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Tiny human geographies: babies and toddlers as non-representational and barely human life?

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posted on 2023-11-07, 15:42 authored by Louise HoltLouise Holt, Christopher Philo
We question the relative absence of babies and toddlers in geographies of children and youth, while also acknowledging what may be signs of a new subfield in the making. We argue that there is an exciting opportunity here because babies and toddlers are at the crux of what it is to be human, raising potent questions about exactly ‘what kinds of human’ are they? We argue that babies are the ultimate non-representational, in certain respects barely-human, subjects who express their agencies in non-verbal ways. Toddlers too are disruptive to the socio-spatial order, and their disruption exposes the normative expectations of behaviour in place. Close attention to these tiny humans and their ‘microgeographies’ provides insight into ‘lines of flight’ that configure our studies, and maybe even our worlds, otherwise.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Children's Geographies

Volume

21

Issue

5

Pages

819-831

Publisher

Informa UK

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Acceptance date

2022-09-24

Publication date

2022-10-18

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

1473-3285

eISSN

1473-3277

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Louise Holt. Deposit date: 25 October 2022

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