Absent-Presence Present-Absence: Places, Spaces, Rights for Young People

Abstract

Children and young people are everywhere (present) but often nowhere (absent). They can be seen but not heard, they may use their voice but not be listened to. As a substantially marginalised group of humans, they experience absence and presence in different ways to older people and are confronted with contradictory experiences and recognition. Children and youth face a range of disadvantages in relational comparison of understandings and interpretations of ‘adulthood’. They are described as unready, immature, unformed, citizens-in-waiting and caught in interstitial nowhere/everywhere betweenness. However, geographers of children and young people are engaging with political conceptualisations of younger people that provide space for discourse, dialogue and discussion combined with an ethics of seeing, looking, hearing, listening, supporting and including children and young people. This article spins out from the three Dossier papers and weaves a threaded analytical examination of absent/presence and present/absence.