Visiting home and familiar places

I just read an article by Pearce (2012)  that introduces the concept of visiting home and familiar places (VHFP), travelling for the purpose of seeing a place that was once somewhere you lived, or have experience with http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738311001988.  It's an interesting concept, and has major overlap with VFR, although is quite distinctive as well.  It made me realise that my profile picture is a product of VHFP tourism, as I teenager I went inter-railing through Europe, and spent some time in Nice.  This picture was taken last year on the street, perhaps the exact spot, where I busked, juggled, in the late 1990s for a few nights.  In my memory it is a magical place- I was at this point travelling alone, and have no photo record or other people to corroborate or share my stories with.  And yet it was such a significant trip in my young adult hood- being alone, successfully busking, making money, meeting people...  So much of my travel now, as an immigrant, is for VHFP.  When I visit the UK to see my family, not only am I spending time with people, but we also relive experiences, go to places that we visited when I was a child, remembering times past.

It's an encouraging paper, and I'm excited to see how this topic that includes VFR, VHFP, and the personal reasons we travel will be developed in the literature and be utilised in practice.

Tickets to UK booked

We booked our tickets back to the UK last week for Christmas.  My brother is visiting from Taiwan, where he seems to have settled for the foreseeable future, and I haven't seen him since April 2010.  Reminds me of an article I just read by Urry on mobility and proximity http://soc.sagepub.com/content/36/2/255.short.  He talks about how technology can maintain connections, and even initiate them, but face to face presences, eye contact, is considered necessary in maintaining social capital links between migrants, their families and friends, and their home community overall.  Me and my brother have already planned to go to a football game on boxing day, reliving old rituals.  Can't wait to be honest.

Camera bought!

Today I bought a camcorder.  I've reading and investigating a lot recently about the use of video in qualitative research, and as a medium for capturing stories, events, and sharing them afterwards.  I'm hoping to video my interviews with immigrants in Toronto who have hosted friends or relatives, and also visit a place of importance with them, perhaps somewhere they took their guests that they really liked, a new neighbourhood  for example.  I'm also interested in the idea of using video links throughout my thesis and possibly published articles, as supplements to the text and giving the reader a direct view on the discussion.  This might have ethical issues, we'll see, but it's a start...  Have you ever seen text and video used in this way before?  I'm curious in other examples.