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Emotional Cartographies of Belonging: Mapping the Intersections Between Children’s Geography and Children’s Literature Scholarship on ‘Voice’

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Emily MurphyORCiD, Dr Helen King

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

What does it mean to listen to and recover children's voices? The growing body of scholarship on the emotional geography of childhood has provided valuable insights into interdisciplinary debates about power relationships between adults and children that speak to this very question, focusing on how researchers can reliably interpret children's ‘voices’. In this paper, we draw out the tensions that geographers and literary scholars have been debating for decades in relation to constructions of childhood, finding the common ground between the two disciplines and underscoring what each can learn from the other. To do so, we explore both literal and metaphoric mappings of childhood to expound on the intersections between emotional geography and children's literature studies, looking at how each field offers methodological possibilities that aid in the challenging task of navigating the emotional terrain that often comes with both recovering and reflecting on children's lives. We focus on materials created by children, as a way of examining ‘voice’ through their perspective, drawing on an original archive of over 260 maps created by schoolchildren from five primary schools in the Northwest of England, alongside accompanying oral interviews with these children. This paper illuminates how the qualitative data that children create as they seek to narrate their identity and belonging underscores the various ways in which children's voices, and the interpretation and archiving of them by or with adult researchers, are shaped by emotions of nostalgia, desire, and power.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Murphy E, King H

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Emotion, Space and Society

Year: 2026

Volume: 60

Online publication date: 07/09/2026

Acceptance date: 04/07/2026

Date deposited: 19/08/2025

ISSN (print): 1755-4586

ISSN (electronic): 1878-0040

Publisher: Elsevier BV

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2026.101201

DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2026.101201

ePrints DOI: 10.57711/0tg7-4a13

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