Mobile Everything
This paper contributes to theoretical explorations of mobile lifestyles by proposing the related concepts of “lifestyle convergence” and “lifestyle as distinction.” In developing this conceptual framework, the paper draws on the example of worldschooling, a mobile lifestyle in which middle-class parents from the Global North take their children out of conventional schooling and educate them while traveling the world. Like other mobile lifestyle adherents, worldschoolers are on a quest for the “good life,” a way of living that they equate with mobility, freedom, and autonomy. This quest constitutes a form of lifestyle convergence in which ways of living, i.e. the embodied, everyday practices of families’ journeys, intertwine with a style of life, i.e. the aesthetic aspirations associated with mobility. At the same time, it is argued that lifestyle convergence can also reproduce social hierarchies that enable middle-class families from the Global North to leverage their existing privilege and accrue new forms of digital, network, and cosmopolitan capital. In this sense, mobile lifestyles can also operate as a form of class distinction. These outcomes are not unique to worldschooling families, however, and the paper proposes the framework of convergence and distinction as a framework for understanding the complex desires and inequalities that characterize mobile lifestyles more broadly.