Only a mouse click away from home: transnational practices of Eastern European migrants in the United Kingdom

Abstract

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...

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