A strange familiarity? Place perceptions among the globally mobile

Abstract

How do globally mobile people perceive and make sense of a new place in which they have to create an everyday life for themselves? And how may their place perception be communicated through photographs? These are the questions around which this article revolves. The visual material discussed in the article stems from a participatory research project, in which North Denmark functions as a setting for studying local particularities and global convergences. Analysing part of this material, the article explores the perception of – and affiliation with – places and localities, pointing to how perceptions of strangeness and familiarity occur along unexpected lines of difference and similarity depending on the embodied positionality of the involved participants.

Designing food packaging to present healthy and ethical diets to the New Chinese middle classes

“…But here communication must be thought of not just in terms of texts, photographs, images, and video, but in the broader strategies deployed by global branding and localization. This could include attention to the design of coffee shops in the fashion of Starbucks' through choices of furnishings (Aiello and Dickinson 2014) or to how typeface, color, and layout are progressively more systematically harnessed in media design (Chen and Machin 2014) all leading to a cross-national visual familiarity, yet with local accents (Pristed Nelson and Faber 2014). For Aiello and Pauwels (2014) it was through attention to such details that we can provide a clearer empirically based understanding of communication taking place in concrete localized situations, rather than leaning on theoretical notions of 'globalization and localization' or 'culture-scapes' (Aiello and Pauwels 2014).…”

Telling migrant stories in collaborative photography research: Photographic practices and the mediation of migrant voices

“…There is already extant research on the diversity of the migrant experience and its influence on the kinds of photographic stories told by cultural minority groups. These have been conducted in places as diverse as Singapore (Ye, 2013), London (Datta, 2011) and north Denmark (Pristed Nielsen and Faber, 2014). Together with these works, however, it is also important to look at the specific practices surrounding photography in collaborative research and their capacity to shape the stories that migrants tell.…”