A multilocal way of life : the case of children living in equal shared parenting agreements
(2018) International conference on shared parenting - « Shared parenting, social justice and children’s right » — Location: Strasbourg (22.November.2018)
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- Abstract
- Since the 1960s, the definition of the family has changed greatly. From the nuclear family, immobile and sedentary, associated with a single place of residence, we move on to a wider and more mobile family associated with different places of residence (Widmer and al., 2008). In this context, new forms of “doing family” (Morgan, 2005) are emerging. In this paper, we will present the preliminary results of our ongoing research ERC Starting Grant project “MobileKids: children in multi-local, post-separation families”. This project aims to grasp the standpoint of children living under equal shared parenting agreements by considering them as active social actors (James and Prout, 1997; Gullov and al., 2015). The fieldwork is taking place in Belgium, France and Italy with children aged between 10 to 16. We develop a set of participatory and visual methods, as the Socio-Spatial Network Game (Schier, 2015), that will allow us to explore their everyday life inbetween two households. We will more specifically focus on one central dimension of our project : how these children define or construct a sense of “home” in a context of circular mobility ? How these children, for whom their different living spaces are fragmented and multiplied, establish potentially links as well as discontinuities between them, what represent here, there and the in- between for them, how an “archipélisation” of these different life spaces is created (Duchêne-Lacroix, 2010). We will highlight different strategies, tactics and daily practices that children would develop to deal with these absences and presences and to establish links as well as ruptures inside these spaces (Schier and al., 2015; Winther, 2015). We will address various daily practices understood as tactics expressed through materiality (for example, by leaving a spatial mark in each house), communication (for example, by maintaining contacts – or not - when the child lives in the other house), attitude (for example, by acting differently in co- presence of his/her two parents) and representation (for example, by considering her or himself as the central link in the chain that connects the whole) to demonstrate how children transform their various “life spaces” into a single “lived space”. Their various “life spaces” are embedded in intimate networks that form a coherent whole that combines spatial representations and frames (di Meo, 2012). Beside our empirical and theorical fieldwork results, we also want to discuss our research methodology and share our reflexions about the recruitment‘s process.
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Nobels, B., & Baar, M. (2018). A multilocal way of life : the case of children living in equal shared parenting agreements. International conference on shared parenting - « Shared parenting, social justice and children’s right », Strasbourg. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/51538