Children and the Anthropocene, a Re-turning

Abstract

City children are often perceived as the most disadvantaged human group in the Anthropocene. Cities throughout human history have been difficult and risky places for children, with urban childhoods in the twenty-first century continuing to be played out in crowded, polluted environments, with limited opportunities to engage with nature, animals or other non-human elements. This chapter maps my own theoretical ‘turns’ from over 20 years of researching the geographies of children in cities. I identify the focus of the book and unpack key terms such as the Anthropocene, sustainability and the politics of urban childhoods. I outline my personal re-turning to a posthumanist and vital materialist perspective, including the ethical choices I am making moving from a rights paradigm to an onto-epistemological perspective and how that positions me politically. In this way I explore a move ontologically from identifying bodies (human and non-human) as separate entities with distinct borders, to thinking of the world as made up of all things, an assemblage. Through this I identify the possibility of an embodied engagement with the materiality of my research: a becoming with the data as researcher.