Motherhood, mobility and materiality: Material entanglements, journey-making and the process of ‘becoming mother’

Abstract

This paper is about the entanglements or mutually affecting engagements with the material world that occur in the course of trying to becoming mobile with a small baby. Drawing on a rigorous empirical base of 37 interviews with 20 families in East London, we analyse the relationships between discourses of parenting and the material practices of journey-making. Bringing together conceptual work on the new materialism and mobility studies, we advance the concept of mother–baby assemblages as a way to understand mobile motherhood, and consider the emotional and affective dimensions of parenting in public that emerge through journey-making. We argue that the transition to motherhood occurs in part through entanglements with the more than human in the course of becoming mobile (including matter, affects, policies and built form). We further argue that approaching motherhood from the perspective of material entanglements advances geographical scholarship by deepening our understanding of mobility as a relational practice. Finally, we extend conceptual work in Geography as a whole by showing the utility of new materialist philosophy as a means for theorising identity.