Narrating Childhood: Exploring the Places and Spaces of Everyday Life in Ireland

Children have been described as one of the worlds largest marginalised minority groups (Ansell, 2005). Subsequently, the extant literature stemming from the field of critical geographies of children, young people and families have served to centrally re-position childrens discourses within contemporary geographic research agendas. Drawing then from this literature the chapter reflects on findings from The Places and Spaces of Childhood in Ireland Project (PSCP) (2011 2014) with the central aim of exploring narratives of childrens everyday life. The chapter has a dual focus. Firstly, we focus on the methodological complexity of incorporating a story-mapping methodology (n = 90) in a collaborative and multi-stakeholder research project. For the PSCP a story-mapping research tool was developed to facilitate the collection of childrens narratives of everyday life, asking collaborators (aged 8 10) to draw a map from their home to their school. Children were then asked to include other places they visit and spend time, placing emoticons on the map to script their opinions and feelings on each place. The drawing of each story-map was recorded as a childs narration of their everyday lives; the associated stories form the basis for the latter part of the paper. Secondly, the paper considers emerging childhood identities incorporating themes of environmental perception, risk and vulnerability discourses, and the geographies of friendship that materialize across childrens narratives. Cross-cutting these narratives are echoes of adultist projections, restricting where children spend time and how this is perceived to change as they grow older, with growing-up and getting big associated with increased mobility regardless of urban or rural childhood lived experiences.