Expanding Oral History: Mobile Podcasting and Geotagging With Refugee Girls

• In Event: 66.053 - Turning Away From Text in Qualitative Research: Possibilities in Image- and Audio-Based Methods

Abstract

Contemporary lives are deeply saturated and transformed by GPS (Global Positioning System) driven mobile technologies, which provide individuals with abundant information about their surroundings through location based services and contribute to city as a system (Evans-Cowley, 2010). In this advanced technology landscape, youth participation is a tremendously important contribution to this mobile media culture by sharing location, text, photos, video, and audio about the condition of any urban city. It sheds new light on the embodied media experiences through which youths relate the urban space with the contingency and affective potential. Importantly, the use of Geotagging and mobile podcasting becomes an alternative method of data collection and presentation in qualitative research with the youth community.

This presentation thus introduces qualitative research of and with Karen tribe refugee preteen and teen girls and the ways in which they created mobile podcasting/geotagging, which generated audio talk and sound invoked by affective encounters with places. Their mobile podcasting and geotagging allowed others to listen to and engage with their own oral histories in the landscape of a U.S. northeastern city to which they relocated. Most importantly, the mobile technologies enable us to expand and transform the understanding of oral history in terms of a way of recording/transcribing, understanding, and archiving narrated memories of the girls. The mobile podcasting and geotagging that perhaps redefine oral history bring further investigation into its reconfiguration of not only the nature of data, but also the research process including representation, which can be marked by entanglement, liminality, continuum, non-linearity, and irreducibility as well as transparency.

With this observation, this presentation explores the potential and limitations of the use of Geotagging and GPS mobile podcasting in the research process with the refugee girls. The methodological exploration poses several guiding questions pertinent to qualitative research: 1) How does this method differently draw the refugee girls to participate in the research process including collecting, interpreting, and presenting the data? 2) What does this method make possible to fill the limitation of the conventional text-oriented data method and to what extent would this method bring the potential to reshape the oral history of a refugee youth community? 3) In what ways does this method expand and transform the epistemological concern that achieves the goal of social justice and equality when researching with refugee youths? 4) How does this method concern and (re)articulate ethical dilemmas in which qualitative research engages?

Author

• Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis, Buffalo State College - SUNY