Hidden Worlds: A Geography of Childhood Multispecies Secret Places

My PhD thesis, titled "Hidden Worlds: A Geography of Childhood Multispecies Secret Places," supervised by Pauliina Rautio and Tuure Tammi, aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of childhood secret places. This research seeks to contribute to the well-being of both children and the environment by establishing principles that respect children and their multispecies companions' rights to privacy, embrace risk, and help to navigate current and future uncertainty times.

Childhood secret places – including physical places like treehouses or dens, but also digital and virtual secret places inside video games or a child’s imagination – inhabit an ambivalent place in discourses on children and childhood. On the one hand, often nostalgic academic literature promotes their existence as supporting children’s development. On the other hand, due to concerns about children's safety and a desire to regulate their education and surroundings, adults more frequently attempt to manage, monitor, and restrict children's mobilities, temporalities, and spaces, limiting their capacity to have and maintain secret places. The two competing narratives – benefits for children’s development and worries over their safety – leave a crucial gap in scientific understanding: what is the meaning of these places for children themselves and those these places are shared with.

This PhD located at the intersection of (early) childhood studies and children’s geographies produces a more holistic view by examining and expanding the current narratives on secret places of children and their companions to answer the main research question of: how can narratives on childhood secret places be decolonized from adult and minority-Western dominated perspectives to acknowledge non-developmental, collaborative, joyful and difficult expressions of this phenomenon?.

To accomplish this work, the phenomenon of secret places will be mapped in three work packages including a theoretical exploration, methodological development, and empirical research. Diverse philosophical, cultural and historical sources will be weaved together with an empirical study conducted in the North of Finland, using the innovative method of inviting the public to send anonymous postcards in line with a research-creation approach. These postcards are then curated into a digital anarchive. This newly developed method responds to the ethical challenges related to researching childhood secret places of privacy, trust and power relations, while also challenging the adult/child binary and concepts of authenticity relating to childhood experiences and children’s voices. Including new materialist and posthumanist perspectives will challenge the romanticizing, colonizing but also risk-avoidant and adults-controlling-children narratives.

This research will further scientific understanding of the phenomenon of childhood secret places. Furthermore, it promotes a transformation in understanding human's relationship to the world, emphasizing epistemological humility and the importance of respecting privacy, embracing risk, unknowing and lack of control while facing today’s uncertain times with joy and playfulness.