‘City as Home’: Conducting walking interviews as biographical method with migrant men in Cork

Youth-Home

The project, Youth-Home was an in-depth ethnography with 20 young single men or those lived a single lifestyle in Cork city: 10 international students (from outside EU and EEA countries) and 10 refugees (not asylum seekers). The aim of the project was to understand how young men who have the official permission to stay in country (student visas and refugee status), make sense of home in Ireland and how they perform home through practices within their domestic space of home and public spaces. The project was examined by the ethical committee of the host institution of the researcher. Students were recruited through adverts set up in the university campus and refugees through a migrant and refugee organisation in Cork. Snowball sampling was used afterwards to access more volunteers. Participants were from Afghanistan, India, Iran, Egypt, USA, Indonesia, Nigeria and Ethiopia. The methodology was composed of a multistage ethnography: In the first step, participants were met for an initial short interview. Information sheets and consent forms were signed, and another day was booked to walk in the city. Meanwhile participants were asked to think of the places that they planned to take the researcher that give them a ‘sense of home’. They were also told that the walk would include a place to eat that would represent the ‘taste of home’ to them. On the day of the interview they were leading the walks whilst both the researcher and the participant took photos of places where participants had thought about before embarking on the walk but this photography exercise was led by the participant. These photos usually accompanied with a relevant biographical story of why that particular location was important to them. The researcher used her mobile phone equipped with an external microphone attached to the participants’ coat during the walk. The recorded voice was clear enough for transcription despite all the background noise, such as wind and bustling city centre. These interviews which were all conducted in English, were followed up by photo-elicited interviews with participants who had taken photos of their domestic spaces on another day. This face-to-face interview took place in the researcher's office or in the student union café on university campus.

In 2019 and 2020, a total of 33 interviews was conducted and a large archive of photos was created from public and domestic spaces. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the strict lockdown, the rest of the walking interviews were suspended, and some interviews took place using mobile apps such as Whatsapp video call. This paper is based on 14 walking interviews and the associated photos that took place during 2019–2020.

Combining visual methods and walking interviews is a common practice. Together they are useful methods to understand the subtleties of co-constructing narratives and visual elements of spaces and places. The visual element of walking methods was taken more seriously by some participants: those who used cameras and photography as their hobby. Two of them brought their own cameras and did not use phones unlike other participants focusing much on angle, lights and other technical aspects. The walks all led to a place that they had been asked to designate in the city where the researcher and the participant could taste the home. ‘Tasting home’ was a method of combining different senses during an ethnography on home to understand how geographies of food in a city inform walking trails and build local knowledge of migrants. I will explore this further below.

Walking interviews in a city

‘Walking alongside’ participants to observe, experience and make sense of participants’ lives have long been an interest in ethnography (Emmel and Clark, 2009) whilst understanding these through walking in sociological research as a way of discovering and transforming the city is relatively recent (Rendell, 2006). It is through the act of walking that new connections to spaces (Middleton, 2009) around us can be made and re-made. These connections change over time and in different spaces. As such experiences of city dwellers in the space of a city can tell so much about the meanings that are produced in that space. For this reason, walking was chosen as the main method of understanding migrants’ perspectives of the city and home making in the public space. WIBM (O’Neill and Roberts, 2020) stems from a combination of biographical research, ethnography and visual and participatory research. O’Neill and Roberts detail WIBM as a new approach to raise awareness of the ‘researcher and the “researched” within the world as moving, interacting, and experiencing beings’ (O’Neill and Roberts, 2020, p.1). O’Neill and Roberts base this approach on three epistemological approaches: theory (critical theory), imagination (artists’ use of walking that goes beyond mobilities) and experience (ethnography) which includes visual ethnography and biographical research.

O’Neill and Roberts (2020) argue that despite the longer history in the fields of anthropology (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008), walking and mobile approaches are relatively new to Sociology and Criminology. Scholars in the field of urban studies have also discussed the importance of walking and transitioning from one space to another and the impact one develops of space (Knox, 2005; Matos Wunderlich, 2008; Rendell, 2006). These scholars base their arguments on how routine encounters and shared experiences help to co-construct meanings of places, particularly in world where fast pace and rapid changes do not allow room for much contemplation and understanding upon the surroundings (Knox, 2005).

Although walking in the city is part of the lived experience of everyday life for urban dwellers, it is a particularly unique method about spaces and places that are meaningful (or not) to individuals. An important contribution to walking methods is made by Matos Wunderlich (2008) who distinguishes between three modes of walking in the city: the purposive, the discursive and the conceptual. All three modes of exploring places through walking are important and encouraged participants’ interaction with the researcher. These modes of walking promote discovery of places in urban settings, they are also vital ways of exploring how ‘home’ as is shaped by encounters between bodies through transnational movements and local embeddedness. Although this paper is influenced by Matos Wunderlich's approach in distinguishing modes of walking, I will mainly focus on WIBM as the main method due to its focus on biographical narratives.

Walking interviews with migrant groups

Walking interviewing is a useful method in migration studies. In sociology and social sciences, walking method has been argued to help identify vulnerabilities and risks participants face (Pink, 2007; Gutierrez and Gibbons, 2020). It is particularly valuable way to understand the importance of places through mobile methods as a therapeutic practice (Doughty 2013). The method offers a dynamic space which facilitates the experience of sharing stories in a more inclusive and less intimidating way. As most often vulnerabilities are feminised, attention to migrant men's experiences of the city space and exclusion is an important angle into experiences of place-making and exclusion from the city space (Harvey 1996; Darling 2017). Migrant men's use and understanding of public spaces is complex. This theme appears in a study by Hondagneu-Sotelo (2017) which presents migrant men's quotidian practices of using public parks in Los Angeles. She argues that the materiality of the city environment, such as public parks can inform migrant integration and introduce solutions for policy makers to create more public inclusive spaces. She adopts a walking method and ethnography on the move to understand how young men use public spaces as places of acceptance and inclusion. O’Neill (2018) in research with women asylum seekers shows that walking with migrants offers a more inclusive approach to research and becomes more democratic.

Analysing WIBM within migration

The analytical framework here stems from situated understanding of home as a migrant woman and participants’ shared and different experiences with me. This approach stems from standpoint feminist literature that argues everyone's gaze is situated and is as such partial. This approach directs us to note the intersectional nature of our gendered, classed, ethnic (and other) experiences that despite being interrelated, are mutually exclusive of each other (Yuval-Davis, 2011). My research and approach to understand narratives is informed by intersectionality studies (Fathi, 2017). In my view, any form of narration is intersectional, epistemologically stems from personal standpoints in understanding the world. Applying WIBM, allowed such intersectional understanding to build biographical narratives and the analysis of narratives showed this situatedness of narratives well.

Firstly, the different positionality of the researcher to that of the participants resulted in some unique but contested experiences of the city from a gender perspective. My understanding of the city, before doing the walks were different to those of my participants, which to a great extent came from me experiencing the city as a woman and them as men. This difference was reflected, as an example, in exploring areas which I normally avoided on a dark night, or secluded areas in some parts of the town whilst for my participants those were frequently visited. The second was participants’ unique migration experiences, each having different migration routes to Cork. The sharp contrast was the shared experiences among the student group which was very different to the experiences of the refugee group, who had a harder and more contentious pathways to resid in Ireland. Thirdly, each participant had a unique aim for the walk and a particular audience in mind: By this, I refer to the imaginations about how to narrate a story and why they chose that particular story. As discussed above, within a dialogical understanding of narrative, the role audiences play is extremely important in how stories are chosen, narrated and constructed.

My approach to analysis integrates the personal biographies of co-walkers, told through the narratives whilst walking in a setting. O’Neill and Roberts (2020) raise important questions in relation to walking as method, by asking the extent to which the method offers new insights into the research we intend to do, or whether or not walking offers any advantage to other methods that could be chosen for a particular research project. Not only do these questions offer a chance to critically think about what can be learned or experienced from and through walking, but also give us the chance to share similar experiences between the researcher and the participant. It is the shared experience of ‘walking together’ combined with visual recording of scenes, that offers a new relationship among bodies, scenes, environment, technology and sense of self.

Recording the walk is another aspect of the existing walking methods. Recording fleeting moments and experiences of locations is argued as an important method (Pink 2007). Digital recordings of mobile experiences when visiting places can capture a variety of ‘practices’, ‘senses’, ‘expressions’, and sometimes ‘emotions’. These were not possible a decade ago, or at least to this extent. The ubiquitous use of smart phones, digital instruments such as cameras, video and audio enabled tools facilitate researchers to record visual aspects of their research more easily (Yi’En 2013). This significant change, has impacted how the social reality in present time is experienced, understood and conveyed to others, such as sharing these fleeting moments on various social media platforms. Visualising places incorporated in the walking methods has become increasingly of interest to social scientists with the expansion of everyday tools such as smartphones and cameras that allow a ‘fast’ way of capturing fleeting images of spaces and transferring and reproducing them to capture scenes that are experienced at the time.

We carry an archive of photos with us everywhere and we record moments, movements, rhythms (Crang, 2001), routines on the go. This constant visual recording on the move has become an important aspect of walking experiences which connect our present experience (walking) to the past (memories) and providing possibilities to connect to the future (possibilities). Whilst we walk in our surroundings and share the relevant stories with others, these photos become sharing devices that convey temporality through visualisation to others (see Lefevbre, 2004).

In fact, the use of mobile phones and photographing images are common among young people. For migrants with extended transnational networks, smart phones allow recording of spaces and places in post migration and sharing them with others who do not live ‘here’. In the backdrop of increased movements, migrations across borders and multicultural transformations of cities and advancement of technological tools in social science, scholars have transformed their methods of data collection (mine included). Including sensory elements: voices, images, videos, touch, smell, etc. would convey a ‘closer’ experience from the research context to the audience. Riessman (2008) in explaining her method of narrative analysis argues that narrative is always constructed by imagining the audience in mind when we formulate a piece of narrative. The same applies to adding multi-sensory tools to the narrative, such as when we shoot a scene and leave other scenes out. As such we are always selective in what we represent in the same way that we are selective when we tell a story (Andrews et al., 2013). Such transformations in sociological methods in the age of social media expansion is an important way of showing fleeting experiences of migration and transnational life in the city which are rich sources of understanding life in transition. Although in this research photography was used to a great extent, in this paper, I focus more on the walking angle of this method.

WIBM as temporal

The first example belongs to Madhav, the student from India (appeared above), taking a long stroll around different shopping malls in the city centre, directing me to look at different clothes, and talking at length about how he envisaged to bring his wife around these shops (who at that moment lived in India), when she would visit for Christmas of that year. This imagination about a reunion with his wife, was expressed for a female researcher and particularly when strolling around female clothing sections, is an example of how stories are shaped by having specific audiences in mind (Riessman 2008). His narratives around the everyday longing for his wife and her first impression of Cork city was a gendered performance in how he made sense of his masculine identity in relation to a female researcher: picturing me as a woman who would be interested in knowing about his perspectives as a married man living a single life who was sharing a day of walking in the city, through shops and observing goods imagining them for his wife. WIBM is adaptive to participants’ everyday life as they can show vignettes of their everyday lives whilst walking, ‘giving attention to contextual “moves” from scene to scene and in changing time perspectives’ (O’Neill and Roberts 2020, p. 6). Madhav told me that he had designated specific locations in shopping centres to bring his wife, to show her various items in shops. In this way Madhav provided an opportunity to show me the ways in which his life was entangled with the everyday experiences of migration, feelings of loneliness and living away from his wife and aspiring towards a married life (a pattern that was seen in other participants).

WIBM provided opportunities for such unexpected discussions. One of the important aspects of the method is that the act of moving from one scene to another prompts the participant and the researcher to ask questions and discuss issues that could not have emerged in a sitting or face to face interview. Matos Wunderlich (2008) argues that ‘while “walking” in the city, we perform in space-time, becoming immersed in temporal continuums of social everyday life activities fused with spatial and natural rhythmical events’ (p. 126). Here Matos Wunderlich is referring to how through rhythms of walking, one connects their body to the spaces and gets a sense of a place. Such a view is valuable particularly for those who are new to a space/place. In this case, migrants’ presence in the city, and their fresh experiences of the urban space, are explored and understood through walking as a mode of experiencing migration and new places in post migration life.

WIBM as embodied

As O’Neill and Roberts (2020, pp. 6–7) argue, ‘the walking method concentrates on the experience as within movement: it gives attention to contextual ‘moves’ from scene to scene and in changing time perspectives; we are beings in shifting place and time; memory is not fixed; our consciousness ‘moves’ across these dimensions’. In my research, the interaction between myself and the participant was one aspect of connection of the senses linked to the material environment (smell of food, sounds of cars and surrounding noise such as diggers, police alarms, the views and scenes that were captured through photos) and to memory (the landscapes in which memories of the premigration were composed). An additional aspect was how participants understood their bodies within the city space and imagined themselves in the city.

Soroush, a student from Iran, took a long walk with me on the banks of River Lee. He told me how River Lee in Cork reminds him of River Kan in Northwest of Tehran, a place of regular visits during his childhood. He particularly reflected on the noise of the river, water streams, the smell of wet land, the green imagery of the riverbanks, the bridge that connects both sides of the river and the domes under the bridge that look like Persian architecture. His long list of similarities between the two rivers connected the worlds of Kan and Cork, juxtaposing places that are combined in the present; a coherent link between stories of places and adventures. ‘Embodied placemaking’, a concept advanced by Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman (2014), enables the body and its corporeal role in understanding and constructing the place. In this framework (embodied placemaking), the city of Cork becomes a place where experiences of ethnicity, gender and migration are performed through envisaging and imagining the different aspects of the city. These imaginations are experiences through seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling. In this image, Soroush is posing for a photo which he stretches his hand to grab a branch of a tree by the river. He explained that this would represent his goals in life. His performance here is emblematic of his migration route, coming to Ireland from Tehran to study on a doctoral course.

Soroush's description of how he finds his body through these noises, smells, feelings and touches in the city, is an indication that his prior presence within the city is not that important in constructing knowledge about places, but it is his bodily attachments to these ongoing feelings from before migration transposed to post migration life, that constructs his experiences of the city as home. He connects these experiences (pre and post migration) through his body. The question that all participants were asked was to take me to a place where they could ‘feel at home’. Not many translated this into such deep embodied placemaking. Some of them like Soroush, Ranit and Mahmoud explored their feelings deeply in relation to pre-migration life and through focusing on locations in Cork that reminded them of their pre migration life and thus a sense of home.

WIBM as spatial

WIBM is used as a method for inhabiting home within a city space. Getting to know the city through walking and revisiting the places, frequent observations of places, contemplating the possibilities that are thought about during walking, are essential components of inhabiting Cork as ‘home’. Walking seemed to be a planned activity but sometimes it became spontaneous where participants either got lost in stories they were telling or were geographically lost in their efforts to take me to the places they had aimed to go. The coordination between narrating events of the past and present geographical navigation was a very difficult venture. The long walks which often took several hours left both of us drained of energy physically and mentally. As well as walking through different scenes, I, as a researcher had to visualise the pre-migration life they were describing and connecting those images to the scene we had in front of us and to ask appropriate questions.

In fact, we often visited places that elicited happy or positive memories of home and the idyllic childhood memories that were also corresponding to locations to Cork. Cork seemed to offer refuge spaces, albeit, mostly when they were engaged in solitary practices. Among these spaces, one particular space, city parks, stood out as inhabited spaces. Ranit, a refugee from Afghanistan, in his late 20s provided an account of home by taking me to Fitzgerald Park, an iconic urban park located in the centre of Cork. The park has fountains, a concert area and is next to the river. It is a popular location by students, families, joggers, and in general urban dwellers. There are normally events such as fairs, concerts, and gatherings throughout the year whilst the rest of the time it offers a quiet and serene atmosphere. Ranit was living in Ireland ‘by mistake’ as he was supposed to claim asylum in the UK (where the rest of his family did) but ended up arriving in Ireland, thinking the two countries were the same. He argued that this park gives him the space to think about his complex life. He said, ‘I would take daily walks in this park to think about my life and future’. Ranit felt he was at home here as according to him, his need for the quiet of the park helped him ‘distancing’ himself from the business of the surrounding streets in Cork town centre where he did not feel much belonging to.

Walking in the city space changes the meanings of the city for migrants. Ranit explicitly mentioned how walking in the park and using the different parts of the park, including this particular bench overlooking the pond, helps him to contemplate his life and his plans for reuniting with his family who live in Manchester. As Matos Wunderlich (2008) argues: ‘like other activities of our lifeworld, walking routinely unfolds over time and space as a result of this pre-reflective knowledge’ (p. 127). Here the park offers a space for Ranit to combine the sense of feeling at home (due to its quiet and distanced environment from the rest of the city) with walking routinely as a rhythmic exercise.

Although Ranit's life routines are formed around these frequent visits to the park, they suggested his sense of unbelonging to Cork simultaneously. As we walked through the park, he mentioned how Cork, as a place of home, does not mean much to him, as he longs to join his family in Manchester. Most of this conversation in the park took place about his family's daily habits such as his mother's cooking and his sister oversleeping in the morning. All of these happen in another country but Ranit was expressing them as if they were present in Cork. Ranit's expressions of longing for this context takes place as he walks alone in this park. Walking can offer a mental space as one can inhabit the space in the present through the act of walking, particularly in a quiet place like the park, the body can find its feet, in another scenario that is not materially here. This is where the WIBM can bring contradictory feelings and actions together: longing for a place that is not here, whilst the body experiences home here and now.

WIBM as tacit knowledge

Finally, the mode of walking and narrating at the same time is the last perspective in the WIBM that I discuss in this paper. Silences and absences in walking methods convey emotions carried within the walking experience. However, as in any narrative research, what is not narrated is as important as what is said. Silences in the narratives, are situated within walks and are accompanied with rhythmic steps. The narration stops whilst walking continues and capturing the dynamics of these two actions together, are important to understanding what walks mean to different participants.

Negassi, from Ethiopia, was a first-year student at university and came from a refugee family. Being 19 he was one of the two youngest participants. He was silent most of the time during our walk. His experience of Cork, was different from other participants, as he saw his residence as a continuation of the other town in County Kerry where his family lived in. Additionally, not having much time and money to explore the city, he said he spends most of his time indoors in student accommodation, and as such he does not know many places in Cork to take me. The financial aspect of exploring the city was not directly mentioned by other participants, but as they all carefully discussed managing their finances, this could include reducing the times they ate out in cafes and restaurants. For Negassi, walking in the city was purposive: it was about getting from point A to B in the shortest amount of time. He was very tall and slim, and walked taking long paces, which meant I was almost running behind him most of the time. His frequent silences, taking direction whilst walking fast, was indicative of his lack of engagement with the city space. At the time, I wrote for myself: ‘Negassi, is studying engineering. He should not be seen as messing around and not studying in Cork by his family’. He says not much of Cork reminds him of Ethiopia, it is more about how his future life will pan out if he gets good grades in his studies. However, he said: ‘There are things that feel familiar, such as people's kindness and the sense of community in Ireland’.

He was very young when he left Ethiopia (around 10). For him, becoming an engineer in Ireland superseded his sense of belonging to his motherland. As such the return to Ethiopia which was planned by his parents was not welcomed by him and his younger brother. He mentioned that he was planning to stay and look after his brother whilst the rest of the family would return. I could feel a plethora of emotions that remained unspoken in this walk and also when we sat down to eat in a fast food restaurant, with affordable prices where he frequented when staying in Cork.

Negassi took me to two places, in the city, whilst on average, I visited around 4–5 places with other participants: a pub close to university where he goes frequently to watch some rugby and soccer matches. The second place was a coffee seller where his mum sends him often to buy proper Ethiopian coffee (that cannot be found for that price in the town where they currently live in Ireland). He experienced some agency by going to the pub to enjoy a match and the coffee seller to show loyalty to his family. Once we were inside the coffee shop, he refused to take a photo of the jar of coffee he normally buys. He just pointed at it. I avoided to take a photo to respect his request in entering the shop and quietly leaving the space; he was aware of the girl in the shop eyeing us.

This short walk was indicative of several tacit knowledge: Negassi walked very fast and in a disconnected way from his surroundings. Additionally, he was very silent during this interview. His style of walk was telling a lot about how much he felt he owned the space of the city. Furthermore, being very young and feeling responsible for his siblings, feeling the pressure of having to look after his younger brother made him so focused on his studies, that it limited his engagement with the city even further. I argue here that mode of walking in WIBM can tell a lot about the meanings that a participant wants to convey offering some deeper knowledge about personal biographies.