Speculating with childhoods, plastics and other stuff

This chapter considers speculative geographies of childhoods, plastics and other stuff. It is concerned with storying and otherwise the ‘art of noticing’ encounters between children and material stuff (Tsing, 2015). Geographers and other scholars of childhood have for some years scrutinised children’s engagements with material things. As part of interdisciplinary research about children’s voices and experiences, childhood scholars have examined the use and meaning of variegated material stuff, by and for children (Horton, 2010; Lee & Motzkau, 2011; Lenz-Taguchi, 2014). Critically, theorisations of children’s interactions with nonhuman agents—from toys to pharmaceuticals to animals—have increasingly been characterised by approaches that seek to ‘decentre’ children, to observe either the agency of nonhuman matter and/or the ‘flat’ relationships into which children and matter enter (Prout, 2005; Spyrou, 2017).