Not just growing up, but going on: Materials, spacings, bodies, situations

Abstract

This paper argues that non-representational theories, relating to materialities, spacings, embodiments and events, are important to children's geographies. In so doing, it suggests in particular that we might engage with the becoming-ness of children's geographies in a number of new ways. This point is made via four (ostensibly banal, everyday) examples: wearing glasses; visiting the local park; being clumsy; and one's first day in school. Through this juxtaposition, the paper insists that children's geographies are and can be complex, mundane, unsettling and thoroughly material-spatial-embodied-evental. In other words, there is more to children's geographies than purely representational or symbolic notions of Growing Up. Rather, it is argued that there is always-already-all-sorts-going-on-. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.