Abstract
Abstract Based on fieldwork with migrants and border populations in Central America and the story of a young Congolese woman in particular, this article discusses how research participants’ use of mobile communication technology provokes a redefinition of the ethnographic field. Increasingly popular trajectory research often sets out to follow migrants, yet a focus on migrants keeping in touch with researchers at their own initiative and discretion, following them, reveals entanglements of selective on- and offline engagement and self-representation. Critical exploration of research participants’ differentiated use of digital technology for navigating a social environment that includes the researcher herself not only transforms our understanding of the field in empirical, ethical, and methodological terms, but also counteracts potentially voyeuristic and life-threatening practices of following people on the move.
Highlights
Based on fieldwork with migrants and border populations in Central America and the story of a young Congolese woman in particular, this article discusses how research participants’ use of mobile communication technology provokes a redefinition of the ethnographic field
What happens when research participants employ mobile communication technology to take over the conversation? This article is inspired by Stella,1 a participant in research on transatlantic and trans-American migrant trajectories in Central America who used her smartphone to share, curate, and contest our field encounters and transformed my understanding of the ethnographic field
This article is based on intermittent fieldwork with migrants and border populations in Costa Rica, Panama, and Honduras in 2017, 2019, and 2020, part of the research project “African Trajectories across Central America: Displacements, Transitory Emplacements, and Migration Nodes,” carried out together with Heike Drotbohm at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Summary
Following the “twists and turns” of migrant trajectories (Schapendonk and Steel 2014: 263) is rapidly becoming a popular way to explore the experiences of people on the move. Some scholars question an overly enthusiastic celebration of the uniqueness and adequacy of so-called mobile methods (Merriman 2014), there is a burgeoning methodological literature in mobilities and migration research claiming that a world characterized by movement, instability, and interconnectivity demands that our methods be on the move or at least attuned to mobility (Salazar et al 2017) Such mobility-attuned methods are often infused with digital and visual techniques (e.g., Walton 2017), including accompanying travelers, recording photograph and video diaries, and participating in online communities. This article highlights how people on the move use the same technologies that are often employed for subjugating them (Andersson 2014) to perceive, structure, shape, make sense of, and entangle others in their trajectories through (interrupted) online connectivity Highlighting this crucial side to migrant journeys counteracts migrant Othering. Protecting the safety of both researcher and research participants required visiting, revisiting, and reconnecting with migrants at certain points along their way, instead of literally accompanying them as they traveled
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