ABSTRACT
Children’s geographies as a field rarely considers psychoanalytic thought. In fact, as Chris Philo (2011: 125) notes, the field more generally insists on a child’s autonomy and assumes that each child is a “capable and knowledgeable actor to whom we must always listen.” Louise Holt similarly claims that the concept of the “sociological child” (after James et al. 1998) undergirds geographers’ advocacy for the “competency” of child actors (Holt 2011: 2), so that scholarship can push against predominant understandings of children as anything from socially and culturally marginal to unknowing, frivolous, and apolitical. She rightly questions the modernist notion of agency on which children’s geographies stand (see page 3, where she points to Susan Ruddick’s [2007] work to do so), as well as the centrism afforded to children’s experiences at the expense of examining the constraints of children’s lives and agency. In these assessments of children’s geographies and their welcome critiques of the subdiscipline’s child-centrism, the child as a subject is not afforded a complexity that psychoanalysis might bring to it.
