Digital geographies of everyday multiculturalism: ‘Let’s go Nando’s!’

Abstract

As UK cities and towns become increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse, researchers have tuned into how people inhabit multiculturalism. Ethnographic approaches have focused on the kind of togetherness that people generate as they go about their everyday lives, observing the affective textures of interactions and happenings of the here and now in granular detail. Missing from these accounts is what crowdsourced data might add to understandings of how multicultural places are experienced. What is vital about this kind of data is that it is 'big', involving a diversity of voices similarly intent on messaging their experiences, presenting opportunities to scale up the affect of encounters and to quantify what is difficult to qualify. This paper brings Digital Geographies into conversation with research on everyday multiculturalism to examine qualitatively and quantitatively how social media use folds into and expresses various practices of sociality and connection. Our paper involves Twitter, Nando's and the city of Leicester in the UK to challenge and advance ways of understanding everyday multiculturalism in an era of global migration and ethnically complex populations.

Towards a study of everyday geographic information: Bringing the everyday into view

“…As quantitative analysis can be very sensitive to spam and content created by bots, we removed such content as far as possible. However, as the aim of the project was to study how Leicester is experienced as part of everyday life (Bennett et al, 2023), we took a very cautious approach to removing content and only did so when there was a possibility that the content might significantly skew the overall picture emerging from the data. Among the 30,505 users in the English dataset, we checked all users who posted on average more than two tweets per day, and we interrogated bursts of concentrated activity over a short period of time.…”

“…The focus on events is also ubiquitous in studies that explore less dire online representations of our cities and countries, such as the study of the spatial and temporal patterns of social media posts (Longley and Adnan, 2016), their relationship with local demographies (Ballatore and De Sabbata, 2020) and the main topics discussed in the posts (Meyer et al, 2019). That said, the focus remains on what social media content can tell us about the key patterns and events happening in the spaces we live and key topics that emerge from the content describing the places we experience, with little to no attention being paid to the mundane, the ‘ background noise ’, the everyday – the mundane posts that compose a large part of social media content, like expressing midday cravings for chicken wings (Bennett et al, 2023).…”

Introduction to A Research Agenda for Digital Geographies

“…These range from smartphone applications and social media (Halliwell and Wilkinson, 2021;Roberts, 2017), and digital visual methodologies (Rose, 2016;Pink et al, 2017) to (critical) global information systems (GIS) (Sui and Goodchild, 2011;Elwood, 2006). Some of the most exciting work arises from the continued critical engagement with intersectional, critical race, and feminist theorisations in digital geographies (Elwood, 2021;Bennett et al, 2022;McLean, 2020). There have also been significant interdisciplinary endeavours (Birenboim et al, 2021;Sumartojo et al, 2021), and reflections on how the digital shapes our research practice (Meijering et al, 2020;Yeager and Steiger, 2013).…”