ABSTRACT
According to current sociological debates, due to expanding mobility requirements family is increasingly being done across space – with respect to multiple local daily life management and the construction of we-ness and belonging (see Schlinzig, 2017; Schier, 2016; Schneider and Collet, 2010). Starting from the perspective of an interpretive family sociology (see Gubrium and Holstein, 2009; Bösel, 1980), this paper takes the example of a qualitative multi-method research project on multi-local post-separation families to discuss practices of establishing and stabilising group cohesion, belonging, and family identity within shared residence arrangements where children regularly shuttle between their parents’ households. Data suggest that passive multi-locally living parents and their partners oscillate between creating a cross-spatial sense of commonness and belonging with reference to the other household on behalf of the active multi-locally living children, and at the same time applying territorialisation practices to promote a social order and family identity local to their particular household. In this they gain sovereignty over collective interpretations and practices. This includes communicative, spatial, personnel, material, and habitual closure processes. Children, however, face the challenge of merging both residential places and family nuclei into a coherent whole and simultaneously need to distinguish between different family sociotopes.
