‘I Brought My Grandma’s Old Cheese Cutter with Me’: Finns’ Domestic Material Culture in the UK as Translocal Assemblage

Abstract

This paper asks, through a digital ethnographic approach, how everyday domestic material culture creates translocal (dis)connectedness between the UK and Finland. I apply a 'translocal assemblage' analytic, where the focus is on the (dis)connectedness that is generated through everyday materialities across temporal, spatial, sociocultural and personal scales, processes and changes. The study addresses three types of everyday translocal items: practical, nostalgic and biographical. The findings suggest that everyday translocal materialities are emplaced as well as mobile and imagined. They generate a structure of (dis)connectedness between several co-presences through reproducing everyday rhythms, maintaining memoryscapes and reinforcing the self.