This article presents findings from a qualitative research project on the environmental experiences of trans-European migrants, drawing on conversational interviews with young people who have moved to Britain over recent years from the new European Union Member States in Eastern Europe. It explores these migrants’ practical and emotional relationships with physical (and media) environments, also drawing on the literature of phenomenological geography, in which there is a helpful concern with environmental experiences and associated senses of place. Such experiences and perceptions are not usually objects of reflection in day-to-day social circumstances, precisely because of their routine, familiar and taken-for-granted character. However, transnational migration can bring a profound disturbance of lifeworlds, throwing senses of place into sharp relief. Therefore, a major theme of this article is the close connection between matters of migration and those of place-making in daily living.
connections between former and new (sometimes temporary) homelands. The role of media, in particular satellite television, has been studied in the * Email: m.metykova@gold.ac.uk 2 transnational context. However, satellite broadcasting has not been embraced by migrants from EU8 countries to any extent, rather they rely on a range of media and practices that enable them to be connected to two or more national contexts. Migrants interviewed for this research have proved to be avid and highly skilled users of digital media in particular, they access newspapers, magazines and films online, use Skype to make calls, post photographs on social networking sites and even check online images of their home towns in Transnational media uses have been explored in studies on diasporic media, migration and multiculturalism (Georgiou, 2004;Aksoy and Robins, 2003;Christiansen, 2004). The central tenet of studies on diasporic media is that migrants (immigrants, ethnic minorities) maintain a sense of belonging to an original homeland and negotiate that with belonging to a new 'host' country which has its different majority (national) community (Georgiou, 2007). The consumption of transnational media contents is understood primarily as a means of constructing an ethnic identity based on the identification with the national group of the original homeland. Even the 4 terms 'homeland' and 'host country' used in such studies suggest that migrants are bound to maintain an identity shared with the national group of -what is termed in a rather neutral way -the country of origin while residing as guests in a 'host' country. This conceptual framework is seriously flawed, it involves 'techniques associated with describing a bounded national container society' (Wimmer&Glick Schiller, 2002, p.324). Such an approach, argue Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, encompasses a culture, a polity, an economy and a bounded social group. … Almost no thought was given to why the boundaries of the container society are drawn as they are and what consequences follow from this methodological limitation of the analytical horizon -thus removing transborder connections and processes from the picture (ibid, p.307).In her overview of the theoretical and empirical groundings of research on diaspora and media Myria Georgiou (2007, see also Aksoy&Robins, 2002, pp.368-374 for a critique of diasporic media studies) acknowledges that a number of these studies are characterized by methodological nationalism -they understand the national frame as the most important one for studying these phenomena Researching everyday life poses a number of theoretical and methodological questions. In this article I do not discuss conceptual issues related to everyday life rather I understand it very generally in terms of routines and habits that our interviewees recalled. The recollection of these mundane everyday practices and their critical assessment involve particular challenges, 'everyday life is synonymous with the habitual, the ordinary, the mundane, yet it is also strangel...
The article deals with changes in the journalistic profession and journalistic practices in the early 2000s in three new European Union member states: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. It can be argued that Eastern European journalists face changes and challenges related to the ‘proletarization’ of journalistic work, commercial pressures, and ‘dumbing down’ as well as changing work practices related to new technologies. Yet they face these changes in the specific context of post-communist societies where the links between media and politicians often directly influence the professional practices and standards of journalists. We concentrate on developments in these three countries in relation to three areas: 1) dominant values in the journalistic profession and their change in the past 10 years; 2) influence of structures of ownership and market forces on practices and processes of journalism, and 3) influence of technological changes on journalistic practices and processes.
In this article, we follow a lead in Roger Silverstone's work by engaging critically with the writings of human geographers who have drawn on phenomenology in their attempts to understand environmental perception and senses of place. A distinctive feature of the approach that these geographers developed was its focus on the ordinary doings and feelings involved in place-making. We highlight a series of concepts that are found in their writings and we apply those key concepts in a discussion of some qualitative empirical research on trans-European migration. Our project has been concerned with the practices and experiences of contemporary migrants, including their routine uses of communication technologies in everyday living. With reference to data from lengthy conversational interviews, we pay particular attention to matters of dwelling or habitation, and to these migrants' knowing how to get around-as well as their being out of place-in physical and media environments.The research discussed in our article arises out of an interest in questions of place, in asking how best to conceptualize place and how best to investigate it empirically. 1 Asking how best to conceptualize place, we have
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