Talk Description
The paper examines the intersection between two key fields in which international migrants respond to displacement and negotiate a sense of home: digital media and religion. The example chosen is the vlogging strategies used by Indonesian marriage migrants to navigate complex religious relationships with their followers and weave these into wider homemaking practices. The vlog analysis and in-depth interviews with the Indonesian marriage migrants in France and Belgium show that religion is an important element in constructing a sense of home in new locations. However, the immediacy of vlogs exposes them to religious expectations from followers back in Indonesia. As a result, homemaking is shaped by a complex interplay between the feelings of belonging and alienation in relation to their followers. Using vlogs, the marriage migrants maintain control over their sense of home by building a mediated form of religious tolerance with their followers through adapted religious expressions in the vlogosphere.