Migrant visits over time: Ethnographic returning and the technological turn

This paper reflects on four decades of research (via ethnographic returning) to explore the social transformations in travel and communication technologies that have impacted the lived experiences, and consequently the theoretical conceptualization, of migrant visits. A comparison of migration waves...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Global networks (Oxford) 2023-01, Vol.23 (1), p.160-173
Main Author: Baldassar, Loretta
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citizenship
Communications technology
Community life
Concept formation
digital citizenship
Ethnography
Families & family life
Group identity
Italian migration
kinship
Migrants
Migration
Mutuality
polymedia environments
Residential care
Residential institutions
roots migration
Safeguards
Telecommunications
travel visits
Visits
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Summary:This paper reflects on four decades of research (via ethnographic returning) to explore the social transformations in travel and communication technologies that have impacted the lived experiences, and consequently the theoretical conceptualization, of migrant visits. A comparison of migration waves between Italy and Australia reveals both continuities in visiting experience as deeply relational practices that facilitate a mutuality of being, but also transformations brought about by the technological turn. Visits take on different meanings depending on individual/ family life stage, generation, and community and national histories. The capacity for both physical and virtual copresence must be understood as coconstitutive, requiring a temporal perspective. The experiences of immobile migrants in residential care suggest that, in the context of rich histories of copresence over time, digital kinning can provide the capacity to share a mutuality of being that safeguards the socio‐relational ties of individual and collective identities and belonging that make us human.
ISSN:1470-2266
1471-0374
DOI:10.1111/glob.12393