Memory and Autoethnographic Methodologies in Children's Geographies: Recalling Past and Present Childhoods

Abstract

This chapter examines how children’s geographers have attempted to access, represent, and recall past experiences of childhood. Recognizing that children’s geographers’ research endeavors have rarely extended to historical contexts, I nonetheless examine one set of approaches for accessing childhood past: autoethnographic methodologies. Initially, I frame the chapter in a recent turn within geography and other disciplines to memory studies, which now inflect earlier debates in children’s geographies about the problems of accessing childhoods that are demonstrably “other” to adulthoods. Specifically, I examine how these debates raise important questions for the methodologies that might be developed to engage childhoods, past or present. Thereafter, I assess autoethnography – an ethnographic methodology in which the academic self takes center stage – as a way of interrogating and broaching thorny questions about the “otherness” of (past) childhoods. I provide some examples from my own life/work, using these to identify the key features and advantages of autoethnography. Subsequently, some key criticisms and limitations are identified, of which other scholars wishing to use autoethnography should be aware. Some of these criticisms are articulated in light of other possible methodologies for witnessing (past) childhoods. In conclusion, I argue that consideration of autoethnography – and reconsideration of questions about the otherness of childhood – also has implications for how children’s geographers research contemporary childhoods in the present.