Paper short abstract:

Digital practices are frequently seen as extensions of the concerns and objectives of communities of practice. This paper, though, reveals how the digital creates the conditions for a (dis)assemblage of cultural repertoires and resources, obscuring social tensions that emerge on a quotidian level.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that digital collectives are often extensions of communities of practice gathered around shared knowledge and interests and engaged in common practices and commitments. However, the digital also allows a (dis)assemblage of cultural elements and repertoires within a community of practice. This, we will argue, may obscure social tensions that emerge on a quotidian level and, at the same time, caters to different audiences, local and global.

This argument is based on an ethnography of proximity and virtual communities within a Bangladeshi diasporic public sphere in a multicultural historical and touristified neighborhood in Lisbon. It looks into several digital communities of practice fostered by local collectives and cultural and political brokers examining how the amplification of certain features of cultural heritage - from language/Bengali and religion/Islam to emplacement/Citizenship and multiculturalism/culture – emerge as a resource to evade heritage ‘dissonance’ . However, because the digital always engages with the non-digital (Miller 2018), the paper also brings to light the re-assemblage of a heritage collective in the entanglement of performances and discourses, solidarities and tensions, embodied practices and emplaced affections that ‘do’ heritage on the ground (Smith 2021), thus appointing to how the group re-articulates the ‘social’ beyond imagination.

Overall, this paper provides some preliminary insights into the interweaves of digital and non-digital heritage communities of practice and the ways culture’s expediency (Yudice 2003) meets global and local future-making (Harrison et al 2020) while, at the same time, obscuring tensions and conflicts inherent to the ‘social’.