A coming into being, a coming undone: assembling care in the inner city

Abstract

This thesis is a qualitative case study of the everyday practices of six mothers and four fathers on parental leave in the inner city of Oslo. The thesis contributes to understanding the relations between care practices and urban space by articulating the friction of moving through the urban environment from the care-giving experience and it attends to the uncertainties that are actively inhabited in early parenting practices. By following along transitioning parents on parental leave in the inner city of Oslo, I trace artefacts, affects and agencies involved in care. I do so by considering the affordances of parenting artefacts such as prams, cribs and slings, asking what these objects offer the parents, as well as considering the subjectivities that emerge, by asking what these parenting artefacts do to the parents in turn. The thesis explores how becoming a parent is experienced simultaneously as a material transition, a mobility transition and a spatio-temporal transition, arguing that becoming a parent happens in part through engagements with the nonhuman. Thus, I draw humans and nonhumans together to provide richer accounts of the relationship between lifecourse, experience and geography, while also opening up new lines of thinking about whom cares in caring practices.