Improvised Access

Listening for African Migrants’ Journeys through an Abu Dhabi Public Park

Abstract

"Improvised Access: Listening for African Migrants’ Journeys through an Abu Dhabi Public Park" is a sonic manifestation of how African migrants in Abu Dhabi renegotiate their place in a segregated economy in search of upward social mobility and agency. The research emerges from the ongoing project “Abu Dhabi’s Public Spaces” sponsored by NYU Abu Dhabi’s Arts and Humanities Division, and explores African migrants’ creative use of an open public space in the city to forge connections, seek opportunities, and ultimately create their own sense of belonging. The soundscape seeks to amplify the tactics of improvisational urbanism that African migrants bring from their home countries while navigating between “productive visibility” and “hypervisibility.” In so doing, their improvised access to the park becomes a gateway to access social and job networks and, ultimately, the city itself. 

This project collects student ethnographic research in a soundwalk that relates physical environments with audio clips and images in order to create a “hybrid” spatial experience and offer “an alternative way of creating, representing, and producing meaning in relation to place” (Talianni and Charitos 2013), ultimately offering new approaches to the “representation of space” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991). In a city where the African migrant community operates on the peripheries, a digital soundwalk project provides an avenue to center their voices and make their presence and struggles more resonant with academics, policy makers, and the general public.