Contemporary research on education is enormously broad, rich and intense, and spans several academic disciplines. It would be inappropriate to try to review these bodies of work in this chapter, and I would therefore direct interested readers to authoritative reviews by disciplinary specialists (Ball, 2004; Moore, 2004; Curren, 2007). Moreover, writing as a geographer – where studies of education are relatively nascent – it is inevitable that this book will omit reference to research that readers from other disciplines may deem important, because I want to interrogate the spatialities of alternative education. However, at the same time, I hope that this book will present an opportunity to open up more vibrant cross-disciplinary debate about what a geographical analysis of alternative education might offer. In this chapter I seek to combine a range of theoretical writings that, when read via a geographical ‘lens’, will offer something new to readers from different backgrounds. In so doing I cover a fair amount of ground,but develop each strand of thinking through the thematic chapters that follow. I begin by situating the book within recent geographies of education and childhood, sub-disciplinary concerns that form the immediate context for this book and my own research. I then highlight three theoretical strands that inform my analysis and which each defy simple labels: ‘radical’ theories of education, informal education, and alternative education;diverse economic and autonomous practices; non-representational geographies and the politics of life-itself.

Geographies of education and childhood

A critical starting point for this book is that the study of education is less well developed in human geography than other social-scientific disciplines (Gulson and Symes, 2007). At the time of researching and writing this book, several papers in geographical journals reviewed and prospected the development of ‘geographies of education’ as a possible sub-discipline (Collins and Coleman, 2008; Hanson Thiem, 2009; Holloway et al, 2010; Cook and Hemming, 2011). These papers outlined a series of overlapping frameworks (such as scale and boundary making) for how a geographical perspective could supplement and challenge analyses of education in other disciplines.