The Road Less Travelled – New Directions in Children's and Young People's Mobility

This collection emerges from the intersection of two vibrant, dynamic and expanding academic endeavours. The papers are situated within ‘new’ social‐scientific studies of childhood and youth and also draw upon a burgeoning interest in mobility (for which this journal is clearly a cornerstone). This editorial essay provides an introduction to extant and prospective work at the intersection of these lines of enquiry, and has a twofold structure. First, we provide a sketch‐map of recent social‐scientific studies – especially those which have emerged from the academic sub‐discipline that has come to be termed ‘Children's Geographies’ – which have interrogated some of the manifold mobilities fundamental to younger people's lives. We argue, though, that much of this extant research concerning children's and young people's mobilities remains limited – both theoretically and empirically. So, second, we elaborate a number of ways in which intersections of mobilities and (young) age ought to pose significant questions for future research and enquiry regarding ‘mobility’, ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, and perhaps those very terms themselves. In so doing, we provide an introduction to the papers in this collection which – though dealing with diverse mobilities and locales, and though showcasing various conceptual and methodological inclinations and new directions – share a concern to take the road less travelled by attending to, and beginning to open out, such challenging, and potentially fruitful, questions.

Social‐scientific Studies of Childhood and Children's Geographies

Over the past decade, children and young people – and indeed the contested, culturally‐specific notions of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ themselves1 – have become increasingly important foci for the social sciences, but especially for sociologists, anthropologists and human geographers. From the early 1990s, ‘new’ approaches to the study of children sought to move beyond psychologists' deterministic, positivistic and medicalised models and ideals of child development (as unpacked by Aitken & Herman, 1997; James & James, 2004). Social scientists sought a reinvigorated understanding of children's lives, drawing upon three key assumptions.

First, that, contra developmental models, there was no such concept as a ‘universal’ child. Rather, children were differentiated by social categories and experiences such as class, gender, relative age, ethnicity and bodily dis/ability (James et al., 1998).

Second, that, contra traditional concepts of social agency and transitions, children should not be treated as future adults: adulthood should not be conceived as the end point in children's development. Rather, children could – empirically, politically, morally – be understood as social agents in their own right, in the here‐and‐now at a variety of spatial scales (Holloway & Valentine, 2000; Skelton, 2007). There followed a drive to support children's ‘voices’ and participation in research and, more broadly, in social processes (Matthews & Limb, 1999).

Third, that the idea and ideal of ‘childhood’ could be exposed as a social construction, an artefact of adult in(ter)vention in and of children's lifeworlds (Ariès, 1962). Social scientists broadly agree that childhood is not a natural or biological given, such that (adult) social expectations for childhood recursively shape the experiences of children (although see Conroy, 2007, for a critique).

Forming a recent sub‐discipline within human geography, children's geographers and geographers of young people have played a key role in exploring the spatiality of childhood and children's experiences (Matthews & Limb, 1999; McKendrick, 2000; Holloway & Valentine, 2000). Children's geographers have interrogated the role of place in diversifying children's and young people's experiences at a variety of cross‐cutting spatial scales, ages and contexts (Katz, 1993, 2004; Hörschelmann & Schaefer, 2007; Zeilig & Ansell, 2008). They have, furthermore, taken significant strides forward in exploring ideas about where children should (not) spend their time, whether in schools (Valentine, 2000; Kraftl, 2006), playgrounds (Woolley, 2008), urban spaces (Valentine, 1997; Collins & Kearns, 2005), rural spaces (Tucker, 2003; Leyshon, 2008), out‐of‐school care spaces (Smith & Barker, 2001) or other built environments (see Kraftl et al., 2007). In addition, geographers have explored how children's everyday spaces and their identities are co‐constitutive (Dwyer, 1999; Holloway et al., 2000; Beazley, 2003; Hopkins, 2006; Horton & Kraftl, 2006; Ansell & van Blerk, 2007)

However, despite interest both within the new mobilities paradigm and children's geographies, only a relatively small number of articles consider debates regarding children's and young people's mobility. For example, historically, key texts such as Ward's (1978) Child in the City began to raise the issue of how children move around in public space. Likewise, Hillman et al.'s now classic series of empirical studies in the UK and Germany in 1971 and 1990 (Hillman et al., 1990) brought much‐needed attention to the fact that children do indeed engage in mobility and travel, and, more significantly identified two key trends in children's travel which helped to shape much of the empirical focus of research in children's mobility over the following decade. Namely, that children's independent mobility was in decline (most notably for children under the age of 11) and that cars were increasingly used for children's travel. This forged the way for a wider number of empirical studies of children and young people's travel patterns across Western industralised countries which replicated Hillman's study and documented similar patterns of shifts in children's mobility, including those in countries such as Denmark (Fotel & Thomsen, 2004), Italy (Rissotto & Tonnucci, 2002), Sweden (Sandqvist, 2002) and New Zealand (Collins & Kearns, 2001). The then emerging social studies of childhood helped researchers to apprehend these changes in conceptual terms, analysing the reduction of children's mobility in terms of broader adult–child power relations and the growing use of cars and institutional mechanisms to travel to school (school buses, walking buses) as examples of broader surveillance (see Kearns & Collins, 2003).

These empirical studies were complemented by a growing body of evidence considering a broader variety of aspects of children, young people and mobility. The cultural turn in the social sciences spurred researchers to embrace diversity and difference. Extending their concern with young people's identities, children's geographers have begun to explore differences in the mobility experiences of children in minority and majority world countries (Punch, 2000; Katz, 2004; van Blerk, 2005), the role of place at a variety of spatial scales in differentiating children's day‐to‐day patterns of mobility and experiences of migration (van Blerk & Ansell, 2006), and the increasing spatial restriction of children in Western contexts (Pain, 2003, 2006). Research undertaken in different countries in Africa has been particularly important in expanding conceptualisations of children and mobility. As well as engaging in personal mobility, children in developing countries also often play a significant role in carrying and moving goods, food and water (Porter, 2002), questioning Western assumptions that debates about children's mobility relate solely to personal travel. In the context of India, Lolichen et al. (2006) used children's individual ‘transport profiles’ as one route to engendering children's participation in research about mobilities and resource availability in rural areas. They argue that children were not only empowered by learning new skills directly related to their personal mobilities; they also gained confidence in more sophisticated skills such as information management and communication. Elsewhere, Gough & Franch (2005) examine the relationship between young people's ‘socio‐spatial mobility’ and corresponding social exclusions (and inclusions) in low‐ to middle‐income areas of Recife, Brazil.

An increasingly nuanced mapping of the diversity of children's mobility has also been accomplished through other work which has explored differences at other spatial scales. Place is also significant as children's spatial mobility is influenced by location, including the social and physical characteristics of the neighbourhood (Valentine, 1997; Tranter & Pawson, 2001; Ross, 2002). Although powerful sets of ideological and symbolic representations construct rural childhoods as growing up in a natural environment with unlimited access to the countryside (Philo, 1992; Jones, 2000; Tucker & Matthews, 2001), children's experiences often contrast sharply, indicating that the countryside is increasingly inaccessible to them, and many rural children often have less independent spatial mobility than their urban counterparts (Matthews et al., 2000a; Kloep et al., 2003).

Research in Western industrialised countries has highlighted that children from lower social class families are less likely to have space to play at home, and are often more likely to spend time unsupervised outdoors (Matthews, 1992). Conversely, affluent children often experience very different childhoods, living in more wealthy localities, and participating in more institutionalised and commodified leisure activities (Frønes et al., 2000; Smith & Barker, 2001). Children from higher social class families often have less independent spatial mobility, with higher levels of adult‐escorted spatial mobility – although such children often succeed in subverting adult‐imposed rules (Jones & Bradshaw, 2000; Tranter & Pawson, 2001; Barker, 2003; Mackett et al., 2004).

Gender has also been shown to be a significant category differentiating the mobility experiences of children and young people. Until recently, in the UK, boys were seen to have greater levels of independent spatial mobility than girls (Valentine, 1996; Matthews et al., 2000b), although more recent research has found no significant gendered differences in children's spatial mobility, as both boys and girls are increasingly escorted in the UK until the transition to secondary school (Jones & Bradshaw, 2000; Ross, 2002; Thomson & Philo, 2004). Research has also explored gendered mobility patterns in other parts of the world, including showing how girls' and boys' mobility are influenced by differing household and economic responsibilities (Punch, 2000; Porter, 2002).

Social‐scientific approaches – principally in the guise of children's geographies – represent the predominant theoretical lens through which much of this important work about children's mobilities has been viewed. More recently, a small but growing number of authors have drawn upon the new mobilities paradigm to consider and analyse children's mobility. For example, Fotel & Thompson (2004) and Laurier et al. (2008) have begun to consider how broader theoretical debates regarding automobility can be applied to children. However, that only one paper from the first three volumes of Mobilities (Laurier et al., 2008) specifically considers children and young people suggests that children's mobility has not been mainstreamed into the new mobilities paradigm.

Nevertheless, the above review indicates that research on children's and young people's mobilities is a vibrant, burgeoning interest. Hence it was timely that at the international New Directions in Children's Geographies conference, held at the University of Northampton in September 2006, a number of papers considered different aspects of children's mobility. This special issue presents a selection of those papers in an attempt to consolidate and develop research on children's and young people's mobilities – and to make this research available to new audiences.

Mobile Childhoods, Young People's Mobilities: the Papers in this Special Issue

As a whole, this collection of papers interrogates diverse aspects of children's and young people's mobility, at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Taking a specifically geographical approach to children's mobility, the authors explore international variations in young people's everyday mobilities, making sense of contemporary trends in the UK, Palestine, Germany, South Africa and Denmark. The papers consider children's experiences of contemporary everyday mobility spaces, such as cars, homes and public spaces. The papers also consider how young people of different ages experience and (to varying degrees) dictate their mobilities – from young children in car seats to students in Palestine. In so doing they extend theoretical, methodological and especially empirical discussions regarding children's mobilities. In previewing the papers, we want to suggest that – amongst much else besides – they open out three pertinent lines of enquiry that hinge upon the relationship between mobility and (young) age.

First, all of the papers reflect upon the co‐implication of age and mobility. This observation renders age more than simply a social structure or ‘factor’ in the production of mobilities (Horton & Kraftl, 2008, p. 285). Rather, age (young age) and mobility recursively produce one another in the course of young people's everyday lives. Thus the papers in this issue question and to some extent overcome a still‐unresolved tension between structure and agency in sociological accounts of both childhood and age (Hockey & James, 2003; Hunt, 2005). They do so by evoking and comparing ‘mobilities’ of two different, related registers. On the one hand, they uncover the literal, material movements that characterise children's and young people's use of everyday spaces. As John Barker highlights, parents' attitudes towards and practices around their offspring in cars enable youngsters to be configured as child car passengers – profoundly aged subjects whose experiences of car travel are de‐mobilised in particular ways. On the other, they bespeak the multiple temporal mobilities – and immobilities – that undergird particular lifecourse stages (compare Barker's focus on primary school children younger than 12, Mikkelsen's 10–13‐year‐olds, Harker's consideration of twentysomething students). Critically, those lifecourse stages are themselves dynamic – a reminder that the lifecourse itself is experienced as a shifting set of spatio‐temporal mobilities that are both literal and metaphoric, material and aged (Dodgshon, 2008). Age is not simply then, a ‘structuring’ social category that controls children's (im)mobilities (nor is the reverse true). Rather, age and mobility are constantly produced in and through the experiential plane(s) of everyday life. The papers in this issue critically interrogate concepts like ‘independent mobility’ (Miguel Mikkelsen & Pia Christensen) and ‘public worlds’ (Sue Milne) precisely through multiple meanings of being a ‘child’ and ‘growing up’. Furthermore, Christopher Harker's paper ably demonstrates how the lives of students in Palestine are striated by multiple material and figurative (im)mobilities whose rigidity may nevertheless be escaped by recourse to specific lifecourse opportunities made available by their educated‐and‐aged (in this case young adult) identities. Similarly, Matthew Benwell's paper articulates how historically enduring social relations and ideologies (such as apartheid) operate and are evoked at particular instances to complicate the explanatory power of ‘age’ in terms of children's mobility. Thus, it is our hope that the following set of papers should prompt renewed and broader reflection upon the importance of multiple, complex, dynamic co‐implications of (younger) age and mobility in other contexts: perhaps in relation to broader conceptualisations of urbanity and auto/mobility (Latham & McCormack, 2004; Featherstone et al., 2005), mobile materialities and popular culture (Lash & Lury, 2007), or mobility and identity (Morley, 2000).

Second, many of the papers demonstrate that an attention to mobility should refine social‐scientific understandings of discourses around ‘childhood’ and youth'. As Ruddick (2003) and Katz (2008) suggest, discourses around youth are becoming increasingly globalised and globally pernicious. Like Miles (2000), Ruddick (2003) suggests that notions of youthfulness are increasingly characteristic of Western consumer cultures and lifestyles for all ages. As the boundaries between young and old are purportedly becoming more blurred (Valentine, 2003), so the figure of ‘youth’ gains ideological, aesthetic and political‐economic pre‐eminence. Ruddick (2003) suggests youth is a key – but often hidden – tool for neo‐liberal global capital, exemplified by individualistic, self‐reflexive projections of identity (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992). There is, then, a key duality at play, wherein the self‐reflexive and flexible society (and identity) is also a youthful one. Ruddick highlights that the resources required in order to enact such flexible, youthful lifestyles are of course unevenly distributed. Critically, this duality (flexibility/youthfulness) also intimates multiple mobilities which remain under‐theorised. Put simply: flexible, youthful identities privilege certain kinds of mobilities, encompassed by opportunities as diverse as international travel, global communication, educational status and personal financial power (compare Hörschelmann & Schaefer, 2007). These identities and opportunities may reflect the global ideal of youth: yet the experience of (and beyond) this ideal is often very different.

The papers in this special issue therefore provide empirically‐grounded theorisations of the multiple, contextualised mobilities that both enliven and cross‐cut the ideal mobilities narrated by global discourses of youth. Situated in South Africa, Matthew Benwell's paper not only draws upon a ‘non‐Western’, majority world context, but presents a picture of children's mobilities that retains an ambivalent relationship with global discourses around youth. Whilst children growing up in post‐apartheid South Africa might in theory be subject to global processes of youth identification, children's experiences of their local neighbourhoods are still – in part – affected by their differential (i.e., racialised) positioning in respect of apartheid, as well as by the mobilities of non‐human agents such as domestic dogs. Elsewhere, John Barker highlights how car manufacturers design and market their products by making certain assumptions about the families – and children – who use them. He highlights how for some families, cars are becoming increasingly commodified spaces, configured around particular understandings of child safety and (youth‐orientated) family entertainment. Yet other families, who cannot afford such ‘child‐friendly’ cars, must rely on more ‘traditional’ technologies and practices in order to negotiate the car journey. Thus, it is our hope that the following papers will prompt reflection – beyond the specificities of their immediate milieu – regarding key contemporary discursive presences such as ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘mobility’ and the often intricate and powerful ways in which they are co‐related.

Third, each paper attends to the multiple modalities of control that surround children's mobilities. Social scientists have become increasingly concerned with (and about) the manipulation of mobilities, performances and emotions by what can loosely be termed ‘affective technologies’ and architectures (Connolly, 2002; Thrift, 2004; Adey, 2007, 2008; Kraftl & Adey, 2008). Drawing on Foucault, John Barker demonstrates how technologies of control are socio‐technical achievements: control is both in‐built in car design (such as car seats and child safety locks), whilst parents' embodied interactions with their children may mobilise and/or exceed the given materiality of car design. In the Danish context, and in distinction from previous work, Miguel Mikkelsen and Pia Christensen argue that both physical and social ‘environments’ were complicit in the patternings of children's mobilities in outdoor environments. Traditionally, ‘independent’ mobility assumes the absence of adults: yet by adopting a critical perspective on this term, Miguel Mikkelsen and Pia Christensen attend to the multiple other actors (friends, animals) and knowledges (about gender roles and ‘autonomy’) enrolled in the conditions of children's movement around outdoor spaces. Both Chris Harker and Matt Benwell highlight how significant political struggles are inscribed into landscapes such that young people's mobilities may be actively and/or tacitly manipulated by people and things populating those landscapes (such as border guards, barriers, accepted routes, cultural assumptions). Yet at other times, the significance of such political struggles recedes as young people negotiate the manifold other constraints/opportunities upon their mobilities. Christopher Harker reminds us how such conditions may create a ‘micropolitics’ of mobility and immobility (cf. Bissell, 2007, 2008; Harrison, 2008) that potentially impacts most forcefully upon the youngest (or younger) members of society.

Sue Milne's paper is similarly concerned with a micro‐politics of everyday life, attending to the small gestures and practices that constitute young people's public encounters with adults (cf. Tucker, 2003; also Laurier & Philo, 2006; Valentine, 2008). Significantly, she does not simply re‐iterate the kinds of im/mobilities experienced by young in public space that social scientists have acknowledged for some years (for instance, around risk). Rather, she demonstrates how encounters between im/mobile young people and adults are constitutive of the inter‐generational relations and age‐based categories upon which social (i.e., adult) control of young people are predicated. She extends her analysis to the ambiguous role of young people in discourses about ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’ cohesion. In these terms – as per our first point – age and mobility are co‐productive of one another, and of key concerns such as the conviviality of urban public spaces. Thus, it is our hope that the following papers will prompt renewed reflection – again, beyond each paper's own specific concern – on the presence and implications of childhood‐youth‐mobility (however combined) in contemporary processes of spatial (re)production, control and resistance.

In short, then, we suggest that the following collection should make several key demands of research and enquiry regarding childhood, youth and mobilities. Put bluntly: social studies of mobilities must – always, already – attend to the importance of age, ageing, and lines of aged difference which are part‐and‐parcel of so many mobilities. Conversely – as is rapidly becoming the case – social studies of childhood and youth must – always, already – acknowledge the manifold mobilities which complexly constitute them. More than this, though, the papers collected in this special issue offer glimpses of how much more can be learned about children and mobility when the two are considered together, and their commonplace co‐implicatedness is explored. The papers represent careful attempts to develop multiple understandings of how, when, why and where younger age and mobilities are co‐constitutive, and of much else besides. It is our hope, then, that the papers in this collection open out further lines of enquiry – both along the lines of our three observations above, and beyond – which take understandings of childhood, youth and mobilities on and elsewhere, along roads less travelled…

Notes

1. Children and young people form a large but difficult to define section of the population, as cultures and societies create different cultural, political and legal distinctions which demark childhood, youth and adulthood. Whilst the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as under the age of 18, in many Western contexts teenagers see themselves as young people rather than adults. In some African societies, individuals in their twenties and thirties may be seen as young people if unmarried.