Decolonizing Mobile Cartography: Using Mobile App’s Geotagging and Podcasting to Advance Asian Refugee Resettlement Education

• In Event: Asian Diaspora Inquiries: Decolonizing and Deimperializing Theoretical and Methodological Traditions

Abstract

This presentation aims at introducing a Decolonizing Mobile Cartography (DMC) with mobile app’s geotagging and podcasting as a methodological tool to intervene and advance Asian refugee resettlement education that centers on the trope of American dream for successful assimilation to U.S. settler colony. With a case of U.S. Asian refugee diaspora youth’s mobile storied walk, this study seeks to find in what ways DMC can challenge and advance Asian refugee resettlement education for ethical, sustainable relation with the land. I explore these following questions: (1) What aspects of DMC can push the boundaries of the dominant Asian refugee resettlement education? (2) How does DMC provide a means to reconsider Asian immigrant refugee positionalities in U.S. settler colony? (3) How do Asian refugee perceptual bodily experiences and restorying play an important role to reconfigure everyday phenomenology of settlement beyond racializing settler cartography through DMC?

This study draws on interdisciplinary scholarships of decolonization, land-based education, and settler colonial critique (Bryd, 2011; McCoy, et al., 2016; Rifkin, 2014; Smith, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2002), intersecting with mobile media (Hjorth, 2011) and Asian settler Colonialism (Fujikane & Okamura, 2008; Day, et. al., 2019). It adopts collaborative, youth community-initiative, art-based research method with ethical consideration drawing on land-based ethics of reciprocity that highlights process-oriented relation-building among the researcher, refugee youth, and non-human urban materialities in non-oppressive and non-violent manners (Coulthard & Simpson, 2006).

The data consists of a collaborative production of mobile app in which refugee youth site-specific art installation, oral stories, sound, and visual images are recorded. Also, data comes from informal and focus group interview on natural settings during city walks, site visits, and oral/visual recordings.

Result shows that DMC, creating a mobile app’s geotagging and podcasting, importantly reorients Asian refugee resettlement educational approach by (1) highlighting Asian refugee youths’ bodily liveness in and (re)stories of a settler urban city to uncover racializing, settler affect as common sense (Rifkin, 2014); (2) repositioning Asian refugee positionalities as racialized settlers, which offers ways to make an ethical relation to the land as Indigenous; (3) providing opportunities of (un)learning settler structure of feeling/sentiment embedded in urban materialities; (4) replacing with a new counter-cartography to transform White settler ways of mapping/sharing places. The results affirm this mobile cartography to reconfigure Asian refugee education for an ethical, sustainable resettlement.

This presentation importantly highlights reframing efforts on alternative educational approach to Asian refugee resettlement in the face of racial and colonial hegemony in U.S. settler landscape. This study is significant because it moves beyond the dominant approach to Asian refugee resettlement that heavily relies upon humanitarian frame that views Asian refugee youth in deficit. It also highlights critique on settler colonial, racialized mapping that has been undermined in Asian refugee resettlement education, which instead reinforces assimilation to U.S. settler colony for their successful settlement. The DMC significantly provides a methodological intervention to the dominant settler colonial, racialized mapping as well as to Asian refugee resettlement education.

Author

• Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis, Pennsylvania State University