Geographies of justice: preschool-childcare provision and the conceptualisation of social justice

During the 1990s geographers of diverse philosophical orientations have shown a renewed interest in questions of justice. The author draws on empirical work on childcare provision in Sheffield, England, in order to evaluate two different approaches to the geography of justice and hence the theories of social justice which lie behind these; in particular she explores the different geographies of childcare produced by the territorial-justice approach, which is based on a liberal conception of social justice, and a study of childcare cultures, which owes more to poststructuralist understandings of justice. The specific differences between these approaches in terms of their conceptualisation of what counts as childcare, who needs it, and how its delivery is structured raise broader questions about the understandings of society and space, about the importance of moral geographies, and about the possible strategies for achieving justice that underpin the different traditions of thought on social justice.