Paper short abstract:

Experiences of being, or having been, a school transport child is higlighted in this presentation. Our ambition is to highlight and discuss the continuous and contemporary construction of places and situated identities.

Paper long abstract:

Every day hundreds of thousands of children in Sweden are transported to and from school by bus, train, taxi, boat - not mentioning all children driven to school by their parents in different cooperative arrangements. Due to changes in society and the educational system new forms of school transports are developing and new groups of users are transported between varying social and cultural areas, bringing along radical challenges for the school.

During this daily transport social relations and borders are constructed, maintained and crossed. Different places - home, vehicle and school - takes shape and are transformed with specific and varying social and cultural meanings. During the mobility children take up and are given different positions, relate to each other, develop peer cultures and negotiate what is possible and not possible to do in this ongoing process where spaces, identities and narratives are constructed and transformed.

The presentation is part of an ongoing research project about the changing school transport in Sweden, what kind of school transport are used, by which groups of families to what kind of schools and its meaning both for the children and society in keeping and crossing social and ethnic segregation.

In this presentation our starting point is the experience of being, or having been, a school transport child. Experiences from children and adults of different ages are told through interviews. By using a narrative approach, our ambition is to highlight and discuss the continuous and contemporary construction of places and situated identities.