Ansell, N. (2009). Childhood and the politics of scale: descaling children’s geographies? Progress in Human Geography, 33(2), 190–209. doi:10.1177/0309132508090980

In the advent of the New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC), the majority of recent scholarly work has been focused on the microscale of children’s geographies. Recognizing that children’s lives happen within a web of environments, the political, economic, social, and cultural forces that impinge upon childhood need greater attention as well. Nicola Ansell criticizes this focus on the “parochial sphere and small-scale social actions of children” as leaving the larger political, economic, social, and cultural processes that affect children as being unchallenged. Ansell’s second concern with the local study of children’s geography is that the smaller scale (in the hierarchical sense of scale) becomes marginalized, and as such children’s geographies become marginalized academically. While this is of legitimate concern, this further underscores the need for those of us examining children’s geographies to better connect the scales.

Ansell finds that geographers who employed developmental psychology-based theories tend to subscribe to and put forth the idea that children’s engagements with their environments expands over time, so that as children develop, their scales move from micro to macro. In this way, children’s engagement begins at the individual sphere and grow towards their family, their school, and then their communities and societies. That children’s geographies at younger ages are more confined especially within the private spaces of their families and homes is a Western notion and as such is reflected in the research and literature. When their activities extend these beyond these spheres there viewed as encroaching on adult spaces.

Scholars who take the NSSC approah are preoccupied with promoting children’s agency and often use visual methods that focus the attention of children and researchers (as well as children as researchers) to their immediate material environments, leaving “relations with unobserved spaces unexplored” (Anwell, 2009). Even Caitlin Cahill and Roger Hart have pointed out that by “forfronting contextualized knowledge and personal experiences, participatory researchers in practice has necessarily placed an emphasis on the local, often failing to theorize connections to broader social processes” (2006). The main focus of this article is to point out that by forfronting local in research on children’s geography, most researchers and theorists fail to make the connections between the local and the global.

Ansell heeds Aitken’s advice to apply “interpretive lenses that focus simultaneously on local and global representations and lived experiences” (2004) so as to give us a more nuanced and rich analysis. Ansell is concerned the focus on spaces encountered through experience and embodiment, especially in the everyday lives of children reinforces our concern with only the concrete and local. That the concrete and local are often considered to be in tension with and at scalar ends with the abstract and global is a logic that Ansell finds problematic. Moreover, she feels that scholars of children’s geographies are widening the space between these.  By not seeing the local and the global, the embodied and the abstract in the same discursive space, we artificially delimit our analysis, or even artificially segregate children’s geography from complex and layered field of study.  It is with this concern in mind that and she proposes that we de-scale children’s geography and consider it using a flat ontology.

Note that this is just an incipient summary of Ansell’s article.  More reflections will follow in a later post.