Reconceptualizing the ‘nature’ of childhood

This interdisciplinary article draws upon human geography to bring fresh new perspectives to the relationship between two commonly conflated concepts: ‘childhood’ and ‘nature’. Childhood studies scholars have gone a long way towards retheorizing childhood beyond the ‘natural’ and the ‘universal’ by pointing to its historical and cultural construction. However, as yet, not enough attention has been paid to childhood’s key collateral term, nature. This article seeks to redress this gap by drawing upon interesting retheorizings of nature that have taken place within human geography in order to suggest new ways of reconceptualizing childhood.