Airport is hardly a ‘non-place’ as these are spaces bubbling with affect and aspiration, of splintered dreams and quiet whispers of a u turn back. (Auge, 1995).

For the perennial migrant worker in me, airports are more than passages, they are windows to a world which are finite, and in many ways opens to the possibilities of the modern.

Recording reels has been a necessary transition from the sacrament of the written language and the visual text of the photograph, key resources of ethnographic work. These reels are spontaneous field-notes from the sidewalk of life.

I have been resisting the allure of videos which have already attracted attention across my feeds. I will record them when I have something important to share. This one below was my first video blog ever, which was recorded at a drop of a hat.

As a consummate consumer of content myself it was I guess only a matter of time. The I-Phone has a good camera, and records audio even in noisy situations. I have been blogging for 13 years now, so do let me know of this humble attempts.

My attempt at a video blog, do watch !

Conversations are catalysts for change, and often these are in curated spaces which are outside the h-index tyranny of the academia. Dr Clarissa spoke about her non linear academic career and an art science approach to life. She teaches in business schools on the applied way of building things. A trained physicist with a STS background, she spoke about the ways of doing things outside the academic cv. Dr Gareth spoke about the publish or perish mindset killing the big ideas lens. The conversation was needed for me as an engineer turned migration scholar as silos in the real world would not solve problems. Dr Gareth, who is a famous editor having worked with the famed Ben Anderson, where the notion of the imagined community was needed to connect Indonesia from Aceh to Timor.

Which often begs the large question- what is the big idea that we are working on in our fields of interest? For me, what is the big idea in migration studies?

Hikayat is a one of kind bookstore where one is kind books are stocked with the best weeklies. The Malaysian bookstore and civil society spaces of discourse have been arenas of learning and growth over the last semester for me.