Arlene Tigar McLaren

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee womens settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the womens accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mothers accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the womens talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.

Coercive Invitations: how young women in school make sense of mothering and waged labour

Abstract This paper examines the ways that young women take up powerfully institutionalised invitations about mothering and waged labour and relate them to notions about equal parenting, family structure, masculinity, femininity, the sexual division of labour and non‐parental childcare. It shows how the young women in this study articulate a range of often shifting discourses and strategies which help them to make sense of the options available to them. The findings suggest much movement and interweaving of discourses and contexts and even ‘signs of change’ but all within definite, circumscribed parameters.

‘Watching like a hawk’: gendered parenting in automobilized urban spaces

The growing interest in automobility theory and feminist perspectives on daily mobility points to the importance of considering parental mobility care of children. Hanson (2010, Gender, Place & Culture 17(1), 5–23) argues that feminists have long known that gender and mobility are bound together but have not sufficiently examined their contexts. The article extends this approach in its exploration of parental mobility care practices. It illustrates how automobility constructs disciplined parental practices to immobilize and safeguard children. Conversely, it shows how parental mobility care practices use, generate and resist automobility. These practices, the article argues, are deeply embedded within contexts of gender and automobility that (re)produce social inequalities. This analysis, which emerged out of our qualitative, interpretive approach, suggests new ways of thinking about automobility and parenting in relation to one another. The research is based on in-depth interviews with parents located in four urban areas in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Under the Radar: Parental Traffic Safeguarding and Automobility

Abstract Research shows that parental mobility care of children has become a growing feature in many western cities, but parental traffic safeguarding has rarely been examined. Based on an ethnographic, comparative case study of two elementary (primary) schools located in Vancouver, Canada, this paper explores how auto-dominated urban environments intertwine with gender and other social inequalities to produce highly charged, variegated and contested parental safeguarding practices in the school journey. The paper also examines how parental traffic safeguarding is discursively and materially organized in relation to automobility and the social denial of its inherent dangers. Two themes (risky traffic spaces and parental traffic safeguarding strategies) illustrate the ways in which parents practice traffic safeguarding in specific contexts and how as part of domestic labour, their practices contribute to automobility and its illusion of safety.

Parent–child mobility practices: revealing ‘cracks’ in the automobility system

ABSTRACT Many commentators are concerned about automobility’s ill-effects and seek a shift away from auto dependence towards more sustainable transport. Little research, however, considers the ways that parent–child mobilities are linked to such a transition. Through the lens of social practice theory, this paper explores how parents travelling with young children preserve and challenge automobility as they enact auto dependency, multimodality and altermobility. The paper argues that it is vital to understand these practices for identifying ‘cracks’ in automobility and the possibility of more sustainable and equitable daily mobilities. The research is based on qualitative parent interviews undertaken in Vancouver (British Columbia).