A gateway to the global city: Mobile place-making practices by expats

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic research of expatriates who use meetup.com and similar digitally based social organizing platforms to access events in Paris, this paper explores how on- and offline meet-up rhetoric and routines contribute to the production of a mobile “sense of place” for people who have relocated or traveled alone. By highlighting how participants may use digital media to create a sense of belonging to an “international community” extendable across a series of local places, this research diverges from earlier studies that have focused on how migrants use media to maintain connections to a “homeland” or to reconstitute the home abroad. Although the paper celebrates new agencies afforded by mobile place-making, particularly for women, I suggest that as professional labor trends increasingly assert the value of placeless-ness, tools that combine communication with location-based digital organizing will only grow in importance and the “support” provided by them should be continually interrogated.