ABSTRACT
This book has developed and exemplified what it could mean to think and do childhood studies, after childhood. It has set out a series of theoretical and methodological tools for bringing childhoods into and out of focus in ways that could enable new ways of looking at complex issues and challenges in which children are implicated. Whether this interdisciplinary endeavour might be termed ‘childhood studies’ or ‘children’s geographies’ or something else – and whether in fact this really matters – cannot and perhaps should not be settled here. Indeed, if, as I explored in Chapter 2, one of the most pressing tasks when it comes to studying age is to engage in analyses of generational ordering, then the status of childhood as an object of study might shift just as much as it has throughout this book. However, those same analyses might also require a return to childhood/s as it/they is/are positioned within generational logics and discourses in particular contexts. In other words, a focus on a phenomenon such as generational ordering always brings with it the question – at least for those of us who are concerned with children: where are the children, precisely? This is one of the questions with which I began the book, and one that sits at the heart of my insistent commitment to the ‘pull focus’ and ‘arts of (not) noticing’.
