Knowing How to Get Around: Place, Migration, and Communication

Abstract

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

Negotiating independent mobility: Single female expats in Bangalore

“…Interviews started out as conversations about their decisions to move to Bangalore, impressions upon arrival, challenges they had faced, and how they dealt with any obstacles. Considering previous literature on mobility and emplacement, I used interviews to explore how, and whether, this swath of mobile people managed to feel at home or ‘in place’ in the city, which, as Moores and Metykova (2009) point out, ‘involves ordinary doings and feelings that give locations a lived-in quality’ (p. 316), and asked which technologies might have helped them in doing so. Drawing on Massey’s power-geometries, I was interested in understanding how the relatively elite status of these expats, and the economic and social power occasioned by that elite-ness, intersected and perhaps clashed with gender in experiences of settling in.…”

Searching for Ontological Security via Homeland Media Use: The Case of Korean Temporary Visa-Status Migrants in the United States

“…The special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies , titled “Mobile Elites: Sojourners, Dwellers, and Homecomers,” argues that researchers need to unveil the complexities of the life trajectories of mobile groups by conducting more existentially oriented ethnographies (Jansson, 2016). Some media studies scholars have highlighted this existential-phenomenological perspective in transnational media studies by focusing on the taken-for-granted feature of everyday experience and the routinized (media) practices that form/make place (Moores & Metykova, 2009, 2010; Scannell, 1996; Silverstone, 1994). While Silverstone (1993, 1994) and Scannell (1996, 2014) focused on the ontological meaning of television in everyday life, Moores and Metykova (2009, 2010) were interested in mobility and media issues in migrants’ everyday lived experiences and routines.…”

“…Some media studies scholars have highlighted this existential-phenomenological perspective in transnational media studies by focusing on the taken-for-granted feature of everyday experience and the routinized (media) practices that form/make place (Moores & Metykova, 2009, 2010; Scannell, 1996; Silverstone, 1994). While Silverstone (1993, 1994) and Scannell (1996, 2014) focused on the ontological meaning of television in everyday life, Moores and Metykova (2009, 2010) were interested in mobility and media issues in migrants’ everyday lived experiences and routines. They found that previous literature on media and transnational migrants often stressed the construction of ethnic identities in place of more mundane and emotional aspects of migrants’ media use.…”

A gateway to the global city: Mobile place-making practices by expats

“…Media practices play an important role in creating this rhetorical sense of place and, in fact, scholars increasingly acknowledge that meaningful places may even be virtual ones. Moores and Metykova (2009: 316) emphasize the importance of everyday media routines for place-making, noting how, “in the course of everyday living, people might routinely inhabit media environments…as they simultaneously inhabit physical environments.” Golub (2010) highlights the role of relationships in this process, arguing that while progress made in the realism of online worlds certainly improves user-experiences, what makes these worlds seem like “real” places is when they become meaningful to participants through undertaking projects with others. Plunkett (2011) contends that if a virtual environment provides a meaningful experience, participants may develop a sense of place in, and place attachment to, that online world.…”

“…Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006) and, for example, by employing concepts of flexible places and place-making to show how places can exist in mediated and virtual worlds (e.g. Moores and Metykova, 2009; Plunkett, 2011), as well as demonstrating how locative media “create new forms of overlaying place with sociality” (Hjorth, 2012: 238). In this paper, these areas of research are brought together to explore how digital media practices may be employed to create mobile and flexible places that span on- and offline space.…”