An introduction to “Migration Stories” by Laura Bisaillon

What do five Canadian women with kinship ties to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

In this special collection, contemporary experiences with human movement and circulation across borders, both material and conceptual, are analysed. The features of these movements—what they look and feel like, and what opportunities and challenges mobilities impose on people on the move—are examined ethnographically from five distinct perspectives. These perspectives come from five thoughtful young women: Danica Bui, Fatema Motiwala, Fatima Haque, Nawrose Khan and Sarah Syed, all of whom grew up in immigrant homes in the eastern suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area, Canada.

The broad aim of this series is to problematize the ways in which cultural, political and spatial boundaries produce tensions for migrants and their kin starting within routine, perhaps overlooked, and otherwise taken-for-granted situations of daily life. This focus on the social, where people are not the objects of analysis per se, situates this series within the social organization of knowledge approach in sociology (Smith, 2006). The strategy of confronting the problems of biography, culture, history, structure and their intersections by beginning in the conditions and concerns that we see, hear about, or which impact on us, connects this volume within the sociological imagination approach (Mills, 2000).

From Practice to Theory—and Back Again

The five contributing authors were fourth-year undergraduate students in my Migration and Public Health course, which convened from September to December 2018. A delightfully dialogical and intimate seminar-style class, I have offered it for the past four years at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Through it, students emerge with better understandings of ideas in diaspora, emigration, forced migration and immigration studies. They engage with the humanities and interpretive and critical social sciences’ literatures. In my teaching, I foreground scholarship produced by Canadian or Canadian-trained scholars. I am strongly committed to having students know and immerse themselves in the preoccupations and priorities that scholars in their home society have studied and debated rather than those imported from U.S. society, for example.

Through this twelve-week course, students gain awareness about social processes that underlie, produce, and sustain human movement across time, space and place. They engage with migration histories—their own and those of their kin, those of their classmates and me, and other people beyond their immediate experience whose lives they only know through the refraction of the media’s lens. Finally, students develop new and socially situated knowledge for thinking about how migrants experience criminal, education, immigration, legal, and medical systems in Canada and beyond by examining how migrants interact with these institutions.

By the end of term, students develop the ability to answer questions such as:

What themes surface again and again in the migration literature? How do classification systems such as state health and demographic registries shape how we understand migrants and ourselves? How do gender, health status, racialization, sexual orientation, and social class influence migration experience?

For the culminating project, students produce auto-ethnographic analyses. This form of analysis starts a social researcher in problematics that are compelling to them (Portelli, 2017; Riggan, 2014; Taber, 2012). This is the springboard for exploration into and critique of cultural, political and spatial relations, and in this collection, those that are germane to contributors’ lives as migrants or offspring of migrant parents. Importantly, students learn to produce re-search—as distinct from me-search—where they connect the dots between private troubles and social problems: tethering their ideas to those of researchers in anthropology and sociology (Anton, 2013; Bernal, 2017; Bisaillon et al., forthcoming; McCoy, 1995), education and social work (Sakamoto, Chin & Young, 2010; Shan, 2013), and history (Calliste, 1993; Eidinger, 2014; Gabaccia, 2010; Iacovetta, 1995; Spagnuolo, 2016).

Anthropologist Shahram Khosravi’s (2010) non-fiction ‘Illegal Traveller’: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders is the intellectual centerpiece for this course and its textbook. On offer is a deeply poetic, personal and incisive critique of the nation state system. Khosravi argues that since this system causes demonstrable harm—as the events of his life and the lives of others storied into this book, living and dead, testify—, it must be dismantled. Because this system presses down most harshly on people in the social margins, his arrow is aimed at talking back to how racialized and working class people, and those who belong to language, ethnic and religious minorities, among other groups, are positioned to experience borders and bordering practices troublingly. ‘Illegal Traveller’’s topical focus and evocative narrative form, and the author’s use of social theory to frame his fieldwork, have made this book a strong resource for students; a fine example that helps students figure out what to say, how to say it, and how to use social theory in their essays.

From Asia to North America

In the first essay, “From Vietnam to Canada,” Bui recounts a 2017 trip to Vietnam with her brother, Allan, and father, Duong. We learn of her and her father’s shared love of photography, and in her essay, she includes two of her own photographs and one her father took on this trip. Using digital cameras, they have captured a specific setting (domestic compound), people (father and brother), and a structure (family home). She uses silent and spoken interactions behind the lenses, the materiality of the setting, and the discursively organized features of her father’s story telling about his complicated relationship with Vietnam and also the numerous other countries through which, in forced flight, he needed to transit, until eventually settling in Canada. Her essay is meditative and artful. Through it, we are privy to a story within a story: a father talking to his children about what it was like to grow up in this home, and a daughter interpreting her father’s fraught relationship with this place. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Bui muses, her father seems to find rootedness in mobility and transience and also in the anchoring that a structure such as a house is conventionally thought to bring.

“Language Past, Present and Future” is Motiwala’s essay that situates us in fifteenth century India with the origin story of her ethnic group, Memon, and language, Kutchi. She descends from a long line of Muslim “sailor businessmen” who migrated into Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and more recently, North America. Motiwala problematizes the gains and losses of permanent migration. Specifically, she asks questions about the Kutchi language, which is entirely oral and currently without an alphabet, and the possibilities for its continued existence beyond the present. Her carefully crafted concerns are fully existential: she identifies language as the purveyor of cultural practice. We follow along as she questions, and tentatively imagines, the implications of a language being forgotten. These issues are discussed by Memons around the world. She argues that Kutchi must be preserved. While the position is understandably sentimental, given that her mother tongue might well run extinct, it raises concerns that scholars of the politics of minority languages and memory studies have long debated. Motiwala draws on these literatures, presenting original ideas about remedial steps that she suggests could assist Memons to re-engage with and re-learn their historic language.

“The first time I recall seeing my father nervous was at the U.S./Canada border.” This is the opening sentence in Haque’s essay, “From Asia to North America.” Racialized people, those working without official paperwork in the European Union, Canada or the United States, for example, and people with passports issued by countries other than the latter have felt the profound sense of trepidation she describes. They have lived or will live similar situations because of how they look or the socially organized impotency of their passport (Torpey, 2000). Social otherness is the ideological concept organizing this essay. The social suffering of being ‘othered’ as a form of social violence is its empirical ground (Said, 1994). A religiously observant Pakistani Muslim, Haque and her kin continue to find post 2001 hostilities toward Muslims difficult, which has shaped their choices about where and how to live. To illustrate, she discusses decisions that she and her mother have taken about performing religious rituals (praying, fasting) and using religious artifacts (prayer mat, hijab). Through Fatima’s eyes, we see religiosity as part action, part reaction. In her lifetime, religious activities have produced calm, coherence, continuity and community connection.

���󲹲�’s “Growing up in a Bengali Kitchen” opens with a scene of her returning home to the smell and sight of her mother preparing a meal for the family to break fasting together. Situating herself in the everyday, she turns to examining food and “what we cook and eat at home.” Specifically, she studies the shil batta, which, in Bangla, means grinding stone. We learn that this tool is a key component of the family kitchen. Symbolically, it connects them with people and practices in Bangladesh. Through conversations with her parents, she explores how this item was used in their respective childhood homes, while also reflecting on how the family uses it now. She juxtaposes her younger and older selves in a discussion about growing confident about social difference, manifest in food culture, juxtaposed against an ideological or so-called “Canadian culture.” While it might be possible to read this essay as a coming-of-age story (and since she tells a good ethnographic story, the reader is in for a treat), its value, rather, lies in what we learn from ���󲹲�’s absorbing analysis of social belonging and tensions and contradictions it triggers in a migratory context.

Finally, Syed’s essay, “A Song for my Mother” is a tribute to her mother who left the Philippines alone and settled in Canada when she was about Syed’s age. In asking her mother to share details of her migration experiences, Syed learns about, and is moved by, all of the big and small effort and incredible challenges the process involved for her mother; seeing her as the woman she was in the years before becoming Syed’s mother. (Other students have experienced and reflexively analyzed this combination of surprise, attending to and illumination in the past years, with the mother-daughter and father-son relation, most commonly contemplated; see Lepucki, 2017 for a daughter’s homage to her mother’s womanhood.) Being a singer and songwriter, she takes guitar in hand to create an original audio-visual musical composition that she includes as part of her essay. Through interpretation of the lyrics, included herein, she contests the ‘us versus them’ binary for how it fails to acknowledge human interdependence, which hitches her work to the critical migration literature. Further, she disputes the concept of ‘vulnerable’ as applied in de facto fashion to migrants. Her mother’s socially ascribed vulnerability has actually revealed itself in qualities such as increased openness, receptivity and empathy, which Syed argues are the attributes we must prize in migrants and us. A mature and humanist contribution, her piece makes a unique methodological contribution.

From Classroom to Media Lab

It has given me abundant joy to see how auto-ethnography as a methodological strategy has alighted students’ imaginations and enlivened their ability to arrive at nuanced considerations about the ‘hot button’ topic that migration has become in the last years. The maturity and quality of student work has very often exceeded my expectations. My hunch about why students have responded so well to this approach and the course’s topical focus is multilayered.

Part of what students must do is work reflexively and in cooperation with each other inside and outside of the classroom. This sees them nestling down into several ideas, identifying passages and words that stir them, for whatever reason, rather than surveying the literature. Individually and together, then, they rehearse their ideas orally and in writing, which invites and makes way for them to contemplate deeply rather than superficially. What is more, Bui, Motiwala, Haque, Khan and Syed care about the people, places and politics they investigated ethnographically. Working from inside their homes in an outward direction, they became exhilarated to realize that scholarly inquiry can, indeed, begin from situations of everyday life. Specifically, from those things which are bothersome or unresolved. As they come to see, the questions they set out to explore have, actually, been nagging at them for some time, as latent features of their lives. Something wonderful and unexpected, for me, is how, through the sequenced assignments, students engage their relatives intellectually: they mobilize course concepts and pursue lines of questioning that, until then, they report, were underexplored, if explored at all. In fact, students devour Khosravi’s book. They read it from cover to cover, in record time, and come to class describing how its ideas informed discussions with their kin precisely because they saw themselves and the experiences of their families, as classed, ethnic, linguistic, racialized, or religious minorities, in its pages.

Finally, we propose this collection as both a scholarly and activist endeavour. It was birthed from an iterative, behind-the-scenes process that began alongside ten other classmates with whom contributing authors shared their earliest ideas about what appears herein. Our process drew together a seasoned researcher (me) who taught five fledgling social researchers (Bui, Motiwala, Haque, Khan, and Syed) to exercise scholarly skills of supporting argumentation, organizing ideas, and writing a good ethnographic story, in parallel with social competencies such as patience, perseverance, and intellectual humility; all necessarily deployed within scholarly publishing. From January to July 2019, we convened working meetings in person and via computer screens, while making productive use of materials within the course’s Facebook page (). I started this public page in 2016 as a way of building and maintaining communication with my students both during the period they are enrolled in my classes, and often for a year or more afterward. In cultivating epistemic communities topically organized by course ideas, I aim to strengthen students’ sense of connection to their university, while also demonstrating to them, through the sharing of ideas that happens on this page, that education is a life-long, effortful and enriching process. These forums also serve as valuable living repositories of course-related materials where students past and present and scholarly colleagues from around the world provide nourishing content. What is more, this translocal engagement sustained over time stands to help me realize a longer-term goal: to curate a collection of essays by successive generations of students in this class. In sum, in the footsteps of a long line of feminist scholars who have come before us, the six of us took time to listen to each other, accept ambiguity, mature ideas, and exchange draft writing in several rounds (Bisaillon et al., forthcoming; Greenhalgh, 2019); intentionally making the most of “the tools of social science, friendship, and the power of conversation” (Mountz 2016, p. 207) to produce a series more valuable than the sum of its parts.

This volume is simultaneously activist and subversive. It presents original analysis that valorizes social standpoint. Importantly, contributors show understanding of the value of training oneself away from employing a theoretically over-determined stance because it can and often does elide experiential knowledge. Instead, as my of program of research and these essays demonstrate, a materialist starting point, one which detects and bravely tackles social problems head on, carries the potential to matter for people experiencing social marginality, be these other people or ourselves, since it gets at the heart of what is amiss. Lastly, this series conceives of the undergraduate classroom as a site of knowledge co-production.

In closing, a key challenge to which the authors rose masterfully was to fuse critical and creative ways of knowing on the one hand (Finn, 2015), while engaging poetically and politically (in a world tilted painfully to the right) on the other. In envisioning this series, our desire, Danica, Fatema, Fatima, Nawrose, Sarah and my own, was to evoke and reveal the world we inhabit in thoughtful and novel ways. We hope that our readers will agree that we have succeeded in our mission.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to �Ӱ�ԭ�� University Professor Merlyna Lim, Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society, along with Kathy Dobson, doctoral candidate and author (With a Closed Fist and Punching and Kicking), of the Alternative Global Network Media Lab. As the project’s earliest enthusiasts and steadfast supporters, their intellectual and editorial leadership were mighty valuable and very much appreciated.

References—Suggested Reading List

Anton, L. (2013). On Memory Work in Post-Communist Europe. A Case Study on Romania’s Ways of Remembering its Pronatalist Past. Anthropological J of European Cultures, 18(2), 106-122.

Bernal, V. (2017). Diaspora and the Afterlife of Violence: Eritrean National Narratives and what goes Without Saying. American Anthropologist, 119(1), 23-34.

Bisaillon, L., Montange, L., Zambenedetti, A., Frasca, P., El-Shamy, L., & Arviv, T. Everyday Geographies, Geographies in the Everyday: Mundane of Mobilities Made Visible. ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies (forthcoming).

Bisaillon, L., Cattapan, A., Driessen, A., van Duin, E., Spruit, S., Anton, L., & Jecker, N. Doing Academia Differently: ‘Needing Self-help Less than a Fair Society’. Feminist Studies (forthcoming).

Calliste, A. (1993-94, Winter). Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Caribbean, 1900-1932. Journal of Canadian Studies, 28(4), 131-148.

Eidinger, A. (2014). Looking Jewish: Embodiment of Gender, Class, and Ethnicity among Ashkenazi Women in Montreal, 1945-1980, Social History, 47(95), 729-746.

Finn, P. (2015). Critical Condition: Replacing Critical Thinking with Creativity. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press.

Gabaccia, D. (2010). Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter? The Pluralist 5(3), 5-31.

Greenhalgh, T. (2019). Twitter Women’s Tips on Academic Writing: A Female Response to Gioia’s Rules of the Game. Journal of Management Inquiry, 18, 1-4.

Iacovetta, F. (1995). Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities, and Defiant Domestics: Writing about Immigrants in Canadian Historical Scholarship. Labour/Le Travail, 36(Fall), 217-252.

Khosravi, S. (2010). ‘Illegal Traveller’: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan.McCoy, L. (1995).

Lepucki, E. (2017, May 10). Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them. The New York Times Opinion. Retrieved from

McCoy, L. (1995). Activating the Photographic Text. In M. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.),  Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations (pp. 181-192). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Mills, C. (2000 [1959]). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Mountz, A. (2016). Women on the Edge: Workplace Stress in Universities in North America. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 60(2): 205-218.

Portelli, J. (2017). Xewqat tal-Passa/Migrant Desires. Qormi, Malta: Horizons Malta.

Riggan, J. (2014). Biopolitical Departures: A Love Story. Journal of Narrative Politics, 1(1), 44-60.

Said, E. (1994 [1979]). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Sakamoto, I., Chin, M., & Young, M. (2010). ‘Canadian Experience,’ Employment Challenges, and Skilled Immigrants: A Close Look through ‘Tacit Knowledge.’ Canadian Social Work Journal 10(1), 145-151.

Shan, H. (2013). The Disjuncture of Learning and Recognition: Credential Assessment from the Standpoint of Chinese Immigrant Engineers in Canada. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 4(2), 189-204.

Smith, D. (ed.). 2006. Institutional Ethnography as Practice. Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.

Spagnuolo, N. (2016). Defining Dependency, Constructing Curability: The Deportation of ‘Feebleminded’ Patients from the Toronto Asylum, 1920-1925. Histoire sociale/Social History, 49(98), 125-154.

Taber, N. (2012). Beginning with the Self to Critique the Social: Critical Researchers as Whole Beings. In L. Naidoo (Ed.), An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors. London, UK: InTech Publisher.

Torpey, J. (2000). The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The post Becoming Migration Researchers: Disquieting Borders with Auto-Ethnography appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Danica Bui

In July 2017, my family and I returned to Vietnam, thirteen years after our last visit together. Once we were there, my father, Duong Bui, took us to his childhood home. This was the house in Saigon was where he lived since birth and had remained there until he became a refugee and fled Vietnam. His mother, siblings, and their families continued to live in the house after he left the country. I had been there previously, but the house behind it underwent a complete renovation, so I did not know what to expect. The house itself is not in use anymore, but at the time of his childhood, it contained everything he had. It holds great sentimental value to my family members who had lived there. The house has been a part of the family since my grandparents and aunts and uncles moved from Northern Vietnam to Saigon in the 1950’s to escape the communist regime that followed Vietnam’s establishment of independence from France.

Living in a “home” or a “house”?

Globalization and the conflict within and between nations can, and often does, drive people away from their places of origin. They leave to other places that they believe will provide them with better opportunities. Vietnam is a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing country, and it is currently undergoing a demographic shift. The way that people live, their buying power, and their social conditions of the Vietnamese people are changing in all sorts of ongoing ways. While the country has undergone an almost unrecognizable transformation since the 1970’s, artifacts remain to remind and connect us to a time before these social shifts.

Houses are not always considered to be homes, and this especially applies to my father, who has inhabited a succession of houses worldwide but has only retained sentimental value to one. When my father was growing up, he told stories about his refugee experience and his worldwide travels. He was born in 1955 and lived there until he escaped the communist regime in the late ‘70s. The nation of Vietnam at present is no longer the country in which he grew up in. The Communist Party of Vietnam is still in power. The name of the city has been changed from Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, after the previous Prime Minister of Northern Vietnam. It was previously the capital city of Southern Vietnam, but Hanoi became the capital city of Vietnam when the south fell. To my father, home for him is where his kin live. Therefore, where we, his children, are. Home, in his interpretation of the idea, is not attached to a house or a country. Rather, home is the memories made in a specific space at a specific moment in time.

Ideas about “home” using photographs

My father’s hyper-mobility has resulted in us having and keeping few material objects in our home. The possessions we have are all relatively recently acquired. They do not carry a lot of sentimental value for me. The objects that we have in our home do not remind us of where my family is from, historically. The absence of physical objects might be why my father and I are interested in photography as a pastime. Growing up, we had many photographs that we used to look at and reminisce about. Due to our quasi-nomadic lifestyle, the photographs have been given to family members for safekeeping. Digital photos are more portable, and the photos that my father took over time he keeps backed up on a large flash drive.

Sociologist Liza McCoy (1995) explores the subjectivity of photographs and politicized function of photography. Her point that the way a photo is perceived depends on social and historical contexts that one is embedded in plays out in the three photographs of my father’s childhood house. Photographs are not necessarily understood as artifacts, but a moment in life captured on film cam tell a lot about the photographer. How we think and talk about photos can give is interesting insight about others (and us) as viewers, too.

I had not revisited these photos until I embarked on an assignment for Migration and Public Health, which was titled “Private and Public Artifacts Related to Migration.” In this paper, I delve into the significance of my father’s childhood home and the different ways we took photographs of the house. This paper had me searching my house for material objects that could be tied back t my family’s migration journey. I had thought long and hard about the object that I wanted to use as my artifact, because we do not have any material objects that are of sentimental value. As I was scrolling through my phone, I came across the photos that I took, and that was when I saw that my father was also taking photographs as well. From there, I decided to look around our home for the photo he had taken. When I found the photo, I decided that it would be interesting and analytically valuable to compare the photos I had taken with those that my father had taken.

Like the McCoy piece states, photos are subjective and the way we perceive photographs are shaped by the social norms ingrained within us (McCoy, 1995). Two of photos are ones that I took of my father and his old house, and the other photo is the photo that he took, while I was taking a photo of him. Both of the photos that I took were taken on my phone, while his was taken on his DLSR camera, hence the discrepancy in photo quality and colour.

Photography is a useful way to develop insights about culture, social norms, and the perspective of the photographer and the viewer. The perspective of my father, the photographer, is important. It shows how he sees it, in the composition, lighting, and field of vision of his choosing. The first two photographs (Photos 1 & 2) are representative of my perspective of the house. My perception of the house is quite impersonal, so my father was always the primary subject of the photos. The house served as a secondary subject in the photographs that I took. I saw it as the house my father and his family lived in because they were poor; nothing more. In contrast, however, my father took great care in capturing the photograph, commemorating his home. I had, rather haphazardly whipped out my phone to snap a few quick photographs before the moment was over.

Through my father, I developed a deeper understanding of the importance of his childhood house. Speaking to my aunt and cousins that also used to live in the house gave me deeper insight into how hard my family has worked to retain and maintain the house, even from other family members. Although my father enjoys storytelling, he does not really reveal that much of his inner life. The subjectivity of my father’s photo (Photo 3) is important: it shows how he sees it, in the composition, lighting, and field of vision that he of his choosing. Photos are subjective and the way we perceive photographs are shaped by the social norms that surround us, as I came to learn through reflecting on McCoy’s (1995) ideas. Two of the photos are ones that I took of my father and his childhood house, and the other photo is the photo that he took, while I was taking a photo of him. One photograph is of my father is showing my brother the house (Photo 1). There is not a lot to show, physically, but he reminisces about his ten family members that shared the house, his neighbors, and the area back in the 50s-70’s.

I used my phone camera to take the photos. I wanted to be discreet and to take the photos without my father noticing. My intention was to capture the moment he saw his childhood house with his children during a genuine, candid moment. In contrast, he brought his backpack with all his camera gear and lenses to take pictures of the house. This was his first time back in over five years, and he took his time taking the photo. He adjusted the shutter speed, aperture, and exposure. He wanted to capture his house in what he thought was the best way possible.

Before and after 1975, experiencing a “double absence”

It is valuable to set my father’s story into a socio-political context. Two separate waves of emigration, multiple collective memories, the Việt Kiều, and the American Vietnamese media shape the Vietnamese diasporic perspective. The Vietnamese diaspora in North America is a layered society. Chinese and French colonialism, Western intervention, and war resulted in high mobility inside and outside of Vietnam. The “double absence” concept explored by Khosravi (2011) can be seen in the Vietnamese diaspora. They are simultaneously detached from or not accepted by the country that they live in and are absent from their country of origin. Like other communities dispersed globally, mass emigration was the result of conflict. The first large emigration movement followed the 1954 Geneva conference that separated North and South Vietnam into separate states. A wave of northern Vietnamese people emigrated to the south to escape the communist regime. My father’s family was among those that left the north. My grandmother was pregnant with him, and he was born in Saigon, and lived in his childhood home since birth. In 1975, when the Vietnamese communist party won the war, massive structural changes throughout the country.

The capital city of southern Vietnam is Saigon. It had fallen under communist rule. The diasporic group that the war produced is, generally speaking, strongly anti-communist. People have a strong nationalist orientation to a place that, actually, no longer exists politically (Vietnamese Diaspora – Part 1 – Oct 2000, 2008). “Home” as these people know it, therefore, no longer exists as long as the communist regime stays in place. Many of my family and family friend’s stories begin with “before ‘1975” or “after ’1975.” The refugees of the Vietnam War hold onto sentiments of a past version of Vietnam that no longer exists. Their practices of Vietnamese culture remain the same even after they leave Vietnam. Their Vietnamese language, beliefs, and values are held even once they integrate into their host country’s society. This can lead to disconnection between both cultures for the diaspora, or a “double absence” (Khosravi, 2011). They are detached from or not accepted by the country that they live in and are absent from their home country.

Losing one’s home is a common phenomenon within diaspora groups and is especially apparent in Vietnamese diaspora groups. Mass migration following the Vietnam War disrupted families and the population of the country as a whole. Having to physically leave one’s country of origin, and having the country transform under a new regime renders their previous home completely obsolete.

Yet, my father’s childhood house continues to retain sentimentality and is a physical representation of his upbringing. It connects him to his family, his childhood, and his home country that no longer exists in the same way it did before. The photographs that my father and I took of his house highlights the alternative ways in which we view the artifact, and the way we view our country of origin. Although we both come from the same country and have similar hobbies, our historical life journeys differ greatly. Like his childhood home, still standing strong after many years, his story continues to inspire the younger generation of our family.

References

Khosravi, S. (2011). ‘Illegal’ Traveller. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

McCoy, L. (1995). Activating the Photographic Text. In M. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations (pp. 181-192). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Vietnamese Diaspora – Part 1 – Oct 2000. (2008). [Video]. California.

The post From Vietnam to Canada: Exploring through Photographs, Footprints and Fingertips appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Fatema Motiwala

My Community Origins

When asked that standard question, “Where are you from?” I usually reply, “Oh, I am from an Indian background. I keep it short and sweet. Of course, “Indian” is too general a term to be meaningful. It is a referent to and shorthand for what is actually a people that are from hundreds of different milieus: cultural, linguistic, religious, geographic and other features make “Indian” a sweeping generalization. One of which includes my own community, the ‘Memon’ community: we are an ethnic group that originated from lower Sindh, India.

It was early in the 15th century that 700 families, belonging to the Lohana caste of Hindus, accepted Islam and founded my community. With this conversion came the change of a different lifestyle than those of their forefathers, and the converts came to be known as ‘Memons.’ They created a native language for themselves, known as Kutchi, and integrated with the culture of new lands. Being traders during British colonial rule, Memons migrated to various parts of India, primarily to Gujarat where I was born. Memons have been called the “sailor businessmen of India (Sait, 2014)” who dispersed from Sindh and Gujarat, settling and opening businesses in various Indian cities and faraway regions in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Memons are scattered throughout Africa, though primarily within South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania where the Kutchi language is spoken, and the Memon community is strong.

Being Institutionally Visible and Socially Invisible

My mother tongue is an Indo-Aryan language called Kutchi. For decades, Memon businesses kept their records and documents in the Gujarati script since Kutchi is an unwritten language and can only be learned and communicated orally. For Memons in Pakistan, they write Kutchi in the Urdu script since many have adopted Urdu as their dominant tongue and have no way of physically writing out the Kutchi dialect. Although Kutchi is the historical language of my community, the use of our language is sharply declining because there are fewer people that can speak it each generation. That I speak this language is surprising to community elders I meet. As it happens, Memons my age are not particularly bothered about learning the language, from what I have observed to date. They were also not taught to speak at home. The dominant language of the place in which Memons settle, whether the language is Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, English, or Afrikaans, tends to replace Kutchi.

Language is a way by which people can identify whether a stranger belongs to their community. Speakers of a language can “hear” whether their interlocutor is a native speaker. I believe it is an integral part of our social heritage through which to express ourselves and be understood fully. There is a relationship between language and social order that can be understood through linking the value of language to the value of the resources that matter in society, including economic and political orders and historical events (Heller & McElhinny, 2017). Anthropologist Shahram Khosravi (2011) discusses a ‘double absence’ about his identity in this way,

This demonstrates how the application of linguistics directly reflects one’s own understanding of who they are and where they do or do not belong, whilst symbolizing togetherness and representing powerful ethnic sentiments. Alongside having deep socio-cultural ties, language is intrinsically intertwined with our “paper” visibility which consists of the documentation that allows us to navigate this world; as it is a question that arises on all formal documents and binds an individual to the country they choose to immerse themselves into. Khosravi shares in his writing, upon returning to the border of Sweden, the border required him to live up to his passport. While others pass through, he is “asked some ‘innocent’ questions to prove that he does speak Swedish, that he can identify himself with his passport (Khosravi, 2011).” The idea is that language stimulates belonging in personal and social ways.

Is Kutchi Approaching its Expiration Date?

Without having an official script and therefore, the ability to officially exist, that is to say on paper, I am concerned that the expiration date of Kutchi is soon to come. It is not recognized locally let alone at a state level; never will I be asked to fill out forms or answer questions at the border in Kutchi. It has been suggested that Kutchi is not a language, but rather a “Boli”. This is a Hindi term relegating it to a dialect, which is meant to convey its lower status to a language.

I am not the only one who harbours this concern. Around the world, Memons are expressing their thoughts through informal literature, blog-posts and social media. They want to be heard expressing concerns about their language. One of these advocates is Thaplawala, a blogger. We have to build an interest of Kutchi into new generations. This feeling of pride can only arise if they know Kutchi as a full-fledged language and not simply a Boli. To preserve our identity as a distinct community, we should explore the possibilities of evolving this Boli into a language. Thaplawala writes, “The Saraiki and Hindko speaking people of Pakistan have started to make efforts to preserve their identity by recently turning their Boli into written languages. If so, why can’t we do the same?”

There is solace in realizing that people are advocating for the preservation of our language, and through it, our community. How we speak, the words we choose to use: there are our connections to each other. Her concern of the language disintegration reminds me of the ‘politics of silence’ in anthropologist Victoria Bernal’s research in Eritrea. She discusses experiences that go unspoken and so unheard. The Internet became a way for people to communicate, and Bernal explains, “part of what draws readers and posters to community websites is the sense of communicating with others who know the shared losses and the absent presences” (Bernal, 29).” Drawing from her ideas, I compare my feelings of loss and the ‘shared losses’ of my community people. Will our language continue to exist as time goes on? I am persistently concerned that our language will, actually, disappear. I wonder what I might do about this.

Reflecting on the Implications of “Low Remembering”

Language is one of the cornerstones of any culture. Based on personal experiences, and also exploring the literature on the social purposes of language, language provides us with a social context for people to relate to each other in the ways that they learned from their earliest days. For minority groups, the threat to our cultures presented by the intrusion of outside influences may mean sustaining losses of various sorts. Loss of language undermines social structures and aids the disappearance of group culture, especially where the language is solely dependant on an oral history. As Lorena Anton sums up, “low-remembering often leads to generalized oblivion. In time, even the very idea of a forgotten past is eventually ‘unremembered’. Thus, forgetting the forgotten is the final stage in putting a difficult past aside forever.” Reaching that final stage of being forgotten is what I want the Memon community to avoid, the stories of who we are and where we come from must continue to thrive through our language.

As a solution, Thaplawala suggests that since the Roman script is easy and convenient for writing and communicating, we can possibly use it to write Kutchi. By formulating simple rules and assigning phonetic sounds to letters, we can create a computerized script for Kutchi and this would allow us to send emails to family and friends in our own language. He asks, “Why can’t we think about an adoption of the Roman script for Kutchi? Turkey has done this in the recent past, as well as Indonesia and Malaysia who have adopted Roman scripts for their languages. If we do this, it will be equally readable by Memons living anywhere in the world.”

Converting Kutchi to a written language has not appealed to state leaders in the past. Memons are a minority population in India. We are less than two million people worldwide. If nothing can be done about the preservation of Kutchi at a state level in India, I hope that Memons can encourage their community to actively speak and teach Kutchi.  Otherwise, if the language were to become extinct, would Memons, likewise, cease to exist?

References

Abdur Razzaq Thaplawala. Memon Community and Preservation of Identity. Retrieved November 4, 2018, from http://www.as-sidq.org/

Anton, Lorena. (2009). On Memory Work in Post-communist Europe: A Case Study on Romania’s Ways of Remembering its Pronatalist Past. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. 18. 106-122. 10.3167/ajec.2009.180207.

Bernal, V. (2017), Diaspora and the Afterlife of Violence: Eritrean National Narratives and What Goes Without Saying. American Anthropologist, 119: 23-34. doi:10.1111/aman.12821.

Heller, M., & McElhinny, B. S. (2017). Language, colonialism, capitalism. University of Toronto [Ontario] Press.

Khosravi, S. (2011). Illegal traveller: an auto-ethnography of borders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nasreen Sattar Sait. (2014). The Memons of Kutch. Hyderabad: Safina Towers.

The post Language Past, Present and Future: Being Memon, Expressing Life in Kutchi appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Fatima Haque

‘Illegal Citizen’

The first time I recall seeing my father nervous was at the U.S. – Canada border. I had noticed this in the apprehension that overtook him as our car approached the border. The process was always the same. While waiting in queue we would begin our routine procedure of concealing: our book full of duas (prayers) into the glove compartment, our janamaz (prayer mat) under the seat, and nervousness with fake self-assurance. When we would reach our turn, my father would hand over five passports with faded gold lettering, three inscribed “United States of America” and two inscribed “Canada”.

Although we carried active and valid passports, questioning was always centered on how we came to obtain the passports and what made us eligible. While we met the legal regulations of obtaining citizenship and owning passports, for my brothers and I through birth right and for my parents through two decades of living, working, and paying taxes in the U.S. and Canada, we would also face social regulations which became visible and tangible at the border. The routine procedure of concealing our daily objects hid away the facets of my family considered foreign – which decidedly were the objects that made us feel like we belonged.

Moving to North America in the mid-1990s after living in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia triggered my parents to consider their positions in a society with differences in cultural practices. They moved from two countries that held Islam at its core to a country that had always seen it as the “other” (Said, 1981). Edward Said (1981) explains in Covering Islam that “Islam has always been seen as belonging to the Orientalist”. The ‘Orientalist’ comes from the larger, “different” part of the world in a world that Said describes as “polarized geographically…in two unequal parts, one called the Orient (east), the other, also known as ‘our’ world, called the Occidental (west)” (1981). This ‘othering’ embeds itself deep in legal structures and social awareness and can present hurdles for immigrants as they seek to fit in. My parents came to navigate these social hurdles through the janamaz.

The Janamaz: Analytic “in” to Community  

Islam has five guiding principles that all Muslims must follow and prayer is one of them. Prayers are offered five times a day as a way to remember God throughout the day. It is also an expression of gratitude, a moment of solace, an opportunity for repentance, a meditative exercise, a practice of discipline, and a way to structure one’s day. Other than the mandatory five times a day prayers, there are special prayers at funerals, when making a big decision, during the holy month of Ramadan in which we fast, and on the religious holiday of Eid. I have seen my parents offer all of these prayers. Frequent prayers relate to travelling. When I reflect on my parents’ stories about their travels, Islam is the persistent thread running throughout their stories.

My parents were born and raised in Pakistan. I see Islam as being deeply integrated into Pakistani culture. It informs clothing, values, and economics: interest-free banking is common in Muslim countries (Rammal and Parker, 2013). These realizations led me to consider the material representation of my parent’s values and travels: the janamaz (prayer mat). This mat is where the spiritual and material world converge. At five different points in the day, the janamaz is laid out facing towards the Kaaba – a holy site for Muslims, located in Mecca. This mat is functional as it provides a clean surface to pray on and decorative through the variation of designs, colors and mihrabs. A mihrab is a design in the shape of a semi-circle or a pointed dome like shape that represents the gate to heaven and a directional pointer to the Kaaba (see Appendix B). Most Muslim households have multiple prayer mats, not just for collection purposes but to be able to pray together in large congregations; an essential communal element that helps to create a sense of community.

My parent’s move to the west meant the beginning of an immigration work process. While they were actively creating new existences for themselves, adapting to new ways of life through learning new languages, laws, and where to find halal food, they were also feeling nostalgic. For this reason, they sought out mosques, and enrolled my brother and I into a madrasa, an educational institute that specialized in Islamic education and was held every weekend. There, we learned Islamic history and religious teachings. The mosque is where my parents met and befriended other Muslims. They formed lasting friendships. One mosque was newly renovated. It had a large basement where children would play, events would be held, and parents would chat and sip tea. They communed; meeting weekly after prayers, enjoying each other’s company, discussing topics relating to politics, religion and community work, the next party, tips for newcomers, and more. Praying in a mosque meant togetherness and community that supported my parents in confidently upholding their religious values outside of the mosque and in the face of rising intolerance.

Within my parents’ search for familiarity, they were privy to any indicators of South Asian culture or that someone was Muslim. These indicators were seen visibly, in the form of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab (head scarf) or someone praying publicly. I remember my mother would see a woman in a hijab and say a passing hello or ‘����������’ (peace) to acknowledge their collective belonging to the Muslim community. When we would spend long summer days at the park, someone would bring a large clean sheet to act as a janamaz. The obligatory nature and imperative need to ensure one is completing their daily prayers is the rationale behind seeing a Muslim pray in a park, airport, or mall. While my mother and I, or any other Muslim, would view this as routine, a person unfamiliar to these customs might find them strange.

A Hijab: Deciding to Wear a Veil

My mother decided to start wearing the hijab around the same time she began working for the first time. She held a temporary position at a manufacturing and labelling company for a year before securing permanent employment there. With this employment came a new space for my mother to represent herself. She was the only woman at work who wore a hijab and was visibly Muslim. This had always brought on a series of questions from curious coworkers. She would tell us about the questions her coworkers asked, ranging from “why do you wear that?” to the incredulous “not even water?” during Ramadan. In recounting her stories from work I recall her being confident, willing, and eager to answer questions as both hoping to set an example for my brothers and I and to demystify a religion that can be severely misunderstood.

Living in a post-9/11 world deepened the ‘othering’ Muslims experienced and reframed the Muslim identity into one that was feared. Hate crimes against Muslims in the United States increased exponentially after 9/11, jumping from 28 incidents in 2000 to 481 incidents in 2001 (FBI, 2018). These statistics have never returned to what they were before 9/11 (FBI, 2018). Muslims were harassed physically and verbally on the streets, mosques were defaced, and on a more severe level, many were given detention without charge and faced torture (Alsultany, 2012). This change in climate that every Muslim felt required a thick protective layer of courage. For instance, wearing a hijab in public opened a Muslim woman up to verbal and physical abuse and having her hijab snatched off her head. More recently, the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President gave him a platform to spread his Islamophobic ideologies on a global level. He birthed the idea of a ‘Muslim ban’ and used anti- Muslim rhetoric, connecting the image of Muslims to the words ‘radical’ and ‘extremist’ and claiming ‘Islam hates us’ (Schleifer, 2016). He gained many supporters of this rhetoric which brought a greater increase in hate crimes in the United States in 2016 (FBI, 2018) and fueled similar ideology in Canada. Most recently, Canada’s province of Quebec introduced a secularism bill, Bill 21, banning religious symbols for teachers, police officers, and other public servants (TCRS, 2019). Such a ban introduces legislation which discriminates against hiring and job retention and ultimately limits access to resources for racialized individuals and groups and restricts participation in all aspects of life. Examples of the Muslim Ban and Bill 21 continue to standardize institutionalized discrimination and racism through legal structures (TCRS, 2019). Watching the news, hearing stories, and feeling that ignorance was becoming the attitude of choice toward Muslims, I remember my father once suggesting my mother not wear the hijab to work. Despite his worry, she continued to wear it and I thought about how my mother came to the decision of wearing a hijab in the face of intolerance.

While not uncommon for Pakistani women to cover their head, many of my mother’s friends and family did not. When I asked her about why she decided to put it on, she said it was something she always wanted to do. I considered the confidence that backed my mother’s decisions to work long labor-intensive hours while fasting and to put on the hijab. Her religious values, and decisions to uphold them, were supported by a confidence that came with finding and belonging to a community. It is a difficult feat to uphold practices that are seen as counter to a mainstream culture, especially one that has within it a demonization of Muslims. In belonging to a community, sharing anxieties and fears, and seeing how others practice, one can feel empowered in their decision to practice and display their religion publicly.

For instance, those that choose to wear a hijab or pray in public have not overcome this demonization but practice courage to practice their religion. This empowerment found through community serves as an important tool to navigate social hurdles.

What are you (and we) Looking at?

Sociologist Liza McCoy’s (1995) essay, entitled “Activating the Photographic Text”, discusses the use of photographs and “the socially organized ways viewers constitute what the photograph shows or is of – that is, on the moment of activating the photograph within a particular discourse”. ‘Activating the text’ in a photograph would place focus on the discourses in operation when one is viewing the photograph. In this same regard, replacing the photograph with a janamaz, there are opposing discourses surrounding it dependent on the viewer. To the Occidental west and in the eyes of border guards, discourse involves ‘othering’ and a connection to a slew of threatening and radical identities. To Muslims and Muslim immigrants, the janamaz elicits dialogue surrounding ideas of community and belonging.

For me, the janamaz brought insight into my parents’ stories and served as an example of not only their courage but also the courage of all Muslims, immigrants, and racialized and marginalized people. Although we are met with opposition through media and systemic legal structures, we still find space, create community, start dialogue and pave our own paths to demand belonging My hopes are that in understanding the deeply embedded ideas that uphold social hurdles and how we navigate them, we can work to disentangle negative perceptions of Muslims and Muslims immigrants.

References

Alsultany, E. (2012). Arabs and Muslims in the media: Race and representation after 9/11. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Concertation table against systemic racism (2019). Bill 21 is a case of systemic racism. Retrieved from

Federal Bureau of Investigation (2018). UCR Publications: Hate Crime Statistics. Retrieved from

McCoy, L. (1995). Activating the photographic text. Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations (pp. 181-192). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Rammal, H., & Parker, L. (2013). Islamic banking in Pakistan: A history of emergent accountability and regulation. Accounting History, 18(1), 5-29. doi:10.1177/1032373212463269

Said, E. (1981). Covering Islam: How the media and experts determine how we see the rest of the world. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Schleifer, T. (2016). Donald Trump: I think Islam hates us. Retrieved from

The post From Asia to North America: Praying Here, There, and Everywhere appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Nawrose Khan

It is late in the evening as I enter our household after work and I am immediately hit with the smell of spices, sounds of the refrigerator being open and shut and the sight of plates neatly placed around our dining table. As expected, even before I see her, my mother, who also just came home from her job, is the one setting up for iftar.

At the time of writing this piece, it is the month of Ramadan, where Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, and also reflect on family and community relations. During iftar, we break the fast with a meal. Being brought up in a Bengali kitchen, this daily ritual is followed by a pattern in our family during this occasion, as most of the time, I join my mother to help her or cook some of the iftar meals on my own for my family.

Paying attention to what we eat, and others eat, at home

The seemingly mundane everyday activities such as making and eating food, is often filled with social, cultural and symbolic meanings. During Ramadan, meals tend to vary in different Muslim countries during iftar time. In our home, traditionally, we make common Bengali items such as chola (cooked chickpeas), daal boras (a kind of lentil fritter) and beguni (sliced eggplants dunked in flour), which is always accompanied by dates, muri (puffed rice), and a mix of different fruits and drinks (Figure 1). As my mother puts the lentil-paste mix combined with onions, spices and green chillies beside the stove, I take it as my cue to start frying them. While I flip the daal boras with the spatula as the texture of each one turns crispy with the oil sizzling, my mom tells me how in the streets of Bangladesh, vendors deep fry snacks for iftar, a taste that she says is hard to find here in Canada. I have not had the opportunity to have iftar foods actually in Bangladesh. However, making iftar dishes and Bengali meals in general with my family here in Canada, is how I feel a connection to my culture and a bond with Bangladesh. This was not always the case.

Growing up, I grappled with feeling a link to my birthplace, and didn’t appreciate or engage in Bengali practices the same way I do now because I wanted to immerse myself into Canadian culture. As an immigrant, there is a sense of needing to integrate into the customs, norms and practices of receiving society to feel accepted. As a result, markers of differences such as ethnic food can leave feelings of stigma, in my experience. I noticed this disjuncture as a child as the food of specific migrant groups, those unfamiliar flavours and customs, become cases of prejudice and “otherness”, despite living in a country that supposedly embraces multiculturalism and relies on the food of different cultures for tourism and economic purposes.

My settlement in Canada and my ethnicity as Bengali, raised between both, affected my understanding of who I am. It also informed my familiarity or not, with Bangladesh. Khosravi (2010), using the descriptions of Lukbkemann, states that, “prolonged resettlement brings about profound transformation in social identities and organization, in socioeconomic practices and expectations and in social life strategies, all of which in turn modify refugees’ own notion of where and what is “home.” (p. 86) These notions can result in similar narratives of migration experience. These narratives of experience allow us to use the self as an entry point within a larger ethnographic context (Taber, 2012, p. 80).

Being on the “inside” looking out

My personal experiences gave me the insider perspective to look at my migration story and acknowledge how it relates to existing literature and understandings of my diaspora group, helping to highlight several important themes, concepts and questions. Due to migrating from their country of origin, many migrants have pursued and maintained ties with their homeland. A strategy has been to look at how migrants keep ties to their original societies through their use of objects.

When my parents immigrated to Toronto, my mother brought along a few pots and pans and some other cooking tools and utensils from Bangladesh with her for the new kitchen. Among a few of the objects, one that notably stood out to me was called a shil batta or shil nora (Figure 2). It was given to her by her father as a gift before she left for Canada. It has been a part of our kitchen ever since. She also used to have one back in Bangladesh when she was growing up, so the shil batta has been part of our family for generations. A shil batta is similar to a mortar and pestle and is usually made out of stone or granite. There are two parts to it. The shil—is the large flat rectangular-like part with a pitted and dotted surface and the batta—is small and pestle-like, almost a roll or pin shape and very hefty. It is used for grinding or mashing different spices and cooking ingredients. Based on my knowledge, this grinding stone method has existed for centuries in South Asian culture as many different groups and religions across India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka use it. Back when our kitchens were not equipped with technological devices such as hand mixers and blenders, people had to process their food using this stone method that required the item to be placed on the heavy stone shil, where it is crushed back and forth by the batta. It is a difficult task in order to make a fine paste due to moving the stone in an appropriate direction continuously. I remember my mother would grind lentils, chepa shutki (a semi dried traditional fermented fish) and spices more than four or five times. The entire process was done by sitting or standing and sometimes bending or hunching her back. The object’s use across time, space and place provides many insights into how it functions as a way for homemaking in both generations of women in our household and our roles in upholding continuing links with the homeland in Bangladesh.

Learning about the shil batta

The shil batta can be interpreted as a social act to study how others activate it as memories and records. Drawing inspiration from sociologist Liza McCoy, who examines ‘looking’ at different discourses, she draws on instances involving mug shots, identity cards and wedding photos to explore how viewers activate the photographic ‘text’. (McCoy, 1995, p. 181).  McCoy’s essay is significant in my writing about how the shil batta can be a site of knowledge when activated. When I placed my version of a visual ‘text,’ the shil batta, on the table for both my parents to observe and talk about, they had one common memory to share. My mom and dad’s first experience with the object was not seeing their mothers use it, something that I had assumed in my mind before the discussion. Instead, both of them talked about how growing up, they had memories of the female workers or maids in their homes that would use it to grind food. Their accounts also provide a window into understanding the formation of traditional gender roles, as I learned that historically women were tasked with food preparation for families and carried the role of transmitting knowledge about cooking from one generation to the next. When I asked my mother, “Why did you bring the shil batta with you to Canada?” she replied, “Because it’s part of our Bengali culture.” The way she interpreted what the shil batta meant to her made me think about a valuable point of entry into examining how society works. In order to mitigate the affects that come with different changes involved in migrating to different countries, immigrants, such as my mother, bring items of their countries, like the shil batta, and cook traditional foods as a way to plant roots in new places and preserve their culture. My mother’s account of the object also included a meaningful record as she explained that the shil batta had a lot of sentimental value to her because every time she would use it here in Canada, she was reminded of her father (who gifted it to her), the food back home and the pleasure she got from using it. She told me how even though workers were the ones who used it, she was always interested and wanted to try it for herself. Once, as a little girl, when the shil batta was left unattended, she ground fried fish before being shooed away by a worker. When she detailed the names of the foods she remembered being prepped, she talked about the smells and tastes. While my mother does not frequently use it, since she relies more on electric mixers or blenders for her day-to-day needs, I asked her why she even needed to use it in the first place. She explained that for certain Bengali dishes, when the ingredients are blended by hand using the shil batta, it is smoother and finer and makes the dishes’ flavour tastier. When she told me this outcome, it made me think about the larger context of Bengali cuisine and what it means to me.

Preparing meals with my mother

Food can play a crucial role in shaping a person’s sense of social belonging. I grew up eating traditional home-made Bengali meals my whole life. Due to being raised in this way, food became part of who I am. I have a lot of memories of when I was younger, waking up to the sounds of my mom working in the kitchen. The first actions of cooking for her involved finding and cutting ingredients and I would know right away what she was making based on the distinct smell from my bed. Out of curiosity, I would poke around the kitchen, asking questions and slowly start assisting her. The practice of chopping, mixing and stirring alongside her in the kitchen became a ritual for me. When my mom prepared a meal, she would share stories about each food, usually memories of how her own mother would make them. These practices created food memories that are linked to habitual memories shaped through repetition. Dicing, serving, offering and sharing foods are memories in repeating everyday or ritual settings (Abarca & Colby, 2016, p. 6). Watching my mother gave me the chance to learn about Bengali ingredients, dishes, spices and methods. This was also a way for me to cultivate my ‘Bengaliness’: by engaging with cultural traditions and forming connections with my mother. She established what was imparted and conveyed to me in the kitchen. And because I was on the accepting end of these teachings, food and cooking became a source for cultural expectations, family values and social norms between mother and daughter.

The use of objects by migrants are a meaningful approach and tool to help explore narratives and act as a way for them to still feel connected to their native countries of origin, representing transnational bonds between people and places. The shil batta is an object that allowed for this concept to be explored, serving as a greater link to Bangladesh, my mother and food. Food can be connected to how social values, norms and ideologies are passed from mother to daughter. Furthermore, practices surrounding food such as food preparation, eating, sharing and giving can be powerful in producing and being a carrier for home, memory, relationships and tradition.

The future of traditional meals

As we clear the table after iftar is completed, my mother heads to the kitchen again to prepare meals for dinner. She likes to make a combination of diverse meals with different ingredients ranging from shak (leafy green vegetables), egg, beef, poultry, fish to chutney with rice and daal (lentils) as the staple dishes. My dad will go to Bengali markets in Toronto and take the time to look for fresh ingredients. It dawns on me what and how we consume has changed since my parent’s time. Ramadan has allowed us to sit and eat together everyday but normally, this habit is difficult with our schedules and some of us like to eat in front of the television. In addition, I find it easier to create food that is less time and money consuming, substituting or removing ingredients and while I love home cooking, I also have a preference for eating out, a practice that my parents did not grow up with. Jennings et al. (2014) found in their research of British Bengali households that while food was place-making and nostalgic at times, it was also a fluid and transformable “cultural site”, actively connecting people to transnational communities and being redefined across space, time and generations (p. 4).

While food is a marker for tradition and belonging and can be passed down from one generation to the next, it is those same future generations that decide how to maintain, conserve or oppose traditional practices and customs. As the next generation adapts and processes, some might not speak the language of their parents or grandparents. I know my proficiency in Bangla is very limited and the recipes learned from my mother are not written down but rather carried on through performative memory, which is past knowledge remembered in the active process of re-enacting (e.g. cooking). This leaves many questions regarding traditional foods being chosen and prepared in the next generation. In what ways, if they are replicated in the future, will food and the practices surrounding it change as migrant lifestyles and ingredients are modified? How will cultural meanings and the significance behind traditional food evolve in the future for migrants?  These changes are inevitable but as I have discovered through my own journey, food and storytelling can be used as important components in learning about and recovering your heritage in the face of uncertainties.

References

Abarca, M. E., & Colby, J. R. (2016). Food memories seasoning the narratives of our lives. Food and Foodways, 24(1-2), 1-8.

Jennings, H., Thompson, J. L., Merrell, J., Bogin, B., & Heinrich, M. (2014). Food, home and health: The meanings of food amongst Bengali Women in London. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 10(1), 1-14

Khosravi, S. (2010). ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. London, UK: Palgrave MacMillian.

McCoy, L. (1995). Activating the Photographic Text. In Campbell M. & Manicom A. (Eds.), Knowledge, Experience, and Ruling: Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge (pp. 181-192). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Taber, N. (2012). Beginning with the Self to Critique the Social: Critical Researchers as Whole Beings. In An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors. INTECH Open Access Publisher.

The post Growing up in a Bengali Kitchen appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Sarah Syed

How do we come to know our parents’ migration stories? What is revealed and not when they talk to us about their lives before they had children? What could motivate someone to leave their home country to an unknown one?

I remember sitting at home pondering such questions about migration. It was at that moment I decided to pick up the phone and call my mother. My mother was born in the Philippines and migrated to Canada when she was twenty years old. Since childhood, it had been a dream of hers to provide support and a better life for her family.

I had begun to ask my mother several questions about her journey to Canada. This led to a two-hour discussion. This discussion instigated my realization that a majority of the public are unaware of the processes that migrants can face in moving to a new country. This lack of awareness may be a factor that has contributed to the anti-migrant rhetoric spread within the media. Such portrayals involve the “othering” of migrants and perceived vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. To challenge these perceptions I was inspired to use music and songwriting as tools to explore my mother’s migration. I was committed to this approach because minority people can go unheard unless we make a point of fore fronting our perspectives. By way of this creative approach, music and storytelling can recast people and bridge emotional distance.

Singing Stories

No Turning Back is a composition that explores the lived experiences of my mother’s migration story. This video combines audio and visual components to uncover a self-reflected auto-ethnographic approach. I chose an auto-ethnographic method to establish rich insight into my mother’s experiences of migration. This approach is beneficial because it allows for “social action” as referred to by Canadian sociologist Nancy Taber (Taber, 2012). Social action encompasses the art of research through a critical approach by way of linking one’s self to the social (Taber, 2012).

With this idea of social action in mind, I engaged in social practice by way of interviewing my mother, encouraging her to share personal insights of her migration journey. I engaged in an unstructured interview with my mother to emulate the flow of an everyday conversation. By asking her open-ended questions, I was able to obtain in-depth responses. In this way, we were able to work in a comfortable and collaborative atmosphere. As a result, the insight I obtained allowed for me to produce lyrics that emphasized strong human emotions. The audio-visual discourse method was used in order to involve this dialogically interactive process. In this regard, artistic mediums serve as more than just a visual representation but rather, a social practice that involves engagement between the creator, the subject, and the viewer. Through this social process, I was able to work collaboratively with my mother to write her story into lyrics, providing viewers and listeners with a deeper understanding of my mother’s migration story through an interactive process. Through analyzing my mother’s stories of migration I was able to share her journey by recreating imagery of experience rather than simply retelling layers of the past.

As I listened to my mother talk about her past, I became aware of recurring themes. The lyrics and video for No Turning Back reveal themes of embodying vulnerability as a strength and the ‘othering’ of migrants.

No Turning Back

Perceived Vulnerability as a Strength

To start, the theme of embodying vulnerability as a strength is apparent throughout this composition. Such lyrics include, “I’ll keep my head held high through sacrifice” and “my journey made me strong.” To provide further background to these lyrics, it is significant to mention my mother’s upbringing in the Philippines. My mother experienced poor living conditions and extreme poverty. She was raised in a small hut, shared with her three siblings, mother, father, and cousins. This confined space was not easy to live in. Food had to be rationed in small portions so that everyone was able to eat – “you get what you get and you don’t complain” was a quote that my mother had told me. Although she did not have much, she had her family. She channeled her love for her family into strength by way of trading in the comfort and familiarity of her home with the possibility of providing them with financial resources and a better life. Thus, she departed the Philippines and was driven to migrate to Canada to achieve her ultimate goal.

When my mother decided to migrate to Canada she had no prior knowledge or social connections to the country. Despite this, she braved her way through her challenges and remained motivated on the basis of helping her family. These challenges involved difficult processes with several institutions, leaving her family behind for years, adapting to a new social context – from learning a new language to culture and customs, exhaustively working multiple jobs, and creating social networks on her own – despite having established social networks in the Philippines.

These sacrifices and her hard work emphasized resiliency and adaptability. My mother’s experiences highlight characteristics that migrants often display. These include hard work, resilience, adaptability, and strength. My mother’s experiences symbolize the human strength and courage that migrants encompass in the face of uncertainty – crossing borders and leaving the familiarity of home (Khosravi, 2010). However, at the same time, migrants embrace this position of vulnerability and uncertainty as a strength by way of adapting into a world of the unknown and making it known (Bisaillon, 2018). After having lived and worked in Canada for several years my mother has been able to create a new place to call home, even though it was once an unfamiliar country.

Contesting Binary: “Us versus Them”

A recurring theme in No Turning Back is the ‘othering’ migrants. This theme was carried out in discussion with my mother which I deliberately emphasize in the lyric, “no us versus them”  written in the bridge of the music composition. Through propaganda and media at large, depictions of migrants have a tendency to portray them as outsiders. Common labels of migrants that contribute to the persistence of the us versus them dualism include the use of terms such as, “invaders” or “foreigners” to describe migrants. Such labels encompass society’s common view of migrants being seen as an ‘other’ (Khosravi, 2010).

To contest this divide, the lyric I have written is decisively placed in the bridge of the song to accentuate the need for the bridging of an inclusive environment, stemming away from the ‘us versus them’ dualism that persists in today’s perceptions of migrants. To draw upon inspiration, a poem written by English poet Lemn Sissay, emphasizes the idea of a ‘multi-local world’ – one in which fruits and products are imported from varying countries around the world (Sissay, 2016). Here, the binary of ‘us and them’ is not applicable because the interconnectedness of our world perpetuates the sole entity of ‘us’- human beings working together to form one inclusive world.

When my mother began to work in Canada, she built social networks with diverse groups of people. Over the years, she has formed many friendships with people from countries such as China, India, Greece, and Spain to form inclusive networks in Canada. These inclusive networks have lead to the exchange of cultures such as sharing foods that originate from different parts of the world and expressing different languages. As such, Canada and countries around the world have been shaped into one entity of ‘us’ through the collaborated labor and practice of various individuals originating from distinct countries. This mindset of an inclusive world is highlighted throughout my music composition of my mother’s migration story by illustrating the belief that human beings are all connected through the practices of human emotion and desires. My mother’s migratory experiences involved moments in which she felt pain, happiness, and the desire to strive for success. These are examples of characteristics that all humans experience and consequently, bind ‘us’ together into one entity.

Final Thoughts

My mother’s migration story sheds light on the journey of a migrant and the hard work and resilience that she exemplifies. By way of constructing the music composition No Turning Back I hope to spark a conversation about migrants and highlight the human emotions of migratory practice. I use music as a medium to evoke emotion for listeners and readers so that they are able to understand the stories of migrants and relate to such people. We can challenge some of those negative portrayls of migrants – such as being represented as “vulnerable” or an “other” –by the reality that migrants actually build up strength in the face of uncertainties and are the main drivers of the multi-local world of today.

References

Bisaillon, L. (2018). Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge, by Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles| Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, by Michel Agier. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 34(1), 82-84.

Khosravi, S. (2011). ‘Illegal’ Traveller. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sissay, L. (2016). Gold from Stone Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin Canongate.

Taber, N. (2012). Beginning with the self to critique the social: Critical researchers as whole beings. In An ethnography of global landscapes and corridors. IntechOpen.

The post A Song for my Mother: No Turning Back appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Kathy Dobson

Credit: Arisirawan’s Blog

After Viktoria Marinova, a journalist with a television station in Bulgaria, was appointed host of a new current affairs show, she vowed that the show would focus on corruption and her increasing concern about the lack of journalistic freedom in her city.  The first episode, which featured a story about two journalists investigating alleged corruption of EU funds, would turn out to be the last. Just hours after going for one of her regular runs along the river, Marinova’s body was discovered on a nearby path, brutally beaten, raped and murdered. Local authorities still claim a lack of evidence to suggest her murder was the result of her investigative journalism, however, as an article in  points out, Marinova’s murder “.” And it’s not just female reporters facing violent attacks.

According to  As part of this new war on the press, repressive regimes are not only keeping close tabs on what journalists are reporting on: if they read or hear about something they do not like, they quickly target the messenger. Attacks on journalists can have a chilling effect on everyone’s freedom of expression, yet according to  The Washington Post isn’t the first to raise the alarm with dire predictions about the safety of journalists. 

At the 28th World Congress of the International Federation of Journalists in 2013, Alan Pearce said that being a journalist is now more dangerous than ever.

Pearce says

) expressed similar concerns about the passing of anti-terrorism law , which they argue contributes to the increasingly restrictive environment that journalists have to operate within.  In a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, RSF expressed their concerns about the Bill, claiming a lack of government transparency and it being a “.” RSF pointed out multiple press freedom violations in Canada, including an Ontario judge ordering a VICE NEWS reporter to turn over all communications between him and a source to the RCMP “.” 

In light of increasing concerns about surveillance and the restrictions placed on journalists by both state and other actors, the dark web – that portion of the deep web that is intentionally hidden and inaccessible through regular browsers – might offer more than just a secret space for nefarious activities. In addition to cloaking those illegal activities online from prying eyes, what about those sources who put themselves at great personal risk, simply by talking to a journalist? And what about the journalists themselves? In the wake of the NSA surveillance revelations, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, what about those journalists who also risk everything, including their lives, when they write about and expose governmentally misdeeds, corporate fraud, or whistleblowing about drug cartels?  

Today, if a reporter researches military statistics, watches a couple of videos about explosions on YouTube, and views an extremist website for background research, he or she will be marked from then on and will no longer be able to research in privacy, or protect the anonymity of a source as all of their work as a journalist will be monitored from now on (). This is why many to communicate securely with their sources, protecting their sources from governments and others who would seek to know their identity. Some of the digital tools available include methods to correspond with sources securely, and the ability to pass on secret notes and sensitive documents without fear of being exposed.  

According to the . More than a dozen others have also been killed but since their deaths have yet to be officially linked to their work, they don’t count as part of the official total so far in 2018. These numbers don’t include the more than 300 journalists worldwide who have been imprisoned for their work. Each year dozens of journalists are also detained, harassed and beaten, and it’s not just repressive regimes that journalists have to worry about. Even in democratic countries, surveillance of journalists online and off is becoming increasingly commonplace.

As with any technology, anonymity can be used for a variety of means and ends, and many of those who use the dark web are using it to browse in privacy because of being in a country that doesn’t offer open access to the internet, and they want to be free of government censors (). But given recent revelations about wide-scale nation-state monitoring of the Internet and the increasing threat to the lives of journalists and their sources, the dark web has the potential to play an increasingly critical role in contributing to a healthy democracy. . The dark web includes sites set up specifically for journalists to exchange files and .  

Journalists will always be under threat of attacks for exposing repressive regimes and reporting on horrific stories from around the world. As some have argued, the dark net will continue to provide an increasingly important safe haven not only for those sources who risk their lives when they speak out, but also, to the very journalists whom these sources are speaking out to.  

Works Cited: 

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). (2018). 1334 Journalists have been killed, 1992-2018. Retrieved from  

Chertoff, M. (2017). A public policy perspective of the Dark Web. Journal of Cyber Policy 13, 26-38. Retrieved from 

Con (2018). Can Journalism be Bound for the Dark Web? Darkweb News. Retrieved from 

Marshall, S. (2013). How journalists can enter the ‘deep web’ to stay secure. Retrieved from 

Murray, A. (2014). The dark web is not just for paedophiles, drug dealers and terrorists. Independent. Retrieved from 

Pearce, A. (2013) Tightening the Net: Be careful what you wish for. NUJ. Retrieved from 

Reporters without Borders. (2016). RSF alerts Prime Minister Trudeau of concerns about deteriorating press freedom in Canada. Retrieved from     

The International Federation of Journalists (2018). End Impunity – for a UN Convention to protect journalists. Retrieved from 

The Washington Post. (2018). 2018 has been a brutal year for journalists, and it keeps getting worse. Retrieved from 

Wilson-Raybould, J. Bill C-51. Retrieved from 

Loading…

No people posts are available.

Kathy Dobson

• Senior Research Fellow

The post [I-lluminate] Exploring the Dark Web: A Cloak for Journalists and their Sources appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Ghadah Alrasheed & Brandon Rigato

One area that has not received adequate attention in the vast academic literature surrounding extremist movements and their use of the Internet is the Dark Web, whose websites are vaguely assumed to work as hubs for terrorists, drug-traffickers, and gangs. The structure, mechanisms, and impact of dark networks on terrorism is largely unknown for a variety of reasons, the main of which is the difficulty of collecting and accessing primary sources of data on the Dark Web. 

Credit: Quartz

The Dark Web is generally understood as a place for those seeking anonymity and invisibility when the surface web is too risky to use. This anonymity comes from the difficulty of finding who is behind the sites since, unlike other research browsers such as Google, sites are not indexed by search engines (Weimann, 2016a). One way to access them is through TOR (The Onion Router), a software originally developed by “as a tool for anonymously communicating online” (Weimann, 2018, p. 3). The was later offered to the public as a free service to promote anonymous access to the internet, especially where online censorship or surveillance is high (Malik, 2018).  

The Dark Web has sporadically made mainstream headlines. In 2015, it was linked to the database when the personal data of around 37 million clients were stolen and dumped in the Dark Web, including their e-mails, names, home addresses, and credit card information (Zetter, 2015). The technology has also been associated with the infamous WikiLeaks, Bitcoin, and illegal goods ranging from drugs to weapons sold on the infamous (Gehl, 2016; Malik, 2018; Weinmann, 2018). Due to the history of organized crime linked with the Dark Web, Western security agencies have become greatly concerned with the potentiality of the Dark Web to be used by terrorist groups such as ISIS to propagate their narratives while remaining completely hidden from intelligence agencies, thus making it increasingly difficult to detect and arrest terrorism perpetrators or inciters of hate.  

While being connected to a number of scandalous events, the Dark Web has received support and praise from organizations and companies such as Google, Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the it provides (Gehl, 2016). Whatever the capacity or the efficacy of the Dark Web in supporting illegal activities or being essential to political struggles, the Dark Web seems to have become infused with power and is symbolically seen as a source of primary effects.  

Similar to previous technological developments, the novel anonymity and encryption features of the Dark Web have fuelled fears especially in relation to ideological and political violence. In a , titled as Pentagon hunts for ISIS on the Dark Web, Starr and Crawford  (2015, May) state, “The U.S. believes ISIS and other potential terrorists are now using the most covert part of the online world to recruit fighters, share intelligence and potentially plan real world attacks.”.  A report prepared by the Defence and Security Accelerator, part of the UK Government’s  and  (2018), warns of the threatening possibility of the Dark Net and encrypted technology to aid terrorists or criminals and jeopardize national security. The report, however, remains vague about how and when terrorists used the Dark Web to recruit or operate. 

This article is a critical assessment of (scarce) academic research on the terrorist use of the Dark Web and “how” and “if” the Dark Web is used by terrorists as a dissemination or operation tool. It is important to note that there is a small number of resources that tackle the topic. Beside the lack of academic publications on the Dark Web, these resources are often inter-cited, feeding off each other. This gap in academic research on the Dark Web has shrouded the Dark Web in a cloak of mystery and discursively determined it as a place that can only accommodate dark activities. It has also allowed some confusion between the Dark Web and other end-to-end encrypted technology such as the  and . Reviewing the literature on the Dark Web, the main definer of what the Dark Web is or how we can measure its impact is government and security think tanks. On the other hand, the Dark Web has not received much attention from independent academic disciplines and researchers.  

Another form of disconnect between researchers studying the dark web is the literal and figurative use of the “dark web” in the field of terrorism. While there is the literal “dark web” that can only be accessed by downloading the TOR browser (Weimann, 2016), researchers such as HscinChun Chen (2012) and Abdullah bin Khaled al-Saud (2017) use the term “Dark Web” in a , denoting online behaviours associated with the darker side of humanity such as organized crime and terrorism. What these academics are exploring is the “dark” activities in the regular web rather than the technical space of the Dark Web itself. 

One study on the encrypted Dark Web was conducted by Nakita Malik in 2018, confirming that terrorists use the Dark Web to recruit, radicalize, gain material benefits and hide their communications and propaganda. The main evidence in the article for ISIS’s use of the Dark Web as a was a single website found by the researcher Scot Terban via a message on the Shamikh forum (one of ISIS’s websites on the regular web). Although this is clear evidence, it is not balanced by a systematic study of the Dark Web’s content or a comparative study of such content in the open and Dark webs. The lack of evidence leads one to question the necessity or the practicality of Malik’s proposal to found a governmental “regulatory body” to oversee the Dark Web (Malik, 2018).  

In Malik’s piece (2018), there is evidence of encrypted services such as the Telegram being used to send TOR links amongst ISIS members, as witnessed following the . However, there is no strong evidence of wide-spread adoption of TOR for mainstream distribution of ISIS propaganda, which is different technology than . This difference between the two technologies is well described by Dilipraj (2014): 

In 2018, Gabriel Weinman published an article, according to which ISIS has turned to the Dark Web following the Paris attacks in 2015 when there was a massive takedown of ISIS accounts. This move, as Weinmann indicates, resulted in the creation of more than 700 Telegram channels. Similar to Malik’s piece, there is an interchangeable use of the Dark Web and other encrypted technologies such as the Telegram. Therefore, it is not clear evidence of ISIS’s increasing use of the Dark Web for recruitment and propaganda dissemination.   

The findings of these studies are usually founded on empirically scarce ones. The only study that is based on rigorous is Moore and Rid’s paper, which reveals a “near-absence of Islamic extremism on TOR hidden services” (Moore and Rid, 2016, p. 21). In their scan of hidden-services websites within the Tor network, Moore and Rid collected data through a website crawler and found 2,723 websites that met the criteria of containing illegal content. Among these, the researchers have found only a fewer than a handful of active Islamic extremist sites. While groups such as ISIS tend to use the internet for propaganda and internal communication, both uses have not stabilized on the Dark Web.  Moore and Rid explain that the reason that the Dark Web is not commonly used by ISIS mass-spreading of violence is because of the Dark Web’s limited reach and its unsustainability as a way of communication.  

The conclusion of Moore and Rid’s study contradicts the work of many who suggest that the Dark Web is a safe haven for terrorists and an effective tool for their communications. While it is true that there is apparent and clear evidence of terrorists (like other criminals) utilizing the Dark Web for transfer of funds using the Bitcoin (Weinmann, 2018 & Malik, 2018), there is less consistent substation of the argument that the Dark Web is an ideological or discursive hotbed for terrorists and groups such as ISIS.   

Robert Gehl refers this unreasonable fear of the Dark Web to moral panics associated with the internet over the past 35 years. We, similarly, argue that tech-deterministic understandings of new technologies in previous eras have constituted “a historical prior” that determines discourses and extends technological utopian/dystopian discourses to newer technologies. Discourses on the internet, therefore, tend to cluster around “liberating” or “threatening” rhetoric. It is not surprising to find such rhetoric recurring with the development of the Dark Web.  

Works Cited:

Abdullah bin Khaled al–Saud. (2017). The tranquility campaign: A beacon of light in the dark world wide web. Perspectives on Terrorism, 11(2), 58-64. 

Chen, H. (2012). Dark web: Exploring and data mining the dark side of the web. New York, NY.

Defense and Security Accelerator (2018). Future technology trends in security. Retrieved from 

Dilipraj, E. (2014). Terror in the Deep and Dark Web. Air Power Journal 9 (3), 121-140. 

Gehl, R. W. (2016). Power/freedom on the dark web: A digital ethnography of the dark web social network. New Media & Society, 18(7), 1219-1235.  Retrieved from 

Jardine, E., & Centre for International Governance Innovation (2015). The dark web dilemma: Tor, anonymity and online policing. Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation. Retrieved from 

Malik, N. (2018). Terror in the dark: How terrorists use encryption, the Darknet, And cryptocurrencies. The Henry Jackson Society. Retrieved from   

Moore, D. & Rid, T. (2016). Cryptopolitik and the Darknet. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 58(1). Retrieved from

Starr, B. & Crawford, J. (2015, May). Pentagon hunts for Isis on the secret internet. CNN. Retrieved from 

Weimann, G. (2018). Going darker? the challenge of dark net terrorism. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Retrieved from 

Weimann, G. (2016a). Going dark: Terrorism on the dark web. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 39(3). 

Weimann, G. (2016b). Terrorist migration to the dark web. Perspectives on Terrorism, 10(3), 40-44. Retrieved from

Zetter, K. (2015). Hackers finally post stolen Ashley Madison Data. Wired. Retrieved from 

The post [I-lluminate] Exploring the Dark Web: Where Terrorists Hide? appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

By Nasreen Rajani 

The Tor browser – often mistaken as being the “dark net” itself and seen as being synonymous with illegal or nefarious activities – has become a useful platform for activists who require privacy and anonymity, and one has been attracting increasing attention from activists and citizens alike in recent years. Tor is being seen as a potential tool for ensuring privacy in a world where the online activity of both activists and even everyday citizens are being closely monitored by corporate and state interests.  

 Credit: Fedotov.co

SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES AGAINST ACTIVISTS   

Many activists now rely on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, to organize and mobilize for their cause. These platforms are widely relied upon by activists because of the low barrier to access, the potential to reach the millions of users locally and globally, and because they can be used to document protests and initiatives. As it turns out, these platforms are also heavily used by governments to monitor activists.   

. This phenomenon of increasing state surveillance coincides with a period of significant political and civic mobilization and action – including the Idle No More, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter movements – and with the development and widespread global adoption of digital technologies, including personal computers, smart phones and social media platforms. 

Journalists have reported that the Department of Homeland Security consistently collected information of those attending protests from their social media platforms2, such as Facebook events set up to promote the protests, Twitter hashtags, Instagram and Vine feeds. Furthermore, journalists or everyday citizens taking photos of protests who post them on social media are providing further data for police to identify and surveil activists. The goal for these surveillance tactics over social media platforms were reportedly to . However, as VICE points out, even without tagging an individual, . 

Social media platforms are not neutral, open spaces and it’s clear that corporate interests do not align with activists needs. Social media design and policies are also often in tension with activist social media goals and needs (; ; ). While social media technologies , the primary objective of social media companies, many of which are publicly traded companies and have fiduciary obligations to shareholders, is generating profit through advertising. Business models of these companies are built upon the mining of personal data about users, and keeping those users online as long as possible ().  

TOR AS AN ALTERNATIVE AND SECURE BROWSER 

The Tor browser provides an online alternative, allowing activists who have some technological know-how to use the browser as a means of organizing and mobilizing while remaining anonymous. Tor addresses concerns about privacy by letting activists encrypt their messages to one another, thereby making it difficult to find out who is sending messages to whom. Tor masks your IP address (which identifies your location and then your potential identity) to prevent it from be used by governments to censor parts of the web. In this case Tor acts similar to a VPN but is volunteer-run, not subject to subpoenas, and does not keep logs of user traffic. For a VICE special on how to not get hacked, J. These are: .  

Although the Tor platform is often associated with the “dark web” based on the “darker” acts that occur using such encrypted communication technologies, as discussed in other parts of this issue, the anonymity of Tor has human rights and social justice implications. The “dark web” is often associated with the dangers that stem from its applicability for “dark” purposes such as criminal activity, buying and selling deadly weapons, illegal drugs, child pornography, ISIS communication, and White Supremacist communication. But the privacy and encryption offered by Tor are not just useful for criminal masterminds. These darker aspects are just a small percentage of what takes place on Tor. :  

Tor is neither “good” or “bad” just like the rest of the internet, however, what’s important here is in how it is being used, who has access to this knowledge and who is often left out of the positive potentials of being anonymous online. As Jardine (2015) shows, the technology of the Tor platform can be used for both “darker” activities but also for democratic purposes. Data collected from ), in 2015, for instance, with over 2.5 millions users on Tor, only 40% of Tor’s browser was used for nefarious purposes while 60% wasn’t. 

The anonymity of Tor provides users the benefits of organizing and communicating online with some safety from surveillance. . Examples of groups using these won’t be that many because the whole point is for them to remain to be private. However, .  

Tor, is, of course, not completely free from the risk of data and privacy breaches. There have been reports of security hacks and infiltration from the state and police that are concerning. Tor is left vulnerable through “weak links” in the computer network that is potentially logging more traffic that the node should be (Tor is hosted by volunteer computer nodes). This was how investigators were able to infiltrate ISIS communications (Roe, 2014). Police have also reportedly entered known child pornography forums, gathering information as a pretend pedophile. The FBI has also reportedly developed and used an application called .   

But for now, . The issues with many of these aforementioned applications in comparison to Tor is that they retain some metadata and, just like Facebook and Twitter, comply with data requests and court orders from government and local police authorities.  

THE TOR PROJECT 

Because the Tor browser is funded through the US government and military but run completely by volunteers, it’s hard to say how long the browser will survive given the trend of increasing state surveillance. And as more activists turn to Tor, technical limitations could pose challenges, including the need to handle the uptake of users while ensuring enough volunteer computers are in place to keep traffic secure.  

The , a non-profit organization that maintains the Tor software, is one example of a current initiative to expand Tor to everyone, beyond the criminal masterminds and spies that we often think of lurking in the dark depths of the Internet. The wants everyone to be using it, so this shows us its capabilities as more than just a space where evil lurks. Using Tor effectively still requires technical know-how and access to the Internet, and in countries with repressive governments, such access to Tor may be hard to penetrate.   

Donating to the Tor project, which , or becoming an active relay for computer nodes, are just a few ways to help ensure that the present and future of internet privacy is maintained for some of us until more of us demand action from our current browser and social media owners and more transparency from our governments in their interactions with them. 

LESSONS FOR EVERYONE ELSE 

Corporate online surveillance is not just an issue that active protestors now need to worry about, but something that so many more of us are affected by in various ways. Recently, . While the outing of such research studies has been a catalyst for improvement, with social media companies taking a more meaningful approach to educating users about privacy (Facebook and recent privacy notifications and suggestions to improve your privacy settings), users’ data is still at risk given the legal authority of government authorities to access data through court order or through surveillance of digital technologies by agencies responsible for protecting national security.   

Privacy is important for everyone who engages with online and networked forms of communication. Platforms like Tor help us to maintain our privacy to some extents. For activists engaged in social justice, this could provide a more secure way to organize and mobilize.  

Works Cited:

Altman, A. (2015). “Person of the year, the short list: Black Lives Matter.” In Time Magazine. Retrieved from   

Chang, A. (May 2, 2018). “The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, explained with a simple diagram.” In Vox. Retrieved from   

Dencik, L. & Leistert, O. (2015). . Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield International. 

Hern. A. (Aug 23, 2017). “The dilemma of the dark web: Protecting neo-Nazis and dissidents alike.” In The Guardian. Retrieved from   

Igo, S. (Apr 10, 2018). “How you helped create the crisis in private data.” In The Conversation. Retrieved from   

Jardine, E. (2015). “The Dark Web dilemma: Tor, anonymity and online policing.” Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series, No. 21. Retrieved from SSRN:  o��  

Jardine, E. (2018). “Tor, what is it good for? Political repression and the use of online anonymity-granting technologies.” New Media & Society, 20(2), 435-452. Retrieved from 

Jeong, S. (Nov 27, 2017). “The Motherboard guide to avoiding state surveillance.” In Motherboard by VICE. Retrieved from   

Leistert, O. (2015). “The revolution will not be liked: On the systemic constraints of corporate social media platforms for protests.” In L. Dencik and O. Leistert (Eds.) perspectives on social media and protest: Between control and emancipation. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. 

Patterson, B. E. (Oct 19, 2017). “Police spied on New York Black Lives Matter group, internal police documents show”. In Mother Jones. Retrieved from   

Poulsen, K. (Dec 16, 2014). “The FBI used the web’s favorite hacking tool to unmask TOR users.” In Wired. Retrieved from   

Roe, K. (Nov 5, 2014). “Meet TOR: The misunderstood gateway into the Dark Web.” In The Bottom Line. Retrieved from   

Rogers, K. (Feb 7, 2016). “That time the Super Bowl secretly used facial recognition software on fans”. In Motherboard by VICE. Retrieved from   

Russell, J. (2016). “TOR turns to crowdfunding to lessen its dependence on government money.” In Techcrunch. Retrieved from   

Taylor, A. (Sept 8, 2011). “9/11 The day of the attacks”. In The Atlantic. Retrieved from   

Tor Project. (n.d.). “Tor project.” Retrieved from   

van Dijck, J. (2013).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Youmans, W. L., & York, J. C. (2012). “Social media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the information infrastructure of modern social movements.” Journal of Communication, 62, 315–329.  Retrieved from 

The post [I-lluminate] Exploring the Dark Web: TOR for Activism appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.