Liquid lives – Blurred boundaries: Working from home and the transport practices of parents

Abstract

In some sectors and settings, the ability to work from home is increasingly common. The way this ability is experienced, and its impact on socio-spatial ordering, is shaped by context. In this piece, we use parenting as one particular context to explore the impact of working from home on day-to-day travel in a car-dependent setting. We intentionally seek out the complexity of mundane family life to ground Bauman’s concept of liquidity by demonstrating its embodiment through families working from home. We use in-depth interviews with 30 parents in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, to examine the way the experience of working from home are filtered through the lens of caring for children and onto ways of being mobile day-to-day. We propose that working from home intensifies the complexity of the spatialities, temporalities and emotional landscapes of the parenting task. This intensification is absorbed by families as flexibility, which appeals to parents. This is likely to perpetuate reliance on autonomous modes of mobility for families, namely, the private car, who use cars to order complexity and enact flexibility. We conclude that working from home sustains and augments liquid lives in myriad ways, including the mundane organisation of family life and ways of travelling in cities.