Photo-Essay of the Migrant Home: Doing International Political Sociology and Engaging the Other “Other”

Abstract Presented in a photo-essay format, this article highlights the immediacy, simultaneity, and possibility of home and transnational relations. Visualizing European urban spaces as constituted by mundane migratory processes, the photo-essay recognizes the everyday struggles of people who are staying rather than moving. Attention is directed towards the discursive, affective, and material labor of grounding a migrant home. The methodological originality of the photo-essay lies in the unmuting of the scholar's analytical voice. The photo-essay is the process and result of an interlegible dialogue between racialized others. That is to say, I combine the narrative and the visual to study a specific migrant home, and throughout this process, I reserve a voice for myself as I recount the life history of a Cape Verdean and his homemaking projects in Portugal. The visual narrative opens a window onto fieldwork dynamics and invites questions of other “other” learning.