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Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss media ethnography as a method to document diasporic place-making and Soviet imaginaries in the everyday of a Central Asian community in Brooklyn, NY. How may technologies of seeing and listening, otherwise used to surveil or still the migrant experience, help re-imagine public space as mobile, fluid and intersectional?

Paper long abstract:

How does human migration transform public spaces in contexts of environmental precarity and economic volatility? My research utilizes expanded media ethnography to research resilience, imaginary and knowledge transfer strategies linking environmentally precarious locations that have seen high emigration rates with communities of destination in the "global metropolis", where migrants seek permanent or temporary relief, or challenge moral geographies and normative discourses of identity. This case study is grounded in my ongoing collaborative research in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in South Brooklyn, NY, home to an emerging multiethnic Russian-speaking diaspora. While the notion of “good place” may sound fixed and timeless, migrants often understand it as a timely process, requiring constant personal and community participation. Kinship and friendship entangle and compress geographic and historical distance, making “home” a dialectic, poly-semantic, multi-sited notion. From observations collected over the first two years of an ongoing localized media ethnography with documented and undocumented migrants, I will discuss some ways in which the camera, microphone, Google Street View and social media, often employed as tools of extraction, to describe, quantify and surveil social relations, may open conversations about belonging, adaptation and fellowship in the diasporic everyday. fruitfully complicating the ethnographer’s view of their field and re-configuring interactions with protagonists towards meaningful connection. Reimagining disciplinary boundaries, “blissful displacements” propose a mobile and dialogic ethnography of public space as transformation, inspired by Jackson and Piette’s “existential anthropology,” that considers technology, place and experience as subjects and makers of culture and politics, not as their objects.