This paper argues that ‘stuff’ and cultural artefacts can be seen as a way of making sense of multicultural worlds and subjectivities. It reports on a visual ethnographic study that analyses the personal collections of 5 multilingual speakers and their unpredictable and self-conscious ways of becoming.
As Braidotti has postulated (2013:35) ‘Subjectivity is rather a process of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values and hence multiple forms of accountability’In this paper I will look at how ‘stuff’ (Miller 2010) and cultural artefacts can be used as a way of making sense of our multicultural worlds and subjectivities. It investigates how we increasingly create and re-create our identities in a transient, unpredictable and highly self-conscious way. I report on a visual ethnographic study (Pink 2013) that analyses the personal collections (including their storage and usage practices) of 5 multilingual speakers. A close analysis of these collections reveal how these objects become agents for the continuous and playful assemblage of their moods, affectivities, histories and memories of other languages and cultures. Through the curation of their personal collections of multicultural souvenirs and everyday objects such as clothes, kitchen paraphernalia and home adornments, these assemblages (Coleman and Ringrose 2013) will also reveal themselves as self-arranging organisms (Braidotti 2013) that create order out of chaos. Such an emphasis on the materiality of language and culture offers new ontologies where languages and cultures become ‘things’ as well as ‘symbols’ or 'signs', so that our multilingual and multicultural identities can be in a constant process of becoming and styling of the self in the most ordinary and mundane aspects of our lives. References: Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coleman, R. and Ringrose, J. (Eds) (2013). Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: CUP. Miller, D. (2010). Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pink, S. (2013). Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage.
