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Nicholas Bascuñan-Wiley

Area(s) of Interest

Migration, globalization, culture, sensation/embodiment, food

Current Research 

Sensing the Mahjar: Mobility and Belonging in Diasporic Palestinian Foodways

In my dissertation, I draw on a year and a half of global-sensory ethnography, cooking, and eating alongside Palestinian migrants in restaurant and home kitchens throughout the central region of Chile. My ethnographic work is supplemented by 60 interviews, discourse analysis of diasporic social media groups, and online and in-person tours of bakeries, restaurants, and grocery stores. From this research, I demonstrate that the core elements of migration—movement and belonging—are experienced as kinesthesia and digestion, two understudied sensations within the social and natural sciences. I draw on mixed methods to show how mobility is felt as kinesthesia and akinestheisa: migrants simultaneously feel mobile and interconnected within the diaspora but stuck and unable to travel to physically return to their homeland. Furthermore, belonging is experienced as digestion and indigestion. Migrants consume and create local culture, but they are also often fetishized or demonized by host communities. My work highlights the sensorial and affective dimensions of diasporic food practices and centers migrants’ voices in academic discourse, which has largely ignored the embodied dimensions of transnationalism

Publications 

Bascuñan-Wiley, N. E. and Brockway, E. (2023). Making and Breaking Bread: The Promises and Pitfalls of Migration Discourse in Food Tour Television. Food, Culture, and Society, online first.

Bascuñan-Wiley, N. E., DeSoucey, M., and Fine, G.A. (2022). Convivial Quarantines: Cultivating Co-presence at a Distance. Special issue of Qualitative Sociology, 45(3), 371-392.

Bascuñan-Wiley, N. E. (2021) Migration and the SensesSociology Compass, 15(3), 1-16.

Miller, M., Bascuñan-Wiley, N. E., and Busse-Cárdenas, E. (2020). Families and Migration in the 21st Century. In Tanja Bastia and Ronald Skeldon (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development, 191-200.

Bascuñan-Wiley, N. E. (2019). Sumud and Food: Remembering Palestine through Cuisine in Chile. Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, 6(2), 100-131.