Children's Experience of Mobility in Post-Separation Families: Intimacy, Home and Journeying

Living within post-separation families is an increasingly common experience for children within the UK, as Relate estimate that a third of British children will be affected by parental separation before the age of 16. As many of these children work to maintain contact with both parents, at times across large-distances, mobility becomes a central dynamic in the spatio-temporal organisation of their family life; leading many children to make significant journeys on a regular basis as part of their two-home domestic routine. Using a combination of in-depth interviews and participatory visual methods, my PhD will explore children's own experiences these challenging periods of transition. Taking journeying to encompass moments of preparing, leaving, travelling and arriving, the research will explore the varying spatial, material and temporal configurations of these journeys and children's emotional and affectual experiences of them. Thus, asking questions of the ways in which this journeying shapes, and is shaped by, children's relationships with their family members, their home-making practices, and the degree and forms of agency they are able to exercise. The PhD will, therefore, draw new connections between literature on mobility, the family, critical geographies of the home and children's geographies.