ABSTRACT
In this book, we have tried to convey some of the complex issues involved in researching and thinking through children’s relationships to place. We have found it necessary to consider place in children’s lives at a number of levels: domestic, local, national and supranational. All of these are intertwined in children’s sense of the relations of space that surround and, to some degree, define them, and are frequently conveyed through symbolic oppositions: here/there, known/unknown, home/away, self/other, nice/nasty. In writing the preceding chapters, we have been struck by the extent to which children’s talk about place turns on their consciousness of being enmeshed in a world of social and cultural, as well as geographical boundaries – operating on a number of different levels. We have discussed these through general observations drawing on the extant literature, but we have also been carefully sketching out and interpreting the findings derived from our own small-scale study of children in Wales. Although we cannot make bold generalisations from this study, nor was it intended to produce standardisable results, it has allowed us to contribute to developing knowledge about how children relate to these different scales of space. At the same time, it has allowed us to engage with theorisations of childhood and nation and to shed a little more light, we hope, on some of those ongoing debates. In these concluding few pages, we return to these debates in the process of mapping out and reiterating some of our arguments – first, through outlining our thoughts about children, place and nation and, second, by drawing out their significance for thinking in particular about children in Wales.
