‘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.     

Does neighbourhood count in affecting children's journeys to schools?

This study examines two factors affecting children's school journeys – independent mobility and accessible school opportunities. Two time-geography based indicators, the spatial extent of potential path area and the number of weighted school places reachable (labelled OPP), are estimated. Multi-level modelling has been developed to analyse the interplay of individual, household and neighbourhood factors. Hong Kong is used as a case study because the neighbourhood effects on school provision within compact cities have not been well studied. The results show that 30.4% of the children's school journeys were made without adult companions. Half of the children walked to schools. The multi-level analysis suggests that nearly 90% of the variance in both indicators was found at the individual level. Neighbourhood, though not a decisive factor, does have impacts on the number of accessible school choices.     

Neighbourhood play on the endangered list: examining patterns in children's local activity and mobility using GPS monitoring and qualitative GIS

Children's time and freedom for independent neighbourhood activity is severely declining, which may be adversely impacting their healthy development. This study integrates GPS activity monitoring and environmental analysis in a geographic information system with activity diaries, annotated maps, surveys, and map-enhanced interviews to conduct a deep pattern analysis of children's habitual neighbourhood behaviour (n?=?23; aged 9–13 years) from each an urban and suburban school neighbourhood within London, Canada. Patterns in children's primary activities and settings, independent mobility (IM) levels, and perception and use of neighbourhood affordances are examined. Participants note a diverse range of local independent destinations, but habitually spend little time playing outdoors in neighbourhoods. Local activity related to free time available, perception of activity affordances, and license to travel independently. Social and environmental conditions of children's micro-neighbourhoods influenced independent destinations and domains. Neighbourhood planning should promote diversity of activity affordances and address conditions that support increased IM for youth.     

Does the walkability of neighbourhoods affect children's independent mobility,independent of parental,socio-cultural and individual factors?

The association between neighbourhood walkability and children's independent mobility using an ecological approach is relatively unexplored. In 2007, 1480 10- to 12-year-old children (and 1314 parents) attending low and high walkable schools across Perth, Western Australia, completed surveys. Objective built environment, social-cultural and individual-level factors were explored. High neighbourhood walkability predicted girls' independent mobility. However, girls and boys were more likely to be independently mobile if they and their parents were confident that they could travel independently. Providing safe, walkable neighbourhoods – particularly for girls – combined with strategies to improve children's skills to safely navigate their neighbourhood may increase independent mobility.     

Children's agency and Islam: unexpected paths to solidarity

This ethnographic study analyzes the experiences of Palestinian children's agency of religion and its manifestation in religion as resistance while it is fighting the globalized hegemony. Children's agency of religion as resistance is cultivated within the debate of Islamist movements and the evolution of Palestinian national identity while it serves as a call for global solidarity. It is this creative construct of agency of religion that transcends borders and distinguishes itself from the old generation method of resistance. The differences between generations on this construct, as described by children's agency and their ability to transform, is constructed by particular meanings of Islamist symbols and rejects the assumption that children's roles are defined. The agency of religion as resistance evolves as the role of religion in national discourse is deliberated in secularism and sectarianism. In 2005/2006, I was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in the Anthropology Department of Johns Hopkins University. The award was for my work on children's political socialization in the Middle East. I also have been active with international studies: in 2009, I collaborated with the Children's Rights Unit, Institut Universitaire Kurt Bösch, Switzerland on the research project, Living Rights: Theorizing Children's Rights in International Development. I am serving as research member on the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and Ethnic Diversity (JLICED), Division of Children's Rights. My work has been published in the Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, Childhood, Children's Geographies, Journal of Mix Method Research and others. View all notes     

(Re)Writing With the Feet: The Flâneur as Urban Cartographer in Alicia Scherson’s Film Play (Chile, 2005)

This article approaches Chilean filmmaker Alicia Scherson’s first feature-length film, Play (2005), from the perspectives of mobility and social cartography in relation to the spatial practices of the main characters. Through the paradigmatic figure of the flâneur, the article explores the representative function of both the characters’ and the camera’s drifting itineraries across the city, as they subtly perform a peripatetic cartography of present-day Santiago. The diegetic threads that are spun by the characters progressively interlace to weave an urban text which lays bare – as they are transgressed – a series of frontiers that cut across the cityscape. The film maps out two very different human geographies of post-dictatorship Chile, a lived urban space that reveals the stark social divide propping up the nation’s neoliberal economic structure. Scherson’s roving camera engages in a politics of perception which invites the spectator to view the city differently, thus exploring the possibility of upsetting this divide.     

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.     

PATHS IN TRANSNATIONAL TIME-SPACE: REPRESENTING MOBILITY BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUNG SWEDES

This article sets out to capture and describe individual transnational mobility from a long‐term, biographical perspective. The purpose is to discuss the use of a time‐geographical form of notation to represent people's transnational mobility as paths in time and space, and to demonstrate how such representations can contribute to explaining some of the dynamics of longdistance mobility. An advantage of using time‐space paths is that several aspects of an individual's travel biography can be represented in a single image: intensity and extensity are immediately evident, and the temporal and spatial relationships between the various mobility actions are made visible. Using data describing all transnational trips taken during childhood and adolescence by sixty‐two Swedish youth with different backgrounds, three aspects of how trajectories develop over time are discussed in more detail. The first concerns overall change in travel pattern with time. A dominant pattern of increase in travel with increasing age is observed, indicating the importance of further investigating how travel behaviour is related to experience and life‐course transitions. Second, sequential relationships between migration and temporary mobility are examined. In spite of the relatively small number of respondents, a wide range of such relationships are disclosed in the material. Third, regularity and repetition in long‐distance travel patterns is discussed as an increasingly important aspect of contemporary transnational mobility. Among these young people, highly regular travel is often motivated by enduring long‐distance social relationships, but is also generated by leisure or holiday travel alone.     

New Zealand parents' understandings of the intergenerational decline in children's independent outdoor play and active travel

Children's independent mobility and physical activity levels are declining in Western countries. In the past 20 years New Zealand children's active travel (walking and cycling) has dropped on average from 130 to 72 minutes per week, and those travelling by car to school have increased from 31% to 58%. This paper describes parents' understandings of why 9–11-year-old primary school children in suburban Auckland are less likely to walk to school and play unsupervised outdoors than they were as children. Data gathered in focus groups show understandings range from proximate neighbourhood explanations to downstream impacts of a neoliberal policy context.     

Complex spaces of orphan care – a Russian therapeutic children's community

Institutions of orphan care are immensely complex spaces imbued with social and cultural norms, and can exhibit intricate power relations and particularly severe examples of surveillance. While there have been numerous excellent quantitative studies of these institutions, they reveal little of the complexity and heterogeneity of the spaces, and there remains a need for more qualitative and particularly ethnographic studies of spaces of orphan care to reveal their nuances. Drawing upon the author's reflections on a highly unusual space of orphan care, this article makes two major contributions to Children's Geographies: (1) it employs a sorely neglected aspect of Foucault's work in Children's Geographies, Mettray, in analysing surveillance and discipline in an institution providing care to orphaned children and (2) It highlights the heterogeneity of these spaces and provides an example of best practice in spaces of orphan care.     

Measuring children's independent mobility: comparing interactive mapping with destination access and licence to roam

Children's independent mobility (IM) lacks a standardised definition and measurement protocol. Interactive mapping applications can capture geographically defined mobility data. In this study of 219 children, independent parental licences (IM Licence) and allowances to travel to certain locations unsupervised (IM Index) were collected through a questionnaire, and compared to IM-roaming areas derived from the Visualisation and Evaluation of Route Itineraries, Travel Destinations, and Activity Spaces (VERITAS-IM) mapping application. Significant relationships were found between the VERITAS-IM-derived measures and traditional measures of IM (IM Licence and IM Index). Results suggest the perceived degree of children's IM is heavily dependent on the assessment method and a combination of methods should be considered.     

Understanding the spatialities of sexual assault against Indian women in India

Both domestic violence (DV) and sexual assault against women (SAAW) in public spaces continue to be significant problems facing Indian society. Moreover, the link between DV and SAAW is also commonly misconstrued. Adding to this confusion is the way in which forms of violence against women (VAW) – battering, rape, molestation and sexual abuse – lacks spatial and contextual analysis. There was nationwide outrage over the Nirbhaya incident of 16 December 2012, which escalated the issue of VAW to the centre stage of political debates. Indeed, the Nirbhaya incident has intensified the need for understanding the spatialities of SAAW in India and propelled the Government of India to pass the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013. Using a questionnaire survey supplemented by open-ended interviews, the research aims to understand how social and patriarchal norms allow SAAW to persist. The research narratives reveal that the contours of DV, leading to sexual exploitation of women, often spill over to the public spaces, thereby restricting women's mobility and creating fear of its (re)occurrence. Finally, I urge for reforms to tackle VAW while using Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 as an asset for reform.     

Commuter lives: a review symposium on David Bissell's Transit Life

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author.     

Cruisers in the City of Helsinki: staging the mobility of cruise passengers

Abstract

International cruise passengers moving in urban destinations have particular time limitation that can make enabling and disabling elements of mobility meaningful on the quality of their visit. Identifying these elements is essential to improve their independent movement. Based on a staging mobilities framework that considers the dimensions of physical settings, material spaces, design (PMD), social interactions (SI) and embodied performances (EP) in situ, the research has analysed location-specific information in Helsinki, a popular port of call in the Baltic Sea. The study has used go-along observations and mobile application in data collection. The produced dataset was analysed by combining GIS-methods and content analyses. As a result, five categories were identified under the dimension of PMD: wayfinding tools, unexpected situations, lack of rest spots and walkability. Categories identified under the dimension of SI were local people, service providers and travel companions, and other tourists. Categories identified under the dimension of EP were traffic behaviour, occasioned activities, sense of direction, planning, and time-related anxiety. Urban destinations such as Helsinki can apply these results in practice, to make the movement of independently moving cruise passengers as effortless as possible, contributing to a better experience of the city space for both tourists and other city users. The proposed methodology could also be used to analyse other mobility-related phenomena.     

Bounded at the driveway’s edge: body-space tensions encountered by children with mobility impairments in moving about the neighbourhood street

ABSTRACT

Research has shown the neighbourhood as an influential environment concerning children’s independent mobility and activity participation. However, its influence on the everyday experiences of children with disabilities is not well understood. This article addresses this gap by studying the accounts of ten nine-12 year olds from south-east Queensland, Australia, who have diverse mobility impairments. This phenomenological study reveals mobility is a conditional act. Conditionality is understood by the way social and spatial factors intersect to influence one’s mobility about the street – or in our case coerced immobility. The body-space practices also reveal a mismatch between children’s embodiment and the neighbourhood environment, which intensified and converged at the absent footpath, with crucial repercussions for their spatial agency and activity participation. The findings suggest the importance of understanding diverse body-space practices in mobility studies and the need to contest ableism in street design to create inclusive walkable neighbourhoods for all.     

Surviving through movement: the mobility of urban youth in Ghana

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South.     

A gender analysis of everyday mobility in urban and rural territories: from challenges to sustainability

Gender differences in mobility patterns between women and men have long been acknowledged. This study analyses how these differences are reproduced in different urban and rural contexts. Using mobility data from a large travel survey taken in 2006 in Spain, we examine the differences between gender mobility through age, modal split and trip purposes. Special attention is paid to how territory shapes mobility and how these territorial settings differently affect gendered mobilities. The use of this data source allows the comparison of all trips made by the total population, including all means of transport. By taking a global view on mobility, the uneven relationships that men and women have with different means of transport become more visible. After disaggregating data by age and territorial settings, results show that women are using sustainable transport modes more often than men, and travelling for more diverse reasons. Gender is thus a fundamental variable in understanding modal split and, by extension, transport sustainability, in terms of energy consumption and the emission of greenhouse gases. From this point of view, we consider women's mobility knowledge and practices – typically related to the most sustainable means of transport – as factors with rising value that could effectively guide public policy in its way to promote more sustainable mobility patterns.     

The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

Hospitality workers and the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility

ABSTRACT

Building on the recent interest among labor geographers for workers’ ability to strategize around their mobility, and tourism researchers’ longstanding examination of mobile tourism workers, this paper explores the mobility agency of differently positioned hospitality workers. The findings suggest that workers are not always ‘strategic’ in relation to labor mobility, and that labor mobility and career paths must be recognized as fragmented, happenstance and erratic. Furthermore, this article argues for an approach to the study of mobile tourism workers that takes the relational as well as temporal aspects into account. This endeavor is in particular guided by the notion of stories-so-far and the understanding of people as both being and becoming. The empirical basis of this paper consists of 22 interviews with hospitality workers in four hotel workplaces in Sweden; the luxury city hotel, the suburban chain hotel, the city chain hotel and the seasonal hotel. Ultimately, I suggest that the multifaceted complex of considerations which workers negotiate, could be conceptualized as the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility.