Children living in shared custody arrangements: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging

This proposal focuses on multilocal families and more specifically on the lived experiences of children of separated parents, living between two fixed households (Gullov, Palludan, Winther, 2015). It is based on ongoing fieldwork conducted in Belgium with children aged 10 to 16 in the context of the ERC Starting Grant project “MobileKids”. In a comprehensive approach, I explore on the one hand, how the parents represent and design as more or less impermeable spatial, temporal and material contours of their respective dwellings. On the other hand, in response to these parents’ normative frameworks, I highlight how children construct their own reality by the study of the children’s multi-local way to inhabit (Morel-Brochet and Ortar, 2012). I focus on how children think and practice their various life spaces and how they appropriate their multi-residential situation as a way of life converting those spaces into one (dis)continuous meaningful and lived space (di Meo, 2012; Duchêne-Lacroix, 2013). In this purpose, I propose a preliminary typology of children’s way to inhabit multi-locally that includes their own representation of multi-locational configuration reflected through their belongings