Divorcescapes: Family Conflicts and Children's Lived Spaces

ABSTRACT This article presents an analysis from a project that focuses on the entanglements that emerge between practices within the family law system and the everyday lives of children in conflictual family law cases. We position our analysis in critical childhood studies and zoom in on the social–spatial dimensions of children's everyday lives by exploring their lived spaces. We focus on what emerges as important for the children and explore how this is (not) reflected in either the family law case or the ultimate decisions. Inspired by the concept of foodscapes, we introduce a new concept, ‘divorcescapes’, to address the mundane spatial contexts of children's lives with separated parents. We also draw on Barad's agential realism and Ahmed's concepts of sticky and circulating emotions. Empirically, the research is based on 100 anonymous documents from child conversations, interviews, observations and documents from 32 family law cases. We find that the professionals and parents fail to acknowledge some of the spaces and relations that are essential to the child. Furthermore, we find that the image of what it means to be competent to participate—as well as discourses regarding divorce—results in the othering of the child together with sticky emotions of shame and powerlessness.