Pram mobilities: affordances and atmospheres that assemble childhood and motherhood on-the-move

The child-friendly city advocates for children's ‘right to the city’. Much of this advocacy focuses on the independent child, with little attention paid to the accompanied experiences of younger children, such as those travelling in prams. This paper draws on a material feminist perspective to help address this gap. We offer the concept of mother–child–pram assemblage to bring to the fore the corporeal dimensions of everyday pram journeys. By analysing sensory ethnographic materials collected with mothers and young children living in Wollongong, Australia, this paper highlights how the ‘affective affordances’ and ‘affective atmospheres’ of pram mobilities shape urban experience by reference to how motherhood and childhood are achieved on-the-move. We conclude with policy-relevant insights for the child-friendly city.     

Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in everyday mobilities: the practice of prayer and meditation in corporeal travel

This paper contributes to contemporary geographies of religion by exploring how everyday spaces of mobility and flows can be transformed through specific practices such as prayer and meditation that contribute to personal spirituality. The work challenges traditionally held assumptions that sacred space or codified religious spaces requires stillness and calmness by drawing on the New Mobilities Paradigm to explore how spiritual practices are conducted within the flows and movement that characterise contemporary everyday life. Using questionnaires and diary-interview methods, everyday journeys of participants captured how prayer, meditation and encounters with others and the environment facilitated by movement can transform and be transformed by mobility and the mode of travel. Participant’s accounts of their everyday mundane journeys reveal personalised associations of the everyday spaces that they travel through and the different routines they enact on a daily basis that incorporate religious objects, practices or ideas. These journeys and time-spaces form what I term a ‘subjective spiritual geography’, a network of the interrelated time-spaces threaded together by the individual’s schedule and routine that create, maintain and reinforce personal and informal religious meaning in everyday life.     

Sharing public space across difference: attunement and the contested burdens of choreographing encounter

This paper concerns how claims to public space are negotiated between differently embodied subjects, and how forms of bodily articulation shape capacities for sharing space. Drawing on a study of outdoor access practices, entailing mobile video ethnographies with walkers and cyclists, it explores the corporeal mechanisms through which the entitlements of differently mobile subjects are asserted, resisted, circumscribed or accepted in the time-spaces of bodily encounter. How the signalling of ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ conduct influences how bodies are allowed to move in relation to other bodies is the focus. Mobilisations of speed, affective and sensory attunement, and techniques of bodily articulation, were found to be a key in the disciplining of cycling and walking bodies. This paper highlights the central role of attunement to, and concession of, hybrid subjectivity in the choreography of encounters, and, moreover, how related burdens of orchestrating coexistence are shared and struggled over amongst different publics. It demonstrates that whilst greater attunement can enable differently mobile subjects to develop a reciprocal choreography, expectations of such attunement can also undermine the ability to share space if not met. This paper thus raises the dilemma of when to accept or extend the limits of attunement in facilitating coexistence in public space.     

Rural Youth Migration Trends in Australia: an Overview of Recent Trends and Two Inland Case Studies

Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data‐free, or data‐poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally‐consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wales and the Western Australian Central Wheatbelt. The paper finds that rates of youth loss from rural regions have increased over the past twenty years. Yet the patterns, processes, causes and impacts of rural youth migration are distributed in a spatially‐uneven fashion. Some remote areas are receiving net migration gains while booming ‘sea change’ coastal regions have experienced heavy losses. While the ‘flight to the bright city lights’ syndrome is evident, relatively high proportions of young people in the Northern SD of NSW move within their immediate region. Nevertheless, some common understandings concerning youth mobility were also confirmed. Gender differentials in migration propensity between women and men are evident even at quite local scales. Young people are also more likely to search out capital cities than the rest of the population. Most inland areas still continue to experience heavy losses of local youth. A more precise understanding of rural youth migration trends is an important stepping stone in the establishment of a reinvigorated research effort into young rural people's perspectives of their changing life chances in their home communities.     

Transient dwelling: trains as places of identification for the floating population of China

China has experienced massive rural–urban migration, producing the huge so-called ‘floating population’ (liudong renkou). This article attends to what it means to be thus between places by focusing on the embodied and emotional experience of migrant travel. Each year sees the Spring Festival rush (Chun Yun) with the largest annual movement of people as millions of these rural migrant laborers (nongmingong) return to their homes for the holidays. The Spring Festival rush is marked by huge crowds queuing overnight for train tickets, with throngs of migrants carrying woven bags of belongings and gifts on their shoulders, who end up standing in the overcrowded ‘hard-seat’ carriages of trains. By closely reading some of the poems from the emerging genre of ‘Hired laborers literature,’ this article explores migrants' affective and emotional journeys. It argues that this transit experience is one of the key shared sites of common identification for a migrant population whose mode of inhabitation is through circulation and mobility. It also argues that mobility creates shared experiences characterized by specific corporealities, material cultures, and senses of social stratification.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people's everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young people's friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on children's independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.     

The Sunday morning journey to church considered as a form of ‘micro-pilgrimage’

Using mixed methods data, the social significance and narrative of local journeys to church on a Sunday morning are examined and reframed as a form of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage studies over the last 30 years have criticized the concept proposed by Turner and Turner of pilgrimage as entirely opposite and peripheral to social structures and relation. Recent literature has reinterpreted Turner and Turner’s terminology of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’, developing these ideas to identify the continuities that remain between much of everyday life and contemporary pilgrimage. Furthermore, there has been a shift in focus, prompted by interest in mobilities, from pilgrimage centres to recognize the significance of the journey to such centres. This paper advances the discussion further to argue that local scale journeys to church should be considered as a form of micro-pilgrimage: local journeys to church services that can form part of a break from daily social structures to be used to prepare oneself for the act of worship or immersion in the social relations based in the church. The concept of micro-pilgrimages therefore recognizes that these journeys can, like longer pilgrimages, contain qualities of liminality and communitas that combine social and religious significance and meaning for the pilgrim.     

Conceptualising differently-mobile passengers: geographies of everyday encumbrance in the railway station

This paper develops ideas of differential mobility at the scale of the ‘everyday’ by investigating some of the complex relationships between mobility and immobility; facilitation and encumbrance when moving through railway stations. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with rail passengers in Britain, the first section explores the entangled relationship between differently-mobile bodies and the station by considering some of the tensions that emerge between experiences of encumbrance and facilitation. Focus here is on how navigating through the station with different mobile objects, or ‘prostheses’, impacts on passengers in a variety of ways. Drawing on insights from science, technology and society studies, it demonstrates how moving with different objects gives rise to fluid apprehensions of both mobile objects and the built form of the station itself. However, and importantly, this section suggests that this fluidity also has the capacity to disrupt the intended affective dimensions of the built form. The second section explores how differently-mobile passengers move through the station with these mobile objects. Drawing on de Certeau's notion of ‘tactics’ and Ingold's idea of the ‘taskscape’, this section pulls out some of the practical knowledges that, through repetition, develop into skills and techniques for moving. In doing so, this paper seeks to illuminate some of the complex relationships between mobility, prosthetics, encumbrance and affectivity that emerge when moving through the railway station.     

‘Knowledge that moves’: emotions and affect in policy and research with young migrants

ABSTRACT

Migration is an emotional experience, and so is the policy and research work associated with it. Yet, discussions on emotions and affect remain largely absent from the literature on children and youth migration. Writing auto-ethnographically, I revisit my research with/about young Lao migrants with the aim of teasing out how emotions, of young migrants, of my own and in policy making emerged in relation to various dimensions of young people’s migration. On this basis I make the case for appreciating emotions as knowledge. While emotions are ‘moving’ in an affective sense, I proceed by arguing the productive dimension of emotions through the idea of the emotive as ‘knowledge that moves’. I substantiate this point by discussing instances in which emotions as a particular form of knowledge ‘move’ research decisions, policy making processes, theorizing the youthful dimension of migration as well as the interpersonal relations through which ethnographic research is realized.     

Neither predator nor prey: What trafficking discourses miss about masculinities,mobility and work

Within trafficking discourses, men appear as predatory and exploitative, while boys appear as victims. This flattens the complexities of social life and obscures the ways that constructs of masculinity frame the trajectories of labour migrants and their brokers. This article challenges those discourses, drawing on research with two groups of labour migrants characterized as ‘victims of trafficking’, as well as with ‘traffickers’ who help them to move and work. The first are adolescents moving from Benin to the gravel quarries of Abeokuta, Nigeria. The second are adults from across West Africa who have made the illegal journey to Italy, where they live in ‘ghettos’ and work as gang labourers on harvests. In each case, migrants and their brokers come from the same or similar communities; (shared) ideals of masculinity structure their mobility and labour. Gendered transitions towards adulthood, the pressure to attain riches and status and a duty of responsibility to those younger and less successful are important. A focus on their masculinities takes us beyond ‘victim-perpetrator’ dyads.     

Irrational amusements,theatre law,and moral reformers in nineteenth-century America: implications for later popular music study

This paper considers several case studies of conflicts between moral reformers active in US cities and venues catering to working-class audiences from the 1860s to 1880s. For moral reformers, theatrical entertainments, particularly forms with no educational or moral purpose, were deeply corrupting and threatened not only the well-being of the individual, but also that of the nation. These case studies show that tensions emerged when popular styles sought to expand their audience beyond their traditional patrons or to move into respectable areas of the city – in other words, when they did not stay in their traditional place. This is also true of the many hybrid musical forms that combined European-based folk or religious styles with African-American music. Forms such as jazz and rock ‘n’ roll did not elicit significant protest until they began to find an audience in northern cities among middle- and lower-middle-class youth. Exploring how laws were changed in response to earlier conflicts adds a crucial historical perspective to popular music studies, which tends to remain firmly focused on music from the mid-twentieth century onwards.     

A comparison study of children's independent mobility in England and Australia

We compared independent mobility (freedom to move around the neighbourhood – or similar – without adult accompaniment) among English and Australian schoolchildren. Parents reported mobility licences granted to their children (e.g. allowing them to cross main roads alone) and accompaniment on local trips. Children reported travel mode to school. We examined associations between mobility licences and independent school journeys, and accompaniment on local trips. Among 10–12-year-olds, English children had more licences than Australian children. Mobility licences were directly associated with independent school journeys among primary but not among secondary schoolchildren who travelled further; and inversely associated with parental accompaniment to other destinations. Influences on parental restrictions should be examined to promote children's independent mobility.     

Teaching English in South Korea: mobility norms and higher education outcomes in youth migration

In many Western contexts, travel has a long historical association with youth, young adults and coming of age, an association that often connects temporary mobility with the lives of the educated middle classes and elite. Indeed, from the colonial adventure and the ‘grand tour’, to contemporary ideas of the ‘gap year’ or ‘overseas experience’, the mobility of Western youth and young adults is often considered voluntary and based on a desire to explore places and develop positive personal attributes, marking a stark contrast to depictions of migration from the developing world as directly or indirectly forced and driven primarily by economic considerations. This paper questions this depiction of developed world mobility in the context of the changing economic conditions that face young graduates in many Western countries. Drawing on survey and interview data I focus on the profiles and biographies of young adults from English-speaking countries working as foreign language instructors in South Korea. Although the personal narrative of travel and exploration amongst these individuals remains significant, findings from this research also suggest that many of these young graduates are also driven by economic circumstances: unemployment or underemployment and high levels of debt usually associated with tertiary studies. This tension between the opportunities available to young people and the constraints imposed by their own circumstances raises important questions about the multiple layers of social and economic differentiation operating through higher education and international mobility in the lives of young people.     

Remapping disclosure: gay men's segmented journeys of moving out and coming out

Drawing on recent work that examines the contingent, personal nature of queer migration, this paper provides empirical support for recent claims that coming-out journeys are more complex than the linear, often rural-to-urban typologies that have framed them during the past two decades. Since coming-out journeys are rarely elaborated beyond a conceptual level, overly teleological understandings involving homophobic, rural places, inclusive urban homelands, and one-time, linear ‘flights’ and ‘escapes’ persist. Employing the migration narratives of 48 self-identified gay men who settled in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, this paper challenges the linearity and finality of coming-out migration by highlighting particular segments of the journey. These include short-term trips to scout the gay life potentials of places, migrations that result in a degree of re-entry into ‘the closet,’ relocations that allow men to test or try on different places and identities, and moves (or imminent moves) that ‘trigger’—rather than stem from—a coming-out process. Taken together, these segments suggest that coming-out journeys are ongoing, relational, and often discontinuous journeys influenced by both queer individuals' intersectional subjectivities (e.g., age, race, and class) and the social contexts of the places they encounter.     

Modifying sense of place in a federal company town: Sunflower Village,Kansas, 1942 to 1959

The federal government built Sunflower Village, Kansas, to house employees of the Sunflower Ordnance Plant and their families during World War II. The community existed in this fashion until 1959 when a private real-estate developer bought the land and buildings. The Village evolved out of many perspectives in urban planning including those of federal ownership, ‘Garden City’ communities, and private company towns. This study examines a modified, or unique, development of sense of place that evolved here due to these varied urban forms and despite evidence of mobility and a short residence. Landscape analysis, archival searches and personal interviews also reveal a distinct difference in the experiences of youth and adults that resulted in varying processes of attachment within the community.     

Parents of global youth: contesting debt and belonging

In the United States, recently arrived migrant youth encounter competing media and institutional discourses that cast them as dependents who have been rendered ‘left behind,’ ‘on their own,’ or ‘unaccompanied’ by their parents. A corresponding narrative emerges in which young migrants’ parents are framed as abusive, neglectful, and ignorant. Combined, these portrayals may garner specialized services and contribute to success in the legal realm. At the same time, however, they fail to recognize and even imperil the intimate intergenerational networks that facilitate transnational migration. In this article, we trace the homogenizing power of public discourses on young people and their families across two diverse ethnographic contexts, that of Chinese and Guatemalan migration. Focusing in particular on narratives of debt and belonging, we argue that the pervasive pathologization of migrant youths’ parents diminishes and contorts valued relationships over time. It correspondingly demands broader efforts to historicize and to contextualize youth mobility.     

Declining Youth In‐migration in Rural Western Australia: the Role of Perceptions of Rural Employment and Lifestyle Opportunities

Over the last two decades there has been a steady decline in youth migration to Australian rural communities. Generally, inland agricultural communities are the most seriously impacted by this trend. Coupled with high rates of youth out‐migration, many rural communities face difficulties in attracting young people to fill skilled job vacancies and apprentice positions. Declining youth in‐migration also has social consequences, effectively reducing the capacity of rural communities to replenish their skill base and social networks. This research identifies how urban‐based youth perceive rural lifestyles and employment opportunities and how this is linked to their willingness to move to rural areas. The study reveals that young people attach undesirable aesthetic values to the physical environment of inland rural communities and perceive them as socially isolating and as having minimal opportunities for career advancement. However, the perceptions of those who live, or had lived, in rural areas are far more positive than those who have had little experience in rural communities. Accordingly, those who had previously lived in inland regions were far more likely to move to rural areas than those who had limited lived experience of rural communities. Overall, the research found that perceptions of lifestyle and employment opportunities were important influences on young people's willingness to move to rural communities.     

Elemental mobilities: atmospheres,matter and cycling amid the weather-world

Abstract

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent ‘elemental’ materialities. Such ‘matters’ matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and ‘elementary’ aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists’ experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air’s force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such ‘elemental’ matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling.     

Circassian Encounters: The Self as Other and the Production of the Homeland in the North Caucasus

Diasporas are an increasingly important phenomenon in the ‘era of globalization’. Transnational networks structure and restructure economic exchanges, familial bonds, cultural identities and political mobilization. This article examines one such diaspora, which traces its origin to the North Caucasus, the Circassians. The break-up of the Soviet Union has enabled some people to journey back to their ‘homeland’ and even take up residence there once again. Through such journeys and the encounters that accompany them, notions of identity, history, culture and tradition are challenged. This has the dual effect of fragmenting ethnic identity while simultaneously transforming the ‘homeland’ from an abstract concept to an everyday reality. The ensuing interplay between nation and diaspora is translated by different individuals in different ways. Three narratives of journeys to the homeland are presented here, showing the complex motivations and consequences of such journeys. Ethnographies of globalization thus reveal that concepts of ‘ethnicity’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘ethnonationalism’ have to be rethought in the context of shifting borders, transnational encounters and the production of diasporas.