This iDoc, The Visit, centres around a trip to Ghana made by one young woman living in Germany, Keziah, and accompanied by a researcher, Laura.

Originally intended to be edited into an ethnographic film, the material for The Visit ultimately became an iDoc, for various reasons:

• First, The Visit's layout speaks to the concept of mobility trajectories: it does not lead you through a linear story of Keziah's trip to Ghana, but instead encourages you to explore places, people, times, and topics that are connected in various and unexpected ways over time and across space. In this way, the iDoc serves as a window into how mobility trajectories shape migrant youth's transnational lives.
• Second, The Visit's layout – including multiple small pieces of data, separate from but also connected to each other – also resonates with the role that digital media play in the mobility trajectories of migrant youth. These 'bit-sy' fragments – memories of small moments, documents of relationships, traces of places – are captured on phones, shared on social media, or stored on personal devices. They form sensorial and sentimental mosaics of trips 'home' to the country of origin that privately memorialise these special visits while simultaneously digitally performing them to young people's global networks around the world.
• Finally, The Visit seeks to make more transparent how social scientific knowledge is created. Ethnography is a research method that involves immersing oneself in the lives of one's research participants, and trying to understand how the world looks from their eyes. It involves gathering various types of materials based on careful observation over a long period of time. Analysis of all of this 'data' requires repeated reading and viewing of the material, back-and-forth engagement with existing scientific literature, and reflections on how the researcher's own positionality (identity, ideals, objectives and social status) shape the research. This iDoc mimics this material and this process by inviting you to also observe, make connections, and build understandings.

Viewing instructions

The Visit includes various 'nodes', each representing a different theme – like school, food, and hair – that connect Germany and Ghana together through Keziah's mobility trajectory. Within each node, you will find a collection of ethnographic materials – including fieldnotes, video vignettes, photos, voice memos, and more – from both Germany and Ghana that relate to that theme and connect to Keziah's trip in the summer of 2019.

The Visit is best viewed on a computer (not mobile device) and heard with headphones.

You can explore the material in any order you like, making your own connections and building your own understanding of Keziah's trip to Ghana, her mobility trajectory, and what it means to be a transnationally mobile young person of migration background in today's globalised world.