Bracelets around their wrists, bracelets around their worlds: materialities and mobilities in (researching) young children's lives

ABSTRACT

While the study of children's everyday mobility has focused on school-aged children and their everyday corporeal movements, this paper – based on mobilities, new materialisms and post-human perspectives – suggests a move towards the study of mobilities in children's lives. This is an approach that considers all forms of movement involved in the everyday lives of children, not only the ones performed by them but also around, in relation to or towards them, by human and more-than-human others. Four ethnographic vignettes emerging from research in Chile and the UK explore some entanglements between different objects (an IPad, a pushchair and two bracelets) and young children to illustrate some of the interdependencies that characterise mobilities in children's lives. This approach can help us to understand (young) children's positioning in the world, considering their multi-scalar connections to unobserved/unperceived places and events.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s mobility
• mobilities
• materialities
• young children
• posthumanist approach

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on my presentation at the 6th Conference on Geographies of Children, Youth and Families, Universidade de Campinas, Brazil 2019. I am grateful to the organisers for the invitation and to all participants for their insights. I am also grateful to the children and families who participated in the studies referred here, to Lesley Murray for her insightful comments on a first draft of this article, and to the reviewers whose comments and suggestions gave a new angle to this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Although the concept of everyday life and everydayness is not discussed in this paper, it is worth clarifying that in relation to mobility/ies, it refers to the movements that constitute part of people's everyday lives rather than the more eventual or circumstantial movements that people may get involved in every few years or once in a life time. However, this does not imply a scalar assumption in terms of smaller or wider scales of movement, as wide scale mobilities can be part of some people's everydayness too, as we will see in this paper.