Families on the move: Exploring the mobilities of young people with separated parents

Walker, Amy (2023). Families on the move: Exploring the mobilities of young people with separated parents. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis provides an in-depth study of the mobility patterns, practices and experiences of young people with separated parents. It focuses on young people who spend time in more than one parental home, representing one of the first studies to look specifically at the journeys they make between their multiple houses. Thus, this thesis makes an important contribution to understandings of post-separation childhoods within the UK and beyond. To explore these mobile experiences, I draw on qualitative research with 18 young people (aged 11-26), using a range of methods including interviews, photo and video-elicitation techniques, go-alongs and virtual tours. Through working across these age groups this thesis combines the experiences of children currently living in these multi-housed ways, with the memories of young adults looking back on their childhoods - offering innovative methodological techniques for using childhood memory as data.

Examining journeys diverse in their frequency and duration, I provide detailed and textured accounts of the doings of journeys at different points in childhood. In exploring such doings, I consider time spent on the move, alongside and interconnected with periods of organising, preparing, leaving and arriving. Taking a geographic and mobility-studies informed approach to the study of post-separation childhoods, I analyse young people’s experiences through unpacking the temporalities, materialities and spatialities of their mobilities.

I consider what practices, skills and habits families have collaboratively developed to help navigate mobility in their everyday lives – considering not only the mobilities of people but also the mobilities of a range of materialities necessary to sustain life across multiple households. Furthermore, utilising a biographic approach to thinking about my participants and their families, I show how mobilities change and adapt across different temporal scales. I explore the various forces structuring and shaping mobilities and examine how young people’s agency emerges and is expressed in these processes. In doing so, I contribute to literatures on time and conceptualisations of children’s interdependent agency within children’s geographies.

In thinking through these topics, I centre the emotions, affects, intimacies and distances produced through journeying. Through doing so, I provide complex emotional accounts of the ways in which family relationships are lived, built, sustained and damaged through mobility. Thus, I develop and evidence a conceptualisation of mobilities as significant sites, practices and processes for the doing and undoing of family in post-separation. I present family undoing as a novel concept, able to more fully capture the dynamics of change, disruption and adaptation within families - thus contributing to literatures within family geographies and family studies more widely.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):