ABSTRACT
In this chapter my aim is to begin to explore some of the implications of recent calls for the retrieval of rural children’s geographies and in particular how such geographies are ‘structured “from without” and experienced “from within”’.1 To a large degree such a project-and the retrievals of many other neglected geographies of the rural and beyond-revolves around sensitivity to the ‘other’. This, of course, in some settings at least, is a sensitivity much sought after and discussed these days (quite rightly), but it is none the less difficult to achieve, and part of that difficulty is seeing how our views of others are constructed and constrained in the very act of viewing and all the baggage of embedded assumptions which accompanies it. The problem is, as Bauman (1993:91) puts it, ‘the Other is recast as my creation; acting on the best of impulses, I have stolen the Other’s authority’. This chapter is intended to explore some of the ways in which children, and particularly children in the countryside, are ‘seen’, by drawing on (mainly) a variety of ‘cultural texts’. It ends with a brief consideration of the complexity involved in trying to reach the otherness of children.
