Touching, scrolling and swooping: Performing and representing migrant stories through geospatial technologies

Abstract

Migration biographies have been used for decades to retell lived migration experiences, however, they only partially represent these experiences. Emergent geospatial technologies can add to migration biographies, creating novel performances and representations of migrants’ experiences. In this paper I reflect on my use of geospatial technologies within biographical interviews to build upon the traditional migration biography. International and domestic migrants to the Maroochy area in Queensland, Australia were interviewed about each of their moves over a lifetime, with their narratives of movement visually represented using Google Earth. I consider how the participants’ interacted with the Google Earth interface as a ‘digital body’, performing their lived experiences of migration. Multiple layers of meaning were produced through mapping migrants’ experiences, requiring a critical, reflexive approach. I then combined the transcribed narratives and mapped migration paths with Google Earth’s satellite imagery as a Qualitative Geographical Information Systems (QualGIS) analysis approach, to create mapped migration biographies. Here, I present excerpts of three migration biographies, and discuss the difficulties and opportunities for the use of QualGIS to represent the participants’ experiences. Digital mapping added mobile, tactile and visual aspects to narratives produced through traditional biographical methods, changing the performance and representation of the migrants’ experiences within the interview. This critical and reflexive evaluation of the method reveals how geospatial technologies can add to the researchers’ toolbox to explore migrants’ lived experiences.