The Space of Sound in Ethnography.
Sound, Im/Mobility and Solidarity Along the Western Balkan Route
The aim is to draw theoretical and empirical connections between sound in ethnography and mobility studies. To do so, the article raises methodological questions on the incorporation of field recording in ethnography, and the interpretation of non-linguistic and non-musical aspects (Maeder, 2014) characterizing migrants’ im/mobility and its support. Exploratory answers are proposed by dwelling on the role of listening in social research and the interpretation of sound as qualitative data, through the display in the text of the field recordings and soundscape (Schafer, 1977).
Conducting research with a microphone in a context characterized by migrants im/mobility in peripherical European countries has generated several considerations concerning ethics and positionality (Gershon, 2013), but not only. Indeed, while in Sarajevo the encounters with migrants were characterized by the narrative of the often convoluted and dangerous journey, in Zagreb the most visible dynamic was that of people experiencing a condition of temporary immobility related to their asylum application. How to sonically explore these differences?
To address these research questions and dilemmas, it is proposed to consider the importance of the audibility of the sounds we are usually led to describe, as qualitative data themselves. These “malleable traces” (Gallagher, 2019), part of the field notes that make up the ethnographic account, can be interpreted and unpacked to analyze the complexity of the social processes under investigation. Through these differences, the Balkan route (Bužinkić & Hameršak, 2018) will emerge not only as a ‘through’ space (Collyer & De Haas, 2012), but rather as a space in which different mobilities, struggles for rights and forms of support coexist and overlap.