Storying the Mobilities of Childhoods Lived across Homes

Storying is a way of making sense of the social world and underpins much of sociological inquiry, yet it is often neglected as a methodological tool. In this paper we place storying centre stage as a means through which the mobilities of childhood can be uncovered. More precisely we are concerned here with the children routinely moving between homes due to the physical separation of their parents or carers. The meaning of home in this context has received some attention and from a storying perspective. For example, Walsh (2019), explored representations of home, in the context of separation, in a range of ‘therapeutic’ picture books aimed at 3–8-year-olds, emphasising their importance in determining normative or counter-normative imaginaries of everyday spaces. However, there is less focus on the liminality of the between space – in which children are varyingly immobilised. This mobile space is determined through intersection of cultures, politics, law and materialities that operate on multiple scales. In seeking further understanding of this mobile space and its cultural production, we embarked on a transdisciplinary project that brings together sociologists and creative writers. We firstly examined accounts of separation in children’s fiction across cultures as well as stories written by children on forums such as Voices in the middle, a website encouraging children and young people to share their stories of family separation. The second stage of the project is to invite children and young people to workshops in which they create collaborative stories of moving between homes. In this paper we reflect on a range of methodological issues, including narrative analysis in social research; the ethics of storying; issues of empowerment through collaboration; and the validity of remembering childhood, given debates on the ‘unbridgeability’ between adult and adult as child (Philo 2003, Jones 2003).