Updates
The project team hosted the latest advisory group workshop on 11 September, bringing together our project partners and academic advisors at St Anne’s college in Oxford. We shared updates on recent project activities, including the family day out at Thomley, and heard reflections from Swindon SEND families Voices’ parent-representatives who had joined us on the day. Partners from SENDIASS Oxfordshire, Living Street, and Liminal Space also contributed insights from their ongoing work with families and communities.
The workshop offered a space for open dialogue and discussions, helping to ensure the project remains guided by a collective set of shared priorities. Conversations touched on current research activities, as well as initial plans for engagement and impact in the upcoming months.
1 August 2025
As part of our project, we hosted a family day out on 28th of July at Thomley, an inclusive facility for people of all abilities. Fifteen families who have previously taken part in our research activities joined us from Oxford and Swindon. Among them were parent-representatives from our partner organisation in Swindon, who also came along with their families.
The safe and supportive environment of Thomley offered families the opportunity to enjoy and explore accessible facilities and activities at their own pace. Alongside this, we ran light-touch, playful activities that opened up conversations with parents, carers, and children about their daily journeys and experiences of getting around their local areas. Overall, the day fostered a space for meaningful and joyful encounters, and supported a sense of community among families, partners and the project team members.
On the 29th of August, our project presented two papers at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) annual conference. In a session titled ‘Caring on the Move’, Haifa Alarasi shared early findings that highlighted often overlooked care practices within both everyday mobility and research processes.
In another session, ‘Geographies of Attention’, Anna Plyushteva drew on interviews with families to explore how digital devices are negotiated in everyday care practices. The paper reflected on how parents, carers, and children use devices to cultivate or redirect attention, and how these delicate relationalities are shaped by wider discourses on neurodivergence, focus, and distractibility.
Together, the presentations situated our work within wider academic debates on mobility, care, attention, and family life.
Our research team submitted written evidence to the House of Lords Committee inquiry into the Autism Act 2009. The submission responded to the Committee’s recent call for evidence, aimed at assessing the impact of the Act and identifying areas where further policy development is needed.
Responding to three particular areas in the call including: government priorities to improve autistic people’s lives; public understanding and acceptance; and education and transition to adulthood, our submission drew attention to the particular challenges faced by families while navigating their daily transport and mobility needs.
More information can be found here.
On 19 June 2025, project team members participated in the Families on the Move: The Geographies of Intergenerational Mobilities symposium at Manchester Metropolitan University. Supported by the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group (GCYFRG) and organised by Dr. Samantha Wilkinson, Dr. Catherine Wilkinson and Dr. Louise Platt, the one-day event featured four panels and fostered rich interdisciplinary dialogue on the experiences, challenges and meanings attached to different mobilities including school commutes, leisure skating and wheeling, migration, and holidaying.
Drawing on methodological and empirical findings from our ongoing fieldwork, our presentation offered a space to reflect on often overlooked care practices in both mobilities and research.
The Care on the Move project team held the third Steering Group meeting at St Anne's College, Oxford. Representatives of Swindon SEND Families Voice, SENDIASS Oxfordshire, and Living Streets gave us invaluable feedback on project activities to date, with an academic perspective provided by colleagues from the Universities of Birmingham, Oxford, Southampton, and Westminster. We are now drawing on these insights while preparing the next phase of data collection and analysis.
Responding to a call for evidence on Active Travel and Social Justice inquiry issued by The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Cycling and Walking, a brief report was prepared and submitted by the project team members in mid-December. Addressing the call's specific inquiry on initiatives aimed at widening participation in active travel, the brief highlighted the project's ongoing engagement with families, community organisations, and policy-makers, in order to inform active travel policies which better reflect the needs of children with SEN and non-visible disabilities.
On the 29th of August, the project team members convened two consecutive sessions at the Royal Geographic Association (RGS-IBG) Annual International conference. Titled ' Everyday Cartographies of Care', the sessions explored the diverse ways in which cartographies of care are brought into being by actors across multiple contexts. Sponsored by The Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group, the session brought together fourteen papers, including presentations from the 'Care on the Move' project as well as Daniel Muñoz's independent work. The discussions offered a range of viewpoints on care from perspectives spanning numerous theoretical and methodological orientations, and geographies. Well-attended, the sessions offered a generative dialogue and a collective reflection opportunity on care as a grounded practice enmeshed with uncertainties. Currently, the project team is working on a publication with some of the participants in the sessions, bringing together perspectives on provisions and mappings of care from different geographic contexts and academic disciplines.
