The Homework House’: Exploring the social organization of shared physical custody in Italy

Murru, Sarah
(2021) Exploring the potential of Institutional Ethnography. Experiences, reflections and new pathways from and for the European contex — Location: University of Antwerp

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  • Murru, Sarahorcid-logoUCLouvain
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Abstract
This paper presents new results that emerged from an innovative research grounded in a yearlong fieldwork in Turin, Italy, where I exchanged with 22 children living in JPC, aged 10 to 16. The data presented, as well as the creative methodological design that was put into place, comes from an ERC Starting Grant funded research project entitled MobileKids: Children in Multi-Local, Post-Separation Families (supervision, Prof. Laura Merla). The problematic is to understand how the lives of children are affected by divorce, mobility and multilocality in the context of shared custody arrangements, and how children accommodate to this family situation. Considering children as active social actors that can, to various extents, exercise agency and influence on their own lives as well as on the lives of the people surrounding them, while being constrained by institutions (James & Prout 1997, Sirota 2012), I look at the process of moving from one house to the other every week and ask how children maneuver inside this mobility. In this perspective, I look into the work that is done to move from one home to the other: what are the children in charge of, what resources or infrastructures are made available to them, what skills/competences do they have (had) to acquire, where is there coordination with the work of others (parents, siblings, etc.)? The overarching question being: how these children’s family practices are socially organized (what discourses/norms/ideologies shape them) and, especially, what role children play in this context?
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Murru, S. (2021). The Homework House’: Exploring the social organization of shared physical custody in Italy. Exploring the potential of Institutional Ethnography. Experiences, reflections and new pathways from and for the European contex, University of Antwerp. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/108302