Lesley Murray

Looking at and looking back: visualization in mobile research

This article discusses mobile and visual methodologies and the use of visual and mobile methods in the context of a study exploring the negotiation of risk on the journey to school. It sets out an epistemological approach that encompasses the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences and current debates on visual methods, arguing that ‘mobile’ and ‘visual’ methods are not only compatible, but often indivisible. This argument is developed through the researcher’s experience of using mobile and visual methods to explore the range of social, emotional and sensorial responses to mobile space. In particular, it is argued that methods that are both mobile and visual produce insights into everyday life experiences, especially of excluded groups such as children and young people, which are not available using more traditional methods.

Discourses of Mobility: Institutions, Everyday Lives and Embodiment

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.

Have Families Been Rethought? Ethic of Care, Family and 'Whole Family' Approaches

‘Whole family’ approaches to intervention and prevention have raised the profile of ‘family’ within social policy, where the family is constructed as a site of child care and protection, neglect and disadvantage. However, ‘family’ is a taken-for-granted and narrowly defined concept within policy documentation, and often used interchangeably with ‘parents’. This paper uses Sevenhuijsen’s (2003) ‘Trace’ approach to explore the use of the concept of ‘family’ across a number of interrelated social policy streams. The efficacy of familial approaches is considered through a feminist ethic of care approach that questions both gendered and generational assumptions about families in practice.

Ageing activists: who gets involved in older people's forums?

ABSTRACT Based on research with members of two Senior Citizens Forums in the South East of England, this article examines the biographies and motivations of those who get involved in such activities, with particular emphasis on (a) how they see themselves in relation to ‘other older people’ and (b) their relationships with the places in which they live. We address these issues in relation to the characterisation of participants in such forums as the ‘usual suspects’ whose legitimacy to speak on behalf of others may be questioned, and by reference to a growing recognition of the significance of place in the lives of older people. Whilst the locations of the two Forums studied are geographically close, culturally they are quite distinct and we identify important differences in motivations, backgrounds and priorities of forum members in the two places that are associated with these differences. Our research confirms that place-based participation tends to engage those who are fitter and who have more social and cultural capital, but questions assumptions that this means they are spaces for the pursuit of self-interest.

Contextualising and Mobilising Research

Most of the chapters in this collection are either predicated on, or make reference to, the value of mobile methods in researching in place or ‘being there’. This is a critical element of mobile methodologies that presuppose the centrality of mobility in everyday life and societal structures (Urry, 2000, 2007; Cresswell, 2006). This methodological approach, along with methods that best capture mobilities, are considered crucial in enhancing our knowledge of the world. An exploration of the notion of researching in place, in spatial context, can tell us about both these elements of mobile research. Firstly, being in place is always relative to another place. A specific spatial context can only be given meaning in relation to another, or to a space it is not. These spatial contexts are then linked by mobility, be it corporeal, visual, audial, imagined or virtual. Secondly, researching in situ requires consideration of the research methods that make this possible. It can both demonstrate the need for mobile methods as well as their application. This chapter is based on my research, which explored the mobilities of the school journey and involved consideration of the same research questions with a group of young people in different spatial contexts. In doing so this chapter describes the process, outcome and implications of research that is mobile, and involves a number of different spatial contexts.

Comparative mobilities in an unequal world: researching intersections of gender and generation

Abstract Mobilities are shaped by social inequalities and spatial unevenness as demonstrated in a range of existing studies across disciplines. These inequalities are manifest at different scales, from the very local spaces of everyday life to global spaces of accelerated mobilities. Mobile spaces, however distant, are connected through common everyday practices and the sociocultural contexts in which they are produced. In this paper, we argue that researching these interconnectivities and commonalities requires a particular methodological approach that accounts for the situatedness of experience. Our focus is on the ways in which inequalities according to gender and generation are generated through urban designed spaces. We suggest that drawing in to a shared material and ‘border’ object, the urban bench, provides a point of reflection on these distant yet parallel expressions of mobile inequality.

Deliberative Research for Deliberative Policy Making: Creating and Recreating Evidence in Transport Policy

Despite promotion of evidence-based policy responses, there remains a knowledge gap between policy-makers and academia particularly in transport policy making, which is steeped in positivist traditions. A number of social policy academics have conceptualised research utilisation in relation to particular elements of social policy, but less attention has been paid to the integration of deliberative and interpretative research into transport policy. This article explores this through a study of the journey to school that used mobile and visual methods in an in-depth exploration of this element of everyday life.

Rethinking Children's Independent Mobility: Revealing Cultures of Children's Agentic and Imaginative Mobilities through Emil and the Detectives

The concept of ‘children’s independent mobility’, which originates in a study carried out between 1971 and 1990 (Hillman et al. 1990), underpins much of the research on children’s mobilities. The study used particular criteria, based on parental determination of children’s abilities and freedoms, to construct a notion of independence. This article contributes to previous work in challenging the assumptions underlying this conceptualisation of independence and suggests a rethinking of children’s mobilities to more firmly incorporate children’s agency and imagination. It does so by firstly critically reviewing existing scholarship and secondly by engaging with an example of a fictional story, “Emil and the detectives”, which itself sets out to privilege both of these key aspects of children’s mobilities.

Reading the Mobile City Through Street Art: Belfast’s Murals

Visual representations populate the streetscapes of all cities, distinguishing different cities in different ways. Through decades of conflict, Belfast has become more resourced than most in visually articulating societal and spatial divisions. But as in all cities the impacts of division are highly uneven. ‘Public art’ in ‘culturally regenerated’ areas such as the Cathedral Quarter (McCarthy, 2006) responds more directly to global economics and trajectories of power, whilst more traditionally working class areas in east, west and north Belfast contain murals that are more reflective of local concerns. The murals in these parts of the city are often found on the ‘peace walls’ and other ‘interfaces’ that separate the communities of the two main cultural groups, marking out space as ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ to certain people at particular times, with mobility greatly restricted as a result (Shirlow, 2002). There is evidence (Shirlow, 2002; Shirlow and Murtagh, 2006; Shortt, 2007) that sectarianism is as deeply entrenched in Belfast as ever, with less integration than ten years ago, particularly among younger people. Belfast has become notorious for its manifest divisions of space and murals are a significant element of the street semiotics that become part of everyday life in the city. Their graphic stories produce mobilities.

Underground tales, overground lives: mobile work identities through to post-retirement

Although there has been recent attention given to the subject of mobile work, there has been less focus, within mobility studies, on the work of those who enable movement: the job of the transport worker. This article takes this incarnation of mobile workers as the basis for understanding the ways in which mobile work identities are pulled through into retirement. The article firstly proposes that transport workers, as movement enablers, have particular identities, and are an important and neglected topic of study within mobilities. Secondly, it suggests that the post-work identities of mobile workers are contingent on their experiences during their working lives and that these are particular to mobile work. The article is evidenced through data gathered during a mobile ethnographic study with two retired London Underground employees. The participants joined the researchers on a walking tour of a disused underground railway station in London, ‘Hidden London’, organised by the London Transport Museum and their experiences and emotional responses were recorded and analysed. Understanding post-work identities through the embodied and spatial experiences of the present, the research sought insights of the past and future; the continuity and fluidity of working identities that permeated through to post-work lives. This article argues that mobile work identities are specific identities that shape a distinct post-retirement identity.