Catalogue of Avatars

At the heart of the AspirE project is the aim to humanize migration research, looking beyond rational decision-making to explore how emotions and perceptions of time shape (re)migration aspirations. To do this, we integrated video diaries into our methodology: over one year, each team followed six participants, who recorded by themselves a 10-minute video-diary every three months to document how their aspirations evolved.

As a European Commission–funded project, strict GDPR and open data requirements meant participants could not appear on camera. Alternatively, they filmed an “avatar object”—a personal item symbolizing their emotional state. For us, researchers, this meant that instead of reading the emotions from a person’s face, we had to infer it from objects, camera angles, background sounds, and narrative flow. In some cases, this led to deeply poetic expressions. In others, it created ambiguity and interpretive difficulty.

Either poetic or ambiguous, over the course of 284 video diaries, we can see patterns emerging in the types of avatars participants selected, revealing recurring themes and possible symbolic meanings. What follows is an attempt to categorize these avatars and interpret their significance. Other classifications are possible, and some readings may be open to debate—but together, they offer a textured lens on how migration aspirations are expressed when the self must be seen through objects, landscapes and places.