Chapter OCEANS, PLACES & PEOPLE

Ethnographic vignettes and short stories

Oceans, Places & People is the first Chapter of the manuscript. The writing is a subjective, poetic and theoretical collection of stories and encounters between the cities of Calais, Rome and Antofagasta. Oceans, Places & People is a writing experiment in response to the great challenge of representation through fragmented narratives that include field notes, dense descriptions, narratives, poems, short stories and collage texts written by others; I am experimenting with how the stories of the people of The Dzjangal, Tiburtina and Los Arenales can be told. Inspired by the idea of the archipelago as explored by the poet and writer Édouard Glissant (1997). I challenge linear readings by playing with the idea of the fragment and, in this way, approach the multiple ways in which people-in-transit interact with the state of inbetween in everyday life within the border regimen, which this dissertation examines as a whole. Using scraps of memory, encounters and events, I am looking for ways to view everyday life as a holistic narrative and not as a linear, continuous and chronological narrative.

In the first part of this chapter I reflected on the great challenge of representation, seeking a balance between how stories and desires can be told in an accurate, truthful and respectful way. This challenge leads me to explore the individual stories of people and places that are woven as fragments into the symbolic fabric of oceans and seas. Specifically, I turn my attention to the North Sea, the Mediterranean and the Pacific, where the three fieldwork are located. By looking at the oceans and seas from their geographical, natural and cultural aspects, I have been able to find theoretical relationships and connections between past and present histories, places and routes related to colonial heritage and contemporary migration, which has brought me close to the "postcolonial oceans" as a framework to look at the narratives of the people I meet on the field with a holistic lens. This section forms the basis for the second part, in which I examine fragmented narratives as an experimental approach to the process of ethnographic writing in the spirit of an ‘archipelago form’ (Glissant,1997). Inspired by the stylistic and visual forms of graphic novels, the fragments in this section, while curated as a whole, are nevertheless written individually and resonate with the preceding and subsequent parts. The different text types can be read as intersecting rather than linear (Garland, Maier, Taleb, 2023), tensioning the classic linear narrative and making it active, mobile and dynamic. I attempt to capture on paper the multi-layered and simultaneous sense of encounters that a researcher experiences during fieldwork.