Ethnic minorities’ media experiences: From the transnational to the local: The example of the populations of Maghrebi origin in France
Résumé
The literature on the uses of media or new media by diasporas has become a crucial locus for examining the elaboration, in an era of globalization, of transnational identities. However, by doing this, this literature has tended to emphasize these populations’ transnational mediated connections to the detriment of other kinds of mediated interactions. While being symbols of these transnational connections, these populations have, in a way, in this literature on media and diasporas, ceased to be ordinary media users. In contrast with this kind of perspective, we conducted, in 2012, a qualitative study among 40 families of Maghrebi origin living in the Paris region, aiming at analysing their ordinary media and new media uses. While taking into account the transnational dimensions of their practices, we tried to do it without giving to these an over-emphasis that would have been detrimental to an understanding of their broader banal media and new media experiences. In this article, we explain how we conceived our research, both in theoretical and in empirical terms, before discussing some of its main results. While underlining the significance for our interviewees of their mediated transnational interactions, we stress the need for being cautious, when considering these, of not obscuring the importance of mediated interactions operating at other scales, which we describe here.