From cocooning to Skyping: An ethnographic study of young children's everyday mobilities in an English town

‘From cocooning to Skyping: an ethnographic study of mobilities in young children’s everyday lives in an English town’ posits the question of how the movements of people, objects, ideas, information and images through physical, virtual, communicative and imaginative means are practiced, experienced and represented by and in relation to young children, in a small English town that I will call Wishwell. This question involves identifying the manifold forms of mobilities that shaped young children’s lives in this particular location: from babies bodily movements and everyday trips within town, to journeys to other countries, cards and parcels sent and received through the post, and videoconferencing on Skype. It also involves tracing the varied places, people and things to which children were connected through these mobilities, and the discourses and representation of childhood and mobility that gave meaning to young children’s mobile experiences and practices. The research question acknowledges children as positioned in relation to phenomena beyond their immediate space of perception, but at the same time it highlights the necessity to empirically explore how these connections are made and experienced, rather than taking them for granted. Therefore, the ‘from’ and ‘to’ on this title do not denote a progressive and linear movement through life cycle stages. Instead, it highlights the diverse range of overlapping and interdependent means and scales of movement that I encountered

La espacialización de los cuidados. Entretejiendo relaciones de cuidado a través de la movilidad

Based on research taken place over the course of a decade by a collective group of researchers on the daily mobility practices as well as on care issues, we identified six categories that contribute to the spatialization of care from a relational spaces approach. Through mobile ethnographies of urban dwellers’ daily lives, we were able to understand how care strategies and circulations take place, and their relation with subjects of care, practices, time spaces, places, affects, materialities, and objects that support care in cities like Santiago, Concepción or Temuco. Understanding them from a perspective of relational space helps to visualize the complexity that care implies, and the intertwined implications of space that go beyond domestic space. This paper contributes to the existing work on invisible aspects of care including the spatialization of care and to the discussion on the need to defamiliarize and collectivize care in Chile. This is particularly relevant today, as care became a major issue in Chile and globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as it was possible to identify the material reality of care in tangible ways, and also to question the ways we want to care for ourselves and our living space in the future.A partir de una serie de investigaciones que han puesto el foco en la movilidad cotidiana de las personas y otras específicamente enfocadas al cuidado se han podido identificar categorías relevantes al momento de entender, desde los espacios relacionales evidenciados por la movilidad, las espacialidades del cuidado. Por medio de etnografías móviles, fue posible mostrar aquellas negociaciones, gestiones, objetos y espacios que permiten cuidar en la ciudad. Las categorías resultantes develan seis dimensiones: los sujetos de cuidados, sus prácticas, lugares, materialidades y objetos, temporalidades y afectos que sostienen los cuidados en ciudades como Santiago, Concepción o Temuco. Al entenderlos desde la perspectiva del espacio relacional, es posible visualizar la complejidad que implica cuidar y, al mismo tiempo, la necesidad de espacio que tienen, el que va más allá del espacio doméstico. Esta propuesta contribuye a la importancia de la espacialización de los cuidados al momento de pensar en formas de desfamiliarización y colectivización de los cuidados en general. Esto es particularmente relevante hoy, ya que la pandemia del COVID-19 relevó la realidad material de los cuidados de manera tangible, y nos instó, además, a replantearnos el cómo nos cuidaremos entre humanos y no humanos en el futuro