Transmigrant media: Mediating place, mobility, and subjectivity

Abstract

This article contributes to the exploration of interrelationships between human and media mobilities through analysis of qualitative interviews with 18 Southeast Asian transmigrants in Australia. This group demonstrated three main orientations toward the media they habitually engaged. In the memorial-affective orientation, respondents re-engaged media familiar from remembered pre-migration childhood and family contexts. An ambivalent-localizing orientation was taken toward Australian legacy media, some of which respondents found helped them relate to Australian culture while other forms were experienced as xenophobic and alienating. In the cosmopolitan-global orientation, respondents engaged global corporate, largely Anglophone media in ways that reinforced their sense of themselves as mobile and cosmopolitan. Most importantly, in our respondents’ experience, these three orientations were often not separable but interwoven into complex admixtures. We explore the implications of this hybrid experience of location through media both for the conceptualization of place in globalization, and for the study of migrant media.