ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the ways an alternative journalism video reportage mediates the performance of migrant-non-migrant relationships that develop within practices of home-/place-making and caring at a distance and are sustained by mobilities and affective engagement across borders. By drawing upon dispositive (dispositif) analysis, broadcast genre analysis and categories from critical discourse analysis, the chapter explores the symbolic (verbal and visual) resources employed in the reportage, which follows en route a Christmas parcel between the country of origin (Romania) and that of destination (UK). The reportage offers an in-depth gaze into transnational lives and connections, fundamentally different from the essentialized and instrumentalized representations in mainstream media and provides publics with distinctive resources for interpretation and identification, as well as for achieving co-presence in the transnational social field alongside the protagonists. It thus relies upon the use of mobile and ethnographic methods to construct a grassroots perspective that leaves out institutional voices and agendas, giving instead visibility to the practices, views and reflections of regular social actors, and to their expression of emotions specific to transnational relationships (e.g., longing, care).
