There has been a ‘turn’ towards ‘the body’ in geography and the social sciences over the past 20 years (see Longhurst, 1997, 2001; Nast and Pile, 1998). Simonsen (2009: 50) states that this ‘rapidly
growing field within geography deals with social and spatial conceptions of the human body’. Geographers have focused on the body as a space that: marks ‘a boundary between self and other’; is ‘a personal space’ that provides ‘our means for connecting with, and experiencing, other spaces’; is ‘the primary location where our personal identities are constituted and social knowledges and meaning inscribed’; and, can be ‘a site of struggle and contestation’ (Valentine, 2001: 14, original emphasis). Furthermore, geographers have argued that ‘bodies are also in space, providing the basis for our experience of the multiple dimensions, aspects, dynamics and properties of space’ (Cook and Hemming, 2011: 3, original emphasis). Simonsen (2009: 51–52) notes that the ‘first wave of body- literature within geography’ favoured a discursive understanding of the body and was ‘devoted to body-inscriptions, body regimes and discourses, while practices of material and fleshy bodies attracted less attention’. ‘This gap, however, has started to be filled: Longhurst (2001) implements Grosz’s [(1994)] theory of the volatile materiality of the body through ideas of body boundaries, body fluids, abjection and (im)pure spaces; studies on illness, impairment and disability explore ‘body troubles’ in everyday coping with the environment; and theories of practice and non- representational theory focus on moving bodies and the performative and material nature of embodiment’ (Simonsen, 2009: 52).
Reflecting this wider ‘turn’, recent work in children’s geographies has focused attention on children’s and young people’s bodies and embodiment (see Colls and Hörschelmann, 2009; Hörschelmann and Colls, 2010), challenging the ‘absent presence’ of children’s bodies within the sub-discipline (Valentine, 2010).13 Horton and Kraftl (2006b: 79), in their paper suggesting some potential future direction(s) for the sub-discipline, argue that ‘a closer apprehension of the bodily details of children’s lives – as well as wider conceptualisations of bodies and embodiments – might give more fresh insights into the Children’s Geographies that concern us’. As Woodyer (2008: 358) explains: ‘[e]mbodiment is implicated in everything children see, say, feel, think and do’; therefore, ‘we need to address and understand the role of the body and it’s materiality in children’s constructions of social relations, meanings and experiences’. Furthermore, Horton and Kraftl (2006b: 79) ‘suggest that Children’s Geographers’ are well-placed to think about the importance and complexities of bodies per se’, and ‘[a]s such, they could talk (back) to the various lines of thought around bodies
13 The phrase ‘absent presence’ refers to the claim that ‘the body has been a fundamental, yet rarely explicitly acknowledged cornerstone of research on children’s geographies’ (Valentine, 2010: 32). Thus, Colls and Hörschelmann (2009: 2) argue that whilst there is a ‘need for brand new research that places the body at the centre’, there is also a need to ‘reflect on how the body might matter to the work that we do or have done in the past’. For example, Valentine (2010: 32) highlights existing work in children’s geographies ‘that considers the ways that bodies have been imagined and constructed historically, how children are understood, regulated and controlled by adults, the importance of their relationships with their peers and their exclusion from public space in particular social and political contexts’, in an attempt to ‘make the absent presence of the child’s body ‘present’’.
[within geography and the social sciences] more actively than has hitherto been the case’. Thus, children’s geographers have been challenged not only to ‘take ‘the body’ seriously in their work’, but also to ‘consider what they can bring to already established work ‘on the body’’ (Colls and Hörschelmann, 2009: 2).
Children’s geographers have demonstrated how children’s and young people’s gendered, sexed, raced, classed, (dis)abled and (un)healthy bodies are constructed, imagined, represented, disciplined and performed (Hörschelmann and Colls, 2010).14 Colls and Hörschelmann (2010: 5) argue that ‘[r]elatively little attention has been paid to date [...] to questions of [children’s and young people’s] embodiment’ as a result of ‘the social constructionist bent of much research on childhood and youth [that] has led to a rather disembodied perspective, which in many ways reproduces the legacy of the Cartesian mind/body dualism by emphasising how the ‘biological’ body is inscribed by ‘the social’, without interrogating how both inter-relate and affect each other through a complex network of embodied, socio-material relations’ (see Footnote 11). As Prout (2000: 1–2) explains, ‘social constructionist accounts of childhood and the body tend to exclude (or at least to de-emphasize) the possibility that social life has a material as well as a discursive (or representational) component’, in other words that children’s bodies are ‘both material and representational entities’. More recently, geographical research has begun to focus on children’s and young people’s embodied experiences and to ‘bring into sharper relief affective and emotional characteristics of young people’s embodiment, [and] their phenomenological ‘being in the world’ as corporeal beings, whilst highlighting their connections with human and nonhuman object-subjects, materials and structures’ (Colls and Hörschelmann, 2010: 5).
This thesis brings to the forefront young people’s material bodies and embodied experiences, drawing attention to how young people ‘come to experience and understand what it means to be an embodied subject, beyond reading [their] bodies in and as spaces’ (Colls, 2003: 4). It contributes to geographical research on children’s and young people’s bodies in a number of ways. First, in Chapter 4 I explore how young people’s motivations for, and experiences of, participation in dance were informed by their knowledges and understandings of their bodies. The research considers how participation in dance resulted in physical (or material) changes to young people’s bodies (e.g., increased strength and muscular flexibility) and involved the negotiation of perceptions about what a dancer’s body ‘should’ look/be like (in terms of gender, body shape and body size). This discussion
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In recent years, growing attention has been paid within children’s geographies to children and young people with disabilities (see Pyer et al., 2010). Whilst the focus of this thesis is not on young people’s experiences of disability, it does draw on research conducted with young people with Down’s syndrome. Thus, my research could also be seen to contribute indirectly to geographical work on young people’s experiences of disability.
engages with research in dance on gender stereotypes (e.g., Risner, 2002, 2009, 2014) and body image (e.g., Green, 2003; Oliver, 2008; Thomas et al., 2005). Second, the thesis explores young people’s embodied experiences of participating in dance. In Chapter 5, I focus on the importance of the body in the process of learning to dance in the formation of friendships between young people and student-teacher relationships, through an engagement with theoretical work on embodiment as intercorporeality (Weiss, 1999) and the geographies of touch (Dixon and Straughan, 2010; Paterson and Dodge, 2012). In Chapter 6, I contribute to work on young people’s embodied emotional experiences (see also Section 2.1.5) by highlighting the importance of feelings such as emotional release, escape, achievement and enjoyment, in young people’s experiences of, and motivations for, participation in dance.
Colls and Hörschelmann (2010: 7) argue that researching children’s and young people’s embodiment ‘requires careful thinking about the methodologies which we use to research young lives’, as ‘[e]motional and embodied responses are, for instance, difficult to capture and convey verbally and are often ‘lost in translation’’. They argue that researchers should ‘think about the potential of different methods such as drawing, filming/photographing, dancing, [and] theatre [...] to convey different aspects of young people’s embodied lives’ and that ‘there is scope for much greater variety, not just in research methods but also in the formats that we use for publishing’ (Colls and Hörschelmann, 2010: 7). Horton and Kraftl (2006b: 78) also argue that ‘an attention to bodies ought to make us reflect more on our own embodied experiences (of being ‘Children’s Geographers’, for instance)’ as ‘the embodied acts and experiences of doing research are, too-often-hushed up’. ‘This calls for a consideration of the place of our own body/ies in the research process and the multiple contingencies that co-produce bodies ‘through’ the research process rather than simply engaging with a body/bodies as ‘a research object’’ (Colls and Hörschelmann, 2009: 2). My research responds to calls for geographers to expand the range of research methods they use to ‘get at’ children’s and young people’s embodied experiences by exploring the potential for video reflection interviews to research young people’s embodied dance experiences, and for researchers to pay more attention to their own bodies in the research process by providing an autoethnographic account of my embodied experience of dancing (see Chapter 3).