The purpose of this visual ethnographic experiment was to find an engaging way of capturing the multi-scalarity of migrant homemaking. Inspired by a combination of anthropological walk’n talks and the prevalent use of information and communication technologies among migrants, the methodological protocol of Google Earth walk’n talks was developed. 

 

The protocol was trialed among self-identified migrants who were invited to engage in the roles of tour guide and visitor in each other’s migratory paths around the world made visually possible by the Google Earth app. The Google Earth walk’n talk methodology not only elicited migrant research participants’ memories, understandings, and meaning-making regarding migrant homemaking, but also affords patterns of difference to emerge from dis/jointed movements across and through satellite and street view footages, fingers touching the smartphone screen, dialogue, and shared memories – together paying evidence to the multiple multi-scalar relations of migrant homemaking.

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The results are presented in a chapter, “Google earth walk’n talks: Diffracting migrant homemaking” in the edited volume, Aesthetic methodological interventions in migrant homemaking amidst divergent integration politics in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, eds. Fran Lloyd, Eleonora Narvselius & Marta Padovan-Özdemir (forthcoming)​