The geographies of children's and young people's bodies

This special issue emerges out of presentations and conversations1 that took place at an international, interdisciplinary conference held at the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK, in July 2006. The conference, entitled 'Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth' was held over two days and brought together a range of academics, researchers, and practitioners all of whom had an interest in 'the body', embodiment and specifically the bodies of children and young people. The two main aims of the conference were firstly, to showcase the breadth of interdisciplinary work that is being done across the social sciences and arts and humanities on the bodies of children and young people; set within a wider theoretical and empirical 'turn' to 'the body', as experienced in Geography over the past 15 years (see Longhurst 2000). The second aim was to bring to light particular contestations that exist in relation to dominant ways that the bodies of children and young people have been positioned, constructed and deployed across a range of policy and popular contexts (see Prout 2000a); contexts which include that of 'health and illness', 'education', 'mobility', 'consumption', 'the (ab)use of public space' and 'crime'. These contexts commonly position children's bodies as unruly, in need of control and/or intervention, or conversely as absent whereby their voices and (embodied) experiences are rarely explored or taken seriously. Therefore, the conference provided an opportunity for critical engagement with these dominant positionings as well as the space to present work which provided new empirical and theoretical contexts with which to make sense of the bodies of children and young people. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.