Postmigrantische Balkanbilder. Ästhetische Praxis und digitale Kommunikation im jugendkulturellen Alltag

This study addresses the construction and negotiation of “ethnicity” in transcultural Europe and its framing through digital communications and camera technology. The analysis centers on the (inter)media and interactive practices of “doing ethnicity” by youths and young adults whose parents emigrated from the successor states to the former Yugoslavia to German-speaking Europe, with a particular focus on Switzerland. Using several examples from the social web, it is demonstrated how notions of “ethnicity” and “origin” are appropriated, negotiated and reproduced using digital photography and online communications. A special emphasis is placed on the ethnographic examination of practices through which symbols and narratives drawn from youth and popular culture are related to the national discourses of the Western Balkan states to form new, (audio)visual narratives of “being Balkan”. Against this backdrop, the imagination of a transnational Balkan identity is revealed to be a template for negotiating everyday experiences of social and cultural stigmatization – as well as a resource for social positioning within the peer group and, not least, in relation to the majority society. In this regard, the ambivalence of the invocation of creativity and social empowerment within the aestheticization of society is highlighted as a major framework for the interpretation of everyday communication.