Time and embodiment in children’s community placemaking processes

Jacqueline “Jacquie” Kociubuk

Self-care children, or children who spend time without direct caregiving adults’ supervision during out-of-school hours, are a common fixture in U.S.-based public libraries and one of my favourite phenomena to study in terms of their community placemaking processes. This group of children is varied in terms of their demographics, yet united in how they construct the public library from simply a community space into a place with meaning and value. As I have spent time exploring different facets of their placemaking processes, the ideas of embodiment (the connection between our physical bodies and minds) and temporality are increasingly an area of curiosity in my work.

The intertwining of embodiment, time, and place draws from a rich history of human geographic scholarship and complements childhood studies’ conversations around children’s bodily and temporal experiences in institutional and familial contexts. In seeing connections between these discipline-specific discourses, I find a need to put together foundational human geographic scholarship like Seamon’s (1980) time-space routines and place-ballets and Rose’s (1993) time-space embodiment with Prout (2000) and other childhood studies colleagues’ work on children’s physical bodies and the social construction of childhood. The conversation between these scholars, and additional insights from childhood geographers like Blundell (2016), has helped me better understand the importance of children’s temporality-related embodiment in community placemaking processes.

Looking first towards the geographers, for many self-care children, going to the library is part of the pattern of their days; exactly what Seamon (1980) describes as a time-space routine. The ebb and flow of children entering and exiting the library space coincides with library staff work habits creating what Seamon refers to as a “place-ballet”. However, in research I have conducted, I have observed that which children are allowed to have the library be part of their time-space routine and what activities they are allowed to engage in is tied up with their current age and/or adults’ perception of children’s maturity relative to their embodied appearance (other ties include racial and gender identity). For example, library policies set out a temporal bound around the age children are allowed into the space unattended, and library staff’s visual interpretation of how old a child (and their race or gender identity) influences whether certain behaviours are allowed (e.g. running is more permissible for a kindergartner than a teenager, more acceptable for a white girl than a Black African American boy).

Helping to make the connection from time-space routines to the physical body, Rose (1993) discusses embodiment, saying that we must acknowledge that when bodies do not fit the standard temporal experience or desires of “white bourgeois men” they are marginalised within geographic spaces (p. 77). My conversations with children (aged 8–18 years) echo this sentiment, with many of the participants describing how the library is a space for those much older or much younger than them as evidenced by the materials, toys, and decor that do not match their developmental stage or desired activities (e.g. plastic toy food, storytime rugs, quiet zones, newspapers). This contrasts with the library staff I talk to who enthusiastically show me various spaces they have designed within their libraries for differently-aged children; a disconnect hinting at how the design of children’s institutional spaces is frequently rooted in adult-centric notions of how childhood time should be spent at certain stages of development (Blundell, 2016; Prout, 2000).

Bringing these thoughts together with Prout (2000) and contemporaries’ ideas of an embodied and socially-constructed childhood, I conclude that children’s bodily experiences of the passage of time, and adults’ projection of developmental time, inform children’s community placemaking processes in multiple ways. As children progress through adolescence, their perceptions and valuation of spaces and places change with time (e.g. children’s area becomes babyish or boring). Further, their experiences with a space also change as adults respond to children’s advancement in age (e.g. older children are more of a threat or should know how to “behave”). Thus, I find I can no longer simply detach children’s experiences with a space from their physical bodies, because social constructions of childhood are so frequently shaped by physiologically-related time markers.