Advancing children’s geographies through ‘grey areas’ of age and childhood

Abstract

Children’s Geographies actively engages with critical understandings of age-based research. However, the concept of age is an uncritical entity in these studies fueled by western concepts of childhood. Demarcating age numerically runs the risk of measuring childhoods in the Majority Worlds with Minority World concepts that are not culturally sensitive, but also forecloses any innovations. Researchers often spend so long debating definitions and boundaries when it is often in the grey areas of scholarship and life that the most exciting events and outcomes occur. This review begins with navigating ‘grey areas of age’ from how it is often measured in spaces of conceptual ambiguity with regards to experiences of being in between formal definitions of childhood or ‘Children’s Geographies.’ This is elaborated upon from Eurocentric linages that have shaped the subfield of Children’s Geographies, and in which the subfield should continue shifting from to further decolonize Eurocentric research related to age and childhood. The paper ends by presenting ways of further advancing the subfield of Children’s Geographies through (inter)generational positioning concepts and new interdisciplinary life course studies that further nuances the social variable of age as a grey area in the subfield.