Kinesthetic community: sensing movement within the Palestinian Chilean foodscape

This article explores migrants’ embodied experiences of mobility and immobility as they navigate within the diaspora and between the homeland and the diaspora. Drawing on global, digital, and sensory ethnography within the Palestinian foodscape in Santiago, Chile, I examine migrants’ multisensory trajectories and their encounters with flow, friction, and stuckness. I demonstrate that migrants simultaneously encounter emplacement in the diaspora given the presence of familiar sensory networks and pathways and dislocation when attempting to access the sensory regimes of their homeland due to financial, political, and geographical constraints on travel. Furthermore, I show how transnational food practices and online communication complicate this mobility-immobility divide, suggesting that movement is felt as a spectrum rather than a binary. By centering the moving-feeling body, I argue that migrants perceive this spectrum of mobility as (a)kinesthesia–the (lack of) perception of bodily motion.