Navigating Fragmented Infrastructures of Care: Children’s Sense of Home in Residential Education

Abstract

Residential education often both challenges and reinforces the norms and systems supporting children and young people’s need for homely environments. In this context, studies on pupils’ sense of home when attending residential schools provide a ground for exploring broader infrastructures of care available to them as they move through different spaces. Drawing on autoethnography, life-story interviews, and semi-structured interviews, we illustrate how, for children within the Latvian residential school system, homeliness may be found at a relative’s apartment, school bus or youth center affected by how each of the spaces relates to children’s safety and control, privacy, community, identity, everyday life, and time. While normative discourses remain fixated on home as a family space where infrastructures of care can be limited, but educational settings emphasize control as a measure for safety without being attentive to peer-to-peer relationships, children’s agency in achieving a sense of homeliness becomes fragmented and stronger in some places more than others.

Keywords

• home
• alternative care
• residential education
• care
• infrastructure
• agency