Diasporas and Audience Studies: A Fruitful Match? Reflections From a Media Ethnographic Study on Turkish and Moroccan Film Audiences

Diasporic communities, especially in urban multicultural settings in the West, have emerged as one of the major sites for innovative audience research. This growing body of research connects media sociological questions with the study of global and transnational media flows. In this contribution, some of the main studies on diasporic audiences are revisited, exploring in which ways diaspora studies and audience studies have turned out to be a fruitful match. This is linked to and further exemplified by the discussion of a media ethnographic study of film reception among the Turkish and Moroccan communities in Antwerp, Belgium. It is demonstrated how the ‘diasporic turn’ reformulates traditional boundaries in audience research, proposing banal yet meaningful engagements with media texts. Finally, it is argued that a focus on diasporic audiences has revealed that ethnicity and nationality intersect with other social and cultural determinants such as gender, generation and religion, putting the diasporic proposition itself into perspective.