As a master student in London, I had the unique opportunity to join an international study of children’s representations of the public sphere.1 At the time, I remember being intrigued by how one could ‘access’ such representations especially since, in many cultures around the globe, the participation of children in the public sphere is either reduced or discouraged. The project was based on a triangulation of children’s drawings and stories about the world they live in and the way they experience it. When I had joined this research, data had already been collected from Germany, Mexico and Brazil. As a Romanian, I enthusiastically accepted to collect new drawings and stories from back home. I expected children not to engage with too much of the public world given a generalised distrust in others and fear about the dangers lurking outside the house, the gloomy legacy of decades of communism followed by years of hardships during the transition period.
What my research found was quite surprising.2 Romanian children aged 7 and 10 did depict in their drawings a lot of the world outside of their homes, even at the younger age. They portrayed the street, buildings, the park, banks, flowers, benches, garbage bins, the school, even ice cream trucks that don’t really exist in Romania but must have been seen in movies or books. This was unexpected because, in the other three countries, 7-year-olds especially focused on the family home, on parents, pets and the self. The self wasn’t present as much in drawings from back home, suggesting perhaps a lack of intersubjective bonds with and within public spaces. The outside world was there to be observed, walked through, shown to others, but not really interacted with—at least in pictorial depictions.
One of the most interesting findings came, however, from children placed in institutions of care. Each country included in the public sphere project didn’t treat culture, rightfully, as a homogenous environment. In fact, every country holds a myriad of cultural settings, each one with its own specificity and contribution to overall patterns. This is how, for example, it would have been misleading to assume that all Romanian children live similar lives or have the same experiences growing up. We had to pay attention to those factors that might impact their understanding and exploration of the outside world.
Growing up in an institution of care leaves a deep mark on one’s development and relationship to self, others and society. Romania has a particularly grim reputation in this area, considering the horrific video footage that emerged after 1989, reflecting what was happening with children in orphanages during communism. Malnourished, mistreated, left to die—these images shocked the world at the time. Conditions have certainly improved but, in any case, the reality of living in a care centre, as a child, is that both your mobility and accompanying sense of possibility can be severely reduced. The orphanage is halfway between an institution and a home, without ever being either of them.
One could see in these children’s drawings and constructions (because I added a task in which participants were asked to build their world from a set of toys and wooden blocks) the signs of restricted mobility. The institution and its playground were often depicted, as well as the family home which was either rarely visited or simply imagined by the child. Any opportunities to see other places, like going to the park or the seaside, were celebrated in colourful drawings. Unlike their counterparts growing up with their families, the presence of other friends or other family members at the orphanage was emphasised—those human contacts that made the place feel safe and familiar. Special moments in the year when they could see their parents, in case they were alive and willing to receive their visit, were also shown: the Easter holiday, the birthday party that either took place or was intensely desired, the place where the rest of the family lived.
It is heart-rending to talk to children growing up in an institution of care and to see their drawings, hear their stories and know that what they wanted most is a home. This is not to say that the institution itself was hated or made them feel unsafe. Many drawings and constructions focused on the life there and its small joys, like playing football with others in the yard or exchanging gifts. And many of them also illustrated the power of the imagination to transform difficult conditions through anticipation, hope and the desire for a different future. One of the constructions that I remember struck me the most belonged to a child who included a lot of people and several houses in it. When asked who those were, he identified himself and his brothers, living together at the centre. The adults in the construction were still them, years later, each one married, having their own children and their own homes. Moving away and moving on are, in this context, both examples of mobility and possibility. Especially when not every dream or hope can be realised, the fact that they can still be envisaged changes the self, the place and the everyday.
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The interest in mobilities is both old and new. We have always been fascinated by movement, our own, that of nature and of the universe. Our travelled trajectories helped us find other places and people, flee dangers, locate new resources, discover more of the world and marvel at it. The flow of water and currents of wind, the spread of fire and the occasional shaking of the earth guided our practices and inspired the first religions. The slow motion of celestial bodies and their intersections made us reflect on the connection to events happening on earth, to our destiny and place in the universe. In all these cases, movement didn’t only change the world, but changed us with it. As the pre-Socratic Heraclitus famously said, ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man’.3 Mobility means transformation, moving leads to becoming. But what we become exactly remains open and rests in the realm of possibility.4
It is important to note here though that the Heraclitan notion of Panta rhei or ‘everything flows’ was in contrast to the philosophy of other thinkers of the time, most notably Parmenides of Elea. For him, the true nature of things was immovable, eternal and unchanging. He is credited, for example, with saying that ‘whatever is is, and what is not cannot be’ and that ‘out of nothing, nothing can come’. In other words, existence is already complete and being reigns supreme, at the expense of becoming. In fact, it is our senses that trick us into believing everything is in movement and constantly changing; what Parmenides calls the way of opinion. If we were to use reason, we would notice the way of the truth: that reality, beneath it all, is one, uniform, necessary, timeless and static. No movement means seeing things more clearly, perhaps, but it also means no possibility.
While the recent surge of interest in mobility and everything associated with it claims its roots in the thought of Heraclitus rather than Parmenides, we should consider the deeper issues at stake here. These are the relationships between stability and change, mobility and immobility, possibility and impossibility. As any dialectic pair, the two ‘terms’ need each other. How could we even identify movement if nothing ever (seemed to) stand still? What would happen to change, if it couldn’t come out of stability and lead to another version of it, even if temporary? What possibilities out there emerge other than against a background of impossibility? There is, thus, an important place for immobility in the study of movement,5 for the impossible in our theories of the possible.6 More than this, increased movement and increased possibility are not always better or desirable. A teenager who has travelled with her family since birth and lived in six different countries already, might yearn for stability. The refugee escaping war would give anything not to have to leave. The child who is told in class that he can paint whatever he wants and given no guidelines, will miss such constraints on the possible. And then there are also those movements that lead us to danger and possibilities that, once explored, put us in trouble. There is, therefore, more to stability and constraints (and to Parmenides) than meets the eye.
Today, migration is one of the paradigmatic examples of human mobility even if, as we will see in this chapter and in this book, it is certainly not the only one. The 2020 World Migration report7 by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) ...