Family and Intimate Mobilities

This book explores the many varied ways in which family and intimate lives are realized through mobility: from leaving home, courtship, relationship breakdown, moving house, commuting, family holidays through to children's mobilities, documenting how mobility creates, sustains and dissolves family and intimate relations.

It is a commonly-voiced opinion that opportunities for mobility undermine family in modern industrialized societies. Family and Intimate Mobilities challenges this assumption. Drawing on theoretical developments in mobilities, family practices and personal life and empirical studies of both individuals and families on the move, the book develops a more integrated approach to family mobility. This account considers how individual mobility over the life course is bound up with the formation and dissolving of intimate mobilities as well as how collective forms of mobility, from moving house, going on holiday and the school run, also sustain family life. The book considers how mobility is not just about bringing people together but how it also allows for time apart. Yet not all mobility is realized or chosen, and intimate mobilities can either be forced or entered into out of sense of obligation. In rejecting the assumption that mobility necessarily undermines family life, the book also resists any attempt to provide a grand narrative of social change of family mobility, but foregrounds the diversity of family practices and mobility.