Exploring the tactical mobilities and everyday activity of immigrant adolescents in a Canadian suburban city

ABSTRACT

The concentration of immigrants in suburban neighborhoods and cities should motivate research into the mobility experiences of racialized and immigrant youth in the suburbs. While intentionally turning our attention to racialized suburban adolescents, we might also look to consider how activities and travel are embodied, reproduced, and embedded with the environment, the social, and the material. Drawing from an ethnographic study about non-school activities and travel of adolescents ages 13–19 years in the suburban city of Mississauga, Canada, we highlight mobility experiences that are mediated by socio-material structures and embedded within micro and macro power relations. Attention is given to visible and invisible negotiation tactics employed by participants to navigate and access and/or exit four types of data-emergent childhood places: physical, mobile, digital, and representational. Participants indicated awareness of systemic surveillance and a parental preference to construct and preserve the innocent child. In response, participants strategically employ mundane daily practices, technologies, and peer-networks to access, widen and obscure the social, spatial (virtually and otherwise) and temporal scope of everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• mobility
• immigrant suburbs
• access
• tactics
• childhood places

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 752-2019-2221].