Picturing community: Exploring migration-shaping through contemporary archeology, spacial relations and visual methodology

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Centering justice-, identity- and community-minded migration questions and methodologies

Proposal

Combining theoretical frameworks of contemporary archeology and spatial relations with visual methodology, this paper discusses the potential of documenting current experiences with migration to improve collective well-being. Contemporary archeology suggests that we interrogate our current surroundings (beginning with material culture) in order to gather various meanings they represent in the same way we would excavate an ancient site looking for clues about those who lived there ages ago. Most attention has been focused at border sites (e.g., US-Mexico border crossing), but has the potential for wider application, perhaps particularly in times/places of rapid change (Kiddey, 2015). At the same time, Massey (2005) informs us that space is ascribed meaning only when interacted with; space is a set of relations rather than a point on a map. Therefore, we can look at built spaces with the intention of better understanding how various individuals experience them. Particularly important in societies affected by changing demographics owing to migration, the spaces captured in this paper include train stations, school yards and billboard advertisements – all of which inform and are informed by those who view or interact with them, migrants and non-migrants alike. As a methodology, visual ethnography or visual methodology encourages shifts in ways of seeing ourselves and the “other,” it questions truth, power, position, privilege and representation, and it opens imaginative spaces for multiple truths and perspectives (Pink, 2001; Prosser, 1998; Bhabha, 1989). In migration research, images assist where words are difficult. Using researcher-created photographs, image analysis was conducted to expose the multiple meanings held by and through spaces commonly assumed to be devoid of such meaning. As such, the analysis forces us to engage in a politicized questioning of contemporary systems and acknowledge our individual entanglement in implicit and explicit social relations, with implications for education policy and practice.

Author

• Cathryn Magno, University of Fribourg