ѴǸ’sMobile Kitchenette, thepandemic inducedvirtual replacement forthe little chats we usually have in the office kitchen, isfast becoming one of myfavouritefeatures of researching withinCeMoRe. It provides an opportunity for membersand affiliatesǴCeMoReto discuss their own research and provide helpful insight to others(something as a first year PhD student, I greatly appreciate)over a brew and some biscuits.
In the most recent kitchenette, which took place on 20thJanuary, Nicola Spurling and I led the discussion on children’s mobilities. A topic that we have both beenfocusingon in our own research, mine in my PhD research on children’s agency in climate change, and Nicola in her DecarboN8 project.
I began the session by discussing Sue Milne’s(2009)article,‘Moving into and through the public world: children’s perspectives on their encounters with adults’, in which children living in Scotland remarked on theirmobility through their local environment. The articlehighlightedthat as children moved through public space, they became aware oftheirperceived ‘childٲٳܲ’reflected in thetreatment they received from adults and their limited agency to participate and move through public spaces. This prompted insightful comments and recommendations for further research from participants including Colin Pooley, StephanieSoderoand Lynne Pearce, including a discussion surrounding children’s agentic mobilities andhow children’s constraints and freedomshave changedover time.This has prompted me to further investigate ideas of agentic mobility in reference to children’s involvement in climate changeand how imagined mobilities of power and agency can extend into the physical world. – proving the kitchenette to be both enjoyableandproductive!
NicolaintroducedBarkeret’s(2009)The Road Less Travelled, which forms the introduction to a special issue of Mobilities Journalfocusedon children’s mobilities.Thisarticleprovides a useful introduction to some of the key debates on children & young peoples’ mobility, and the key disciplines that have researched this topic to date. In particular, and for those new to the field of children’s mobilities, it highlights threekeyconceptualreframingsthat social scientists have contributed to psychological, deterministic and positivistic models of child development. Namely,contra ‘child development’ models there is no such thing as the universal child; contra traditional approaches, children should not beconceptualisedor treated as ‘future adults’, but rather understood as social agentsin their own right; andfinallythatchildhood is a social construction that is disproportionately shaped by adult expectations.The discussion ranged across how children and young people could and should be involved indecarbonisingmobilities, approaches to researching future mobilities,and the recognition that assumptions about ‘childhood’ and adult mobilities areproblematic, andcreateidealisedmobilities thatare byno meansexperienced or accessible acrosstheboard.
The next kitchenette will be taking place on 3rdMarch, focusing on mobilities and Art, facilitated by ManuBruggemann, please see theevent pagefor more information.
The referencesdiscussed in this blogpost are:
Milne, S. (2009). Moving into and through the public world: children’s perspectives on their encounters with adults.Mobilities. 4(1), 103-118.
Barker, J.,Kraftl, P., Horton, J. and Tucker, F. (2009) The Road Less Travelled? New Directions in Children’s and Young People’s Mobility,Mobilities,v.4:1, 1-10.
