Such narratives of participants’ embodied movements through London relocate the observer as the everyday mobile-subject they highlight the connections between urban and transnational mobilities and they present participants’ constructions of different kinds of affective spaces in the city where they begin to negotiate home, belonging and return.ĭatta, A. It is argued that the use of ‘visual narratives’– a combination of participant-directed photography and semi-structured interviews as a methodology-allows for the exploration of embodied and material aspects of everyday lives in the city, which destabilise traditional urban pictorial approaches to the city.

The iconic city remains largely irrelevant to their lives.īased on research conducted with men arriving from eastern Europe in London after the expansion of the EU in 2004, this article examines how migrants’ narratives of the city construct a counter-discourse to a ‘global’ London. Participants express disillusionment with the global city. Looking at photographs the paper observes that participants’ emplacement in and observation of banal and ordinary places in the city and en route to their homeland, suggest an assemblage of a mobile migrant subject within everyday urban spaces.

The study is based on research conducted with men arriving from Eastern Europe in London after the expansion of the EU in 2004. This paper considers visual narratives, referring to the simultaneous textual and pictorial narrating of migrant experiences of everyday life in London, narratives that construct a counter-discourse to a ‘global’ London.

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