Remembering, Sensing and Caring for their Worlds: Children's Environmental Politics in a Rural New Zealand Town

Although investigating children's spatial cognition has been of concern to behavioral geographers since the 1970s, few current studies within the new paradigm of "children's geographies" explore children's relationship with their physical environment. This gap in scholarly analysis of children's environmental relationships encourages assumptions of children and nature to persist in popular knowledge, including the belief that children who spend time in their outdoor physical environment will grow up to become environmental agents in adulthood. Since little is known about what happens when children spend time in their outdoor physical environment over time, this assumption lends little agency to children's role of constructing, resisting and transgressing their environments in substantial ways. This thesis seeks to critically interrogate this assumption through a nine-month case study in a rural New Zealand town. Drawing primarily on participant observation and a photojournal data collection technique, this thesis suggests that children are capable place-makers through developing "special places" in their environment. These special places become important over time through children's reliance on memories of place and through their sensory embodied experiences of place. Through the development of their relationship with place, the children develop a politics of care. By exploring how this politics of care is enacted in their everyday lives, this thesis lends a more contextualized framework for understanding the connections that can be drawn between children's relationship with their environment and the development of an environmental politics in childhood.