Activity event connections and life-course transitions: Altered material arrangements and activity coordination across mobility and food practices

Life-course transitions (major life-events, such as becoming a parent and moving home) have been identified as moments of opportunity to reset automated human activities in ways that foster socially desirable outcomes (such as more sustainable practices). Numerous intervention studies that seek to nudge automaticity into reflexivity have been trialed with mixed empirical results. Social practice theory, by contrast, considers habits (and routines) as empirical observations of continuously reproduced performances of social practices. Studies framed within this perspective reveal that life-course transitions are often multiple and intersecting (e.g. people often move home, change jobs or have children simultaneously), that experiences vary across social groups, and that it is material settings that frame any alterations in the ways in which practices are performed. Focusing on mobility and food practices, interviews conducted with Danish households before and after moving home were analysed using Schatzki’s (2019) concepts of activity events and chains to examine the ways in which food and mobility activities are coordinated and connected with a diverse range of practices. Our findings demonstrate that altered material arrangements (of infrastructures, local services and homes) created diverse challenges for activity event coordination. General patterns of mobility and food practices were not radically changed during home transitions, but dynamic forms of coordination within activity chains were necessary to hold practices together in familiar ways. We argue that activity event coordination reveals the dynamic stabilization of social practices and, together with altered material arrangements, should represent the focal point for approaches that seek to reconfigure practices towards socially desirable outcomes.