Making the journey to school: The gendered and generational aspects of risk in constructing everyday mobility

Abstract

In an increasingly mobile and risk-centred world, the focus of academic attention is often on global movements of people, commodities, wages, finance and information, and on global risks such as environmental deterioration, pandemics and terrorism (Beck 1992, Adams 1999, 2005, Urry 2000). However, everyday life, with everyday mobilities and everyday risk are more often the predominant concern of the majority of citizens in the West (Tulloch and Lupton 2003). This paper is situated at this more local level, aimed at understanding a microcosm of everyday life: the corporeal mobilities of the journey to school, drawing out broader implications for a society shaped by both risk and mobility. In particular, the discussion here follows on from Jenkins' (2006) paper on risk, parenting and young people in using socio-cultural theory to question the assumptions made about parental management of risks to their children and particularly theories of ‘paranoid parenting’ (Furedi 2001). It is argued here that it is localised everyday risk discourses, and their construction according to gender and generation, that are most significant in shaping mobility.