儿童地理学视角下的留守儿童研究述评

Left-Behind Children in Children's Geography:Literature Review and New Agendas

文章通过梳理在WOS(Web Of Science)核心数据集、谷歌学术、中国知网(CNKI)等平台筛选出的较高引用率、方法比较规范、与留守儿童主题相关性强的国内外文献159篇,从理论层面总结了儿童地理学研究的新转向:关注儿童与空间的关系,强调儿童在空间使用中的主体性,重视不同情境下儿童地理体验的差异性。并梳理了跨国迁移背景下留守儿童的3个研究主题:从空间视角探讨留守儿童的日常生活实践;从主体性出发探讨儿童在迁移链中的体验;在童年的差异性基础上讨论本土儿童的问题。同时从问题视角和积极视角分析了国内城乡迁移背景下留守儿童的研究主题,指出因现有研究范式中的经验主义和成人中心主义而存在的局限性。尝试勾勒出符合中国情境的留守儿童研究新范式,提出留守儿童的日常生活空间,留守儿童的能动性、异质性和多样性是国内留守儿童研究亟需关注的内容。呼吁学者采用历时和动态的研究设计,充分展现儿童如何理解、体验和应对复杂的流动背景下的日常生活。

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 leftbehind 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.