Paper short abstract:

Studying transborder labour migration to places in Brandenburg where thousands of workers come to Tesla factory, asparagus fields, and warehouses of Amazon and the like, we look at our field through the prism of frequencies: of movement, sound and feel, hisorical change and our own research.

Paper long abstract:

In VISION Project we study migration from Eastern Europe to places in Brandenburg where thousands of workers come to the Tesla factory, asparagus fields, and warehouses of Amazon and the like. Inspired by the idea of looking at our field through the prism of frequencies we distinguish several overlapping sets of frequencies.

We start with the frequencies of transborder movement – workers coming to work one shift, two, three, a week, a month; going back home or staying in the car, waiting for the next shift; the wave of increased mobility before Christmas or in the asparagus season.

Undertaking sensory ethnography we pay special attention to frequencies of sound, vibration of the ground, cold and heat, emotions, acting and waiting, fullness and emptiness (of parking lots, streets, buses, local services). We reflect on our sensorially rich experiences of the field: walking along the roads we fill vibrations caused by delivery trucks, we hear music from cars parked outside factories, dogs barking with different frequency in different places.

We also think of frequencies of change – Grossbeeren – a recent no-place that now hosts multiple warehouses and suddenly became a daily destination for thousands from across Europe can be compared to Lodz which 150 years earlier turned from a tiny Polish town to a multiethnic metropolis (and later again into a monoethnic periphery). What comes next for Grossbeeren?

Finally, the frequencies of our research – the patchwork ethnography; the rhythm of observations; our own embodied and sensual understanding of the field.