Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the experience of Carla, a 12-year-old girl leading an apparent immobile life in a working-class neighbourhood in Barcelona. It shows that, by engaging in imagined/virtual mobility through storytelling and social media, children navigate adult-made, unwritten (im)mobility rules.

Paper long abstract:

Carla is twelve years old. Her life in a working-class neighbourhood in Barcelona is marked by adult-made, unwritten rules about moving and staying put. She lives with her dad and grandparents in a small flat that hardly ever leaves. Once a year, she visits her relatives in a rural village in northern Spain. Although she goes to school every day, she rarely plays on the street, let alone goes to the city centre. Most of Carla’s life occurs between the four walls of her room. There she challenges her apparent immobile situation by imagining luxurious trips to exotic places – about which she writes books and blog posts – and by exploring the word virtually through social media.

Carla is one of the participants in an ethnographic research on child (im)mobility in low-income areas in Barcelona, which incorporated a series of child-centred techniques. Drawing on her experience, this paper shows that informal (im)mobility rules toward children work as forms of domestic discipline and reveal underlying social inequalities. Yet children, conceived as active cultural producers, transgress such rules by engaging in imagined and virtual mobility. Their narratives and storytelling, as well as the increasingly digital lives they lead, illuminate their imaginaries of mobility, characterized by aspirations of upward social mobility and cosmopolitanism. Do these children really break the (im)mobility rules imposed on them or simply play with their grey zones? Are they empowered agents of change or just vulnerable subjects falling into a creative compliance with the social order?