Journal of the Association of Korean Geographers ISSN:2287-4739(Print) 2733-8991(Online) 한국지리학회지

This study aims to reinterpret existing discussions of children’s citizenship—traditionally understood in terms of rights, responsibilities, participation, and identity—from the perspective of Lefebvre’s theory of social space. Previous studies of children’s citizenship have recognized children as civic subjects who think and make judgments within their present lives and have explored the relationship between children’s experiences of place and citizenship. Drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of social space, this study extends such discussions by examining the relationships among spatial order, children’s bodies and senses, social relations, and practices. Based on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space and the concept of differential space, this study reconceptualizes children’s citizenship not as a set of qualities manifested within space, but as a practice through which children perceive, interpret, and transform the meanings and orders of space. Literature on children’s citizenship, children’s everyday spaces, and Lefebvre’s theory of social space was reviewed theoretically and interpretively. The findings suggest that children’s citizenship can be reconstructed in three dimensions: “awakened perception,” through which children bodily perceive and read spatial contexts; “creative cognition,” through which they question and disrupt the given meanings of space; and “activist citizenship,” through which they appropriate space and create alternative spatial orders. Accordingly, citizenship education for children needs to move beyond the provision of institutionalized participation programs and expand toward creating opportunities for children to sense, interpret, and transform the spaces of their everyday lives.