Redai dili (Mar 2022)
Left-Behind Children in Children's Geography: Literature Review and New Agendas
Abstract
By critically reviewing 159 academic publications in English and Chinese from a range of academic platforms that focus on the study of left-behind children, we advance new theoretical turns in children's geography in future research of left-behind children: to explicate children's use of space in everyday life, to explore their subjectivities and agency, and to unpack the diversity of childhoods across spatial and social scales. We first review literature on left-behind children in the context of transnational/international migration: Scholars have written about how left-behind children participate in reconfiguring transnational family strategies and social ties with their parents across spaces; how they act out their roles in different periods of the migration process and in response to different social and cultural environments; and how they interact with multiple and multilevel social actors, factors and processes to form heterogeneous life strategies and meaning-making. We then conduct a thematic analysis of existing scholarship on left-behind children in the context of internal migration in China, revealing a dominant 'problem' frame due to the prevalent positivism and adult-centrism in the research paradigm and an emerging resiliency perspective. We identify three gaps in this literature: 1) scholars tend to build upon an abstract space of 'the rural' at the institutional level, leaving children's everyday spaces and their social practices in these spaces unexplored, including home, school campus, community centers and so on; 2) children's agency and subjectivity remain obscure, with scant empirical and theoretical discussions; and 3) the literature lacks methodological and epistemological diversity and could not bring children's experiences, voices, emotions and beliefs to the forefront of research. We conclude by outlining a new research agenda on rural left-behind children in the Chinese context. In terms of research themes, we advocate for more attention to three potential areas: 1) explicating the spatiality of left-behind children's daily life practices, especially the spatiality related to the mobility patterns of rural-urban migrants in China; 2) divulging children's experiences and subjectivities vis-à-vis their everyday practices, and 3) unpacking the complexity and heterogeneity of left-behind children's childhood experiences in different contexts. In terms of methodology, we encourage the creative uses of diverse research methods such as in-depths interviews, ethnography and Geographic Information System (GIS) that render left-behind children's voices, thoughts, feelings, cognition and actions more visible. This new research agenda could yield a richer and more balanced literature on the everyday lives and subjectivities of left-behind children, providing fresh perspectives for policy making and public debates.
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