Accumulation, excess, childhood: Toward a countertopography of risk and waste

Abstract

This piece grows out of my on-going project, 'Childhood as Spectacle', and my enduringconcern with social reproduction and what it does for and to Marxist and othercritical political-economic analyses. After more than 30 years of Marxist-feministinterventions around these issues, symptomatic silences around social reproductionremain all too common in analyses of capitalism. Working through these issues andtheir occlusion, I offer what I hope is a useful and vibrant theoretical framework forexamining geographies of children, youth, and families. Building this framework callsinto play three overlapping issues; neoliberal capitalism in crisis and David Harvey'snotion of accumulation by dispossession, my ideas around childhood as spectacle,as a cultural formation associated with contemporary political economic crisis andits figuration of the child as waste, and how this figuration might be turned aroundto find libratory potential in and from the site of children's play and time.