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ABSTRACT
Reflecting on my experience, I present an example of a collision between theory and reality, within the context of my study of Cadaqués, a coastal village in Spain with a history of proteiform mobilities and currently home to a diverse immigrant population working in the tourism industry. This analysis is based ethnographic work in the village, including qualitative interviews with fifty residents, statistical data, press articles, and mapping. The results of my field study appeared to be out of kilter with the abundant literature on the themes I had selected and I was forced to re-center my study by establishing new models: instead of taking a migratory, ethnicist and transnationalist perspective to my study of a dominant group of Bolivian migrants, I decided to formalize a psycho-social geography. I questioned how globalization dynamics and the presence of various (mobile) inhabitants contribute to evolutions within a village community. My objective here is to demonstrate that researchers should be open to questioning their selected paradigms and to developing new analytical tools. As a result, the researcher will be able to produce more pertinent results.
Acknowledgements
The author warmly thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their careful proofreading and advices, as well as Virginie Baby-Collin (Aix-Marseille Université, France) for her support in the translation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Josepha Milazzo studied for her doctoral degree in Geography at the Aix-Marseille Université and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and is currently an associate researcher in the TELEMMe Laboratory and Co-ordinator for the Migrations Network. She specialises in migration studies and links with mobility and sociality, otherness, diversity and citizenship, the ontology of human life, rural development and small non-metropolitan localities, as well as the contributions that utopian visions, science fiction and the arts can make to these issues. Since submitting her doctoral thesis, she is working on the formalization of a psycho-social geography, transdisciplinarity and the “augmentation” of geography, using anthropological, political philosophical, biographical and environmental psychological approaches. Her field research focuses on Corsica and Catalonia: she seeks to understand how migratory dynamics have contributed to the development of these territories and, more specifically, of island habitats, and autonomist, nationalist and/or independentist dimensions. She is now seeking to extend and expand her research through a comparative approach with other European and Occidental (USA, Canada) regions. She continues her research in these areas while publishing articles based on her doctoral studies and preparing her thesis for publication.