Karina Luzia

Travelling in your backyard: the unfamiliar places of parenting

Current theoretical understandings of family-as-activity, as suggested by the terms ‘doing family’ or ‘families we choose’, locate family practices such as parenting, within the realm of the spatial. Feminist geography particularly has been instrumental in conceptualisations of parenting as a spatial project that involves constant renegotiation of the ‘everyday’ spaces of home, work and play. However, what are less evident in the literature are the specificities of the actual places and spaces of parenting: where parents go in the course of their parenting or how they actually use particular spaces. Furthermore, most scholarly work on parenting has been based on the theoretical and material experience of heterosexual parents, with the experiences of non-heterosexual parented families under-documented. Using data from a recent study with lesbian parents, this paper seeks to address some of these conceptual and empirical gaps, suggesting that an exploration of the everyday spatialities of same-sex parenting contributes, not only to expanding current geographic understandings of family and parenting, but also understanding of the material places where these identities—familial, parental, sexual—intersect.

Critical reflections on doctoral research and supervision in human geography : the 'PhD by publication'

Doctoral education is central to both the production of knowledge and the reproduction of disciplines—producing the next generation of researchers. This paper considers the doctoral and supervisory experiences associated with the ‘the PhD by publication’—in which a dissertation comprises a number of stand-alone ‘publishable’ papers, along with introductory and concluding overviews. Using the entry points of human geography and our experiences doing and supervising these PhDs, we provide a number of guidelines for human geographers, and illuminate the identity work involved in this specific process of producing scholars.

Day Care as Battleground: using moral panic to locate the front lines

Abstract While moral panic has been studied from a range of perspectives, much of this work underestimates its numerous spatial dimensions. Discussion of how place, space or location might inform a particular public moral crisis, or how moral panic is a phenomenon with significant socio-spatial causes and effects, has been left to those interested in how space and place inform social relations, to add a critical geographic perspective to moral panic analyses. Drawing on a recent episode of moral panic around a childcare centre in Sydney, this paper shows how moral panic can be used to locate the current sites of social change.

Growing Home: Reordering the Domestic Geographies of “Throwntogetherness”

ABSTRACT Using the concepts of “throwntogetherness” and disorder this article offers another perspective on the role of domestic disorder in making a family home. with original data generated within a qualitative research project with same-sex parented families in Sydney, Australia, the article considers some of the everyday ways parents “use disorder” to regulate and reconcile expectations of family life with lived reality, as materialized through reconfiguring existing home spaces. At the same time, the discussion fills in some empirical gaps in contemporary geographies of family by presenting some family home cultures that remain underrepresented in the empirical work on home and family: the domestic, everyday routines, and rhythms of same-sex parented families.

‘Beautiful but tough terrain’: the uneasy geographies of same-sex parenting

To date, many geographical analyses on and around family have relied on heteronormative social constructions and expectations of parenting within a nuclear family. There is, thus, considerable scope to investigate the geographies of those who are parenting outside heteronormative relationships; first to broaden this relatively limited understanding of contemporary geographies of family and, second, to recognise how some families must actively negotiate their ‘fit’ into material and symbolic space, primarily shaped for and by heterosexual parented families. Drawing on a research project that examined geographies of parenting from the perspective of 19 female same-sex parented families, this paper focuses on some of the ways these families negotiate their ‘fit’ (or otherwise) into spaces of parenting, and how such negotiations can be complex, even awkward. Focusing on Australian families and family geographies, this paper also shows how recent shifts in federal and state policy and legislation on families and parenting impact these ‘uneasy’ geographies of those parenting within same-sex relationships, adding complexity to already-challenging situations concerning the status and recognition of same-sex parented families.

Present Absences: Hidden Geographies of Lesbian Parenting

Recent geographical scholarship emerging from the UK and the US on the diverse queer/questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, transgender/ transsexual, bisexual, asexual and gay, or ‘quiltbag’1 identities and communities has drawn attention, both to the theoretical perspectives that ignore lived experiences of certain sexual subjects, and to the invisibilities in empirical research into the everyday realities of identifying as queer2 (Brown, 2008; Gabb, 2005; Taylor, 2008, Valentine, 2008). This body of work intersects with another within the social sciences, that argues that the complexities and diversity of ‘queer’ life — that is, other than urban, white, middle-class and able-bodied gay men and lesbians in Western, neoliberal, industrialised societies — are under-represented (Bell and Binnie, 2004; Duggan, 2002; Puar, 2006; Taylor, 2008, 2009). This chapter draws on this knowledge work around sexuality, everyday life and space to highlight some ‘queer absences’ that become apparent at such junctions; namely, knowledge of everyday ‘quiltbag’ family3 life outside the UK, European and US context, and specifically, the everyday socio-spatialities of women parenting together4 in Australia.