Under the Radar: Parental Traffic Safeguarding and Automobility

Arlene Tigar McLaren and Sylvia Parusel

Mobilities, 2012, vol. 7, issue 2, 211-232

Abstract: Research shows that parental mobility care of children has become a growing feature in many western cities, but parental traffic safeguarding has rarely been examined. Based on an ethnographic, comparative case study of two elementary (primary) schools located in Vancouver, Canada, this paper explores how auto-dominated urban environments intertwine with gender and other social inequalities to produce highly charged, variegated and contested parental safeguarding practices in the school journey. The paper also examines how parental traffic safeguarding is discursively and materially organized in relation to automobility and the social denial of its inherent dangers. Two themes (risky traffic spaces and parental traffic safeguarding strategies) illustrate the ways in which parents practice traffic safeguarding in specific contexts and how as part of domestic labour, their practices contribute to automobility and its illusion of safety.

Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.659465

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