Making the journey to school: The gendered and generational aspects of risk in constructing everyday mobility

Abstract

In an increasingly mobile and risk-centred world, the focus of academic attention is often on global movements of people, commodities, wages, finance and information, and on global risks such as environmental deterioration, pandemics and terrorism (Beck 1992, Adams 1999, 2005, Urry 2000). However, everyday life, with everyday mobilities and everyday risk are more often the predominant concern of the majority of citizens in the West (Tulloch and Lupton 2003). This paper is situated at this more local level, aimed at understanding a microcosm of everyday life: the corporeal mobilities of the journey to school, drawing out broader implications for a society shaped by both risk and mobility. In particular, the discussion here follows on from Jenkins' (2006) paper on risk, parenting and young people in using socio-cultural theory to question the assumptions made about parental management of risks to their children and particularly theories of ‘paranoid parenting’ (Furedi 2001). It is argued here that it is localised everyday risk discourses, and their construction according to gender and generation, that are most significant in shaping mobility.

Keywords:

• risk
• risk perception
• travel to school
• mobility
• gender
• generations

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this research (ESRC postdoctoral fellowship award number PTA-026-27-1554).

Notes

1. These usually took place a few days after the young people filmed their journey to enable the transference of footage onto a tape or DVD.

2. Nostalgia is defined here as an idealised vision of the past, in this instance, of childhood.

3. This is referring to the murder of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Soham in 2002.

4. This is referring to the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne in West Sussex in 2000.

5. This is referring to the murder of 12-year-old Keith Lyon in 1967 (BBC 2006).