Thrown into and out of togetherness:Children’s experiences of living apart from, with and in multi-local families

• Main Author: Winther, Ida Wentzel
• Other Authors: Alasuutari, Maarit, Mustola, Marleena, Rutanen, Niina
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2021
• Subjects: Materiality,‘throwntogetherness’; ethnography; children; Greenland; Denmark
• Online Access: https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/publications/thrown-into-and-out-of-togetherness(843051cc-45d3-4a1e-8668-f3e7a2021a75).html; https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003024705

This chapter addresses the particularities of children’s experiences of living apart and/or living together with their family. Children live in a mixture of attachment and fragmentation, in a grid of more or less stable connections. They inhabit several sets of social relationships that are bodily settled, separate material worlds with each their rules and regulations. Families that do not share everyday life develop other ways to keep in contact, be close, and share sensations. Based on visual ethnography research in Dk and Greenland, I will show and clarify how shared and (dis)connected everyday life is established and dealt with in an everyday micro-level perspective. I want to invite the reader into the landscape of materiality, sensations and feelings where different kinds of movements happen. The chapter will fall in two parts: First, I will tie together a number of ways to understand entangled family, households, and materiality. After this I will introduce some analytical perspectives on sharing, focusing especially on Doreen Massey’s concept of throwntogetherness. In my analysis I will de-and reconstruct different way of being thrown ‘into’, ‘out in’, or ‘out of’ togetherness. The chapter addresses children’s experiences of living apart from, with and in multi-local families. Thus, the chapter considers children who move between places and alternate between home, households and material settings that change form and content depending on who resides there at any given time. Children are thrown into these circumstances, which they have to act on and navigate and in which materiality may function in different forms. To study the experiences of these children, the chapter applies the concept of ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005). Based on visual ethnography research in Denmark and Greenland, it shows how children are being thrown into and out of togetherness in different ways, with and without agency.