective of children's everyday lives offer? What are the implications for spatial theory and practice when children's lives become the primary focus of research?

Drawing from a wide range of disciplines including Anthropology, Sociology, Architecture and Geography, this collection offers both students and scholars a range of ways of thinking spatially about children's lives, drawing on empirical studies from a variety of countries internationally.

Abigail Hackett is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth, University of Sheffield, UK. Her ethnographic research mainly focuses on the meaning-making of very young children, and collaborative approaches to research with community participants.

Lisa Procter is a Lecturer in Early Childhood Education in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research explores the relationships between emotion, place and children's identities and meaning-making. Her work considers children's emotional engagements in and with place across a range of spaces including schools, green spaces and parks, neighbourhoods, and virtual spaces.

Julie Seymour is a Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology at the Hull York Medical School, UK. Her research interests focus on family and childhood practices in relation to domestic labour, health and illness, emotional labour, work-life balance and body donation.