Fases de la metodología

A limitation of the fieldwork and analysis, though, is that the research analysis does privilege migrants in London. Migrants were interviewed twice while friends and family were interviewed once. The shifting life course moments of informants abroad was a crucial theme during interviews, however, there is an imbalance in knowledge between migrants and friends and family abroad. A richer perspective of friends and family’s daily lives is beyond the grasp of the research.

In addition, due to time constraints there was no attempt to interview or examine in depth relationships that had become entirely inactive. The research does not attempt to explain different degrees of disconnection across entire personal communities. An important caveat, though, is the importance of affect over the life course. Informants sometimes de-prioritized keeping in touch in light of the fact that they felt connected, a finding that reinforces recent literature on friendship (Cronin, 2014), which was only reinforced by the fact that several relationships had fallen out of touch and in certain moments though became important again later on. This was also relevant for kinship as well, as there were several instances were family members were out of touch for long periods yet informants felt they were a part of their lives.

Thus, research in the future might focus on longitudinal methodologies assessing the contexts and conditions under which relationships disconnect and re-connect.

5.9 Conclusion

The aim of this chapter was to outline the research methodology and fieldwork strategy that was used to understand how ethical imaginations of togetherness are constituted from how migrants and friends and family utilize ICT and VFR practices for maintaining relationships. The methodology is grounded in an interpretivist epistemology and ontology. The philosophical

underpinnings helped to frame a qualitative methodology informed by mobilities studies, and a focus on understanding socialities as phenomena with discursive and embodied dimensions. The chapter then described the research sample and research strategy. The study employed a multi-sited ethnography that was carried out mostly in London and different locations in Italy over a period of about eight months.

In conducting analysis the research highlighted a key tension around continuity and change in relationships. To begin to explain this tension the thesis will first describe the key personal communities encountered during the fieldwork. This will help the reader gain a more detailed overview of how this tension emerges in different relationships while providing a general description of the personal communities in order to familiarize the reader with informants. Chapter seven will then argue that this tension is productive of what Arjun Appadurai (2006) has termed the fantasy of wholeness. Wholeness is not understood as stemming from an essentialist notion of selves or communities, instead they are envisioned potentials in geographies of affect, imaginations of self and relationships as rooted, permanent and deep. Fantasy is both productive of and produced from keeping in touch. The constitution of a mobile personal ethics of self produces desires and felt and imagined potential of personal communities as unified trans-local communities. From there the thesis will further analyze this tension in chapter eight to show how this tension both makes intimacy possible and renders it an obstacle to re-shaping intimate relations. The last chapter will explain this tension in relation to the production and management of friction that both fosters and inhibits the distribution of identity and responsibility within personal communities. The thesis argues that these chapters meet the goal of achieving theoretical coherence and transferability. As theoretical coherence through out the study is a key criterion for judging quality, the thesis argues that the research methodology and subsequent process of writing up has met standards of quality for qualitative research.

6 Introducing Translocal Personal Communities: An Overview of Continuity and Change 6.1 Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the personal communities of key informants and present some of the key issues that emerged from examining those communities. The chapter will highlight some important theoretical issues, in order to provide an initial guide for the analysis that will be developed through the rest of the thesis. Thus, this chapter is not intended as an analytical chapter but as a descriptive chapter that will aide the reader in becoming more familiar with migrant informants, their personal communities and the key issues shaping those personal communities.

The chapter also aims to begin detailing a counterpoint to VFR literature that has insisted on separating friends from family in analyzing personal relationships (Backer and King, 2015).

Normative divisions of relationships are important in analyzing relationships, however, relationships are significantly more complex in practice. The qualities of friendship and kinship are often fluidly distributed throughout personal communities based on a variety of factors, happening within contexts of the life course, as well as within myriad overlapping political, social and economic contexts. Furthermore, imagining relationships according to normative divisions of kith and kin can take an atemporal understanding of relationships that downplays the importance of migration as a key process through which lines of kinship and friendship are blurred or reconstructed. The chapter argues for moving away from a normative model of kinship and friendship in analyzing personal relationships as they pertain to keeping in touch.

Instead, the thesis argues for focusing on how migration becomes a means through which relationships construct and experience continuity and also change at a distance.

In addition, it should be noted that the following section is primarily based on migrant interviews. The rest of thesis will draw on interviews from friends and families to more extensively set out the ethical and fantasmatic dimensions of togetherness in personal communities, by offering further convergent and contrasting perspectives. The purpose of this organization is to make clear that personal communities consist of relationships of a focal person, however, those relationships are often imagined and experienced differently across those communities. In addition, the relationship maps are not shown for reasons of anonymity. Several

maps contain the names of informants within their personal community, and showing the maps could potentially compromise the privacy of informants. Thus, the maps have been omitted and instead the section describes aspects of the maps and informant interviews.